Dienteperro

the series of 8 photographs, Dienteperro, [Dogtooth] 2017
digital print on paper Hahnemhule Photo rag 308 gr
86 x 51 cm

Edition 4/5

Dienteperro is a series of 8 photographs of swimming pools in ruins, a process that began in 1961 with the centralization of the economy by the state as sole administrator, and the expulsion of the country’s upper and middle classes. Dienteperro pools are located on the Havana coast, Miramar, one of the neighborhoods of the Cuban upper class. Flooded by the sea and the dog tooth – sharp stone of the coast – the ruin of these pools was ideologically necessary, they represented the substitution of a bourgeois economic power for a state economic power. These ruins have also been the end of a dangerous element: the possibility of idle contemplation.
There are still persistent swimmers in these pools, randomly filled with seawater, trying to restore the contemplative state of the site, while naturalizing its dilapidated condition, ignoring it. Floating in those pools in ruins was also part of my childhood, relocating them as ideological and beautiful symbols at the same time has been the opportunity to deal with the contradiction they represent. When did I normalize ruin and start floating in it as the only possibility to allow myself a contemplative state in the face of chaos?