In a small room off Fourth Pasta Lane, Colaba, an inverted microphone knocks against a wall incessantly. Merged with the sound of the banging, resonate the words of Langston Hughes from the 1951 poem, ‘Harlem’ -- “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” Accompanied by two projections on the wall, one of a digital video and another of a 8mm film, a family of immigrants play football surrounded by an arid landscape. A little girl is seen reciting the poem in the background. Placed beside a pair of gloves on a wooden table, lies a hardbound book. The photo book, SMS (Simultaneous Moments of Silence), is the creation of American and Cuban artists, Cara Megan Lewis and Alejandro Figueredo Díaz-Perera.
Cementing a connection
Beginning in August 2012, and spanning over a year, Díaz-Perera and Lewis began collaborating across borders after a chance encounter at the Havana Biennial. Keeping in touch via Facebook, Lewis and Díaz-Perera who were romantically involved by then, were adamant on overcoming the setbacks faced by a couple separated by not only geographical, but political boundaries too. Since network connectivity in Cuba is weak, and a home Internet connection is illegal, the artists compiled a photographic documentation of two people divided by silence, and the anxiety of waiting.
“A text message would travel from the US to Havana; in response, a missed call would be made in the opposite direction. Photos were taken on both sides but they did not cross the sea,” says art critic and curator of the show, Zeenat Nagree. Together, with the microphone, the videos, and the photo-book, the Díaz-Lewis exhibition titled, A Dream Deferred , was part of the Focus Photography Festival, which was held in April. The Hughes poem is used to highlight migration policies between the U.S.A. and Cuba by highlighting the movement of black people from the south to the north of the U.S. in the 40s and 50s. The microphone on the other hand exemplifies the voice that is unheard. “Who has the right to speak? Whose stories will be recorded? Whose lives will be remembered?” explains Nagree in her curatorial note.
But it’s the photographs that seamlessly bind the viewer to the longing that the artists are trying to convey. His thoughts, and hers, travelling through time zones. Hers accompanied by words, and his with her thoughts and his surroundings. “I don’t know where this light comes from, so I took a photo,” Lewis writes in a text message to Díaz, simultaneously in the northeast direction, he takes a photograph of torchlight placed in front of him. For 365 days, this exchange continued, without viewing what one another had taken until their residency in Steuben, Wisconsin a year later.
Serendipity
The couple was shocked by the synchronicity of the photographs, that also have very similar composition styles. In the opening image, Lewis is returning to her house in Kansas City when she got lost and made the first picture. “I received her message when I was leaving my house to go meet some friends to go out for a party,” says Díaz. “So our book begins with an image where Cara was trying to return home and I was trying to leave home,” as he describes how serendipitous the whole project is over an email interview to The Hindu .
The artists explain how the work was about enhancing the connection with one another, through the obstacles and misunderstandings of distance and limited communication. “Some people might find our art strategy as a solution to their own problems of breaking geopolitical and cultural frontiers, others might not find anything in it or see it as a love story of ‘other people’ and not feel related to the work at all,” say Lewis and Díaz-Perera. But every response elicited by the book, is a form of communication, whether the viewer relates to it or not.
In an attempt to emphasise the geo-political barriers, a few photographs in the book are blank, and read ‘Message Not Received, Photo Not Taken’. The book highlights the longing, melancholy, and nostalgia, harnessed in the wait of a word from your significant other. Even though Cuba is only 90 miles from the U.S., Díaz-Perera explains how it would be easier for Lewis to call a friend in Hong Kong than to call him. For him, it was impossible to communicate in any form with anybody outside of his country until 2011, when he entered the University of Arts. “They had free Internet there, but in Cuba "having Internet" means literally waiting six hours for Gmail to open. When you live like that, waiting becomes a National sport,” elaborates Díaz-Perera.
In the moment
Capturing the hidden beauty and the power of the ordinary, the photographs merge together without much distinction. The duo says that this came from an understanding that there was an immediacy to this process; they weren’t allowed to think very long before making an image. “The fact that we weren't trying to overly construct anything and we weren't staging the images led to a similar candid aesthetic,” they assert.
While Lewis believes that, “Alejandro is more cynical [while] I try to stay present to the magic or serendipity in daily life,” Diaz explains how “Cara is more naive [while] I try to show the harsh reality behind the apparent beauty of daily life.” This has formed a new aesthetic, one they term as Díaz -Lewis, which the artistes believe is a culmination of their opposing perspectives related to their individual experiences with contexts and culture. The story, has a fitting end, Lewis and Díaz-Perera are now married and reside in Los Angeles – a far cry from the days – of a message sent, a missed call received.
A Dream Deferred is ongoing at Mumbai Art Room, from 11am-7pm, until June 8
