Por Nuestros Propios Esfuerzos : Alberto Checa

Borrowing the publication Con Nuestros Propios Esfuerzos  as an eponym for his installation and performance, Alberto Checa utilizes the gallery as a living and working space. Checa’s distinctive process embraces improvisation and collaboration as a crucial component of his art-making – breaking apart old works to make his current one, tethering himself to the mechanical operations of his sculptures, failing and overexerting, resting, renavigating, inviting other artists to create and compose together in the moment. Checa’s site-specific installation opens up to the public in an absurdly uneventful manner, positioning the audience as eavesdropping or on the verge of voyeuristic pursuit. Isolating himself and cocooning his workspace from the audience, Checa physically severs himself from the demands of his ordinary time. In order to extract the time to produce the work, he must exist within a reality where there is no need to clock into work or tend the home – this is his only time to only perform the work.

To get a glimpse of what may actually be going on here, one must muster the courage to also perform in the space – to bend down low enough to touch cheek to floor and peep under the chasm in the gallery wall. From the same chasm, serpentine lengths of hoses sneak out from under, drawing a large loop around the gallery space loitered with remnants of an event, carrying nothing ostensibly and, upon a closer look, at most, beads of fluids. The hose is looped back into the chasm at the other end, closing off the opaque loop. The system Checa presents has just a single task: to irrigate his silicone mold. Yet the absurd situation presented is one that is bound to Checa’s physicality – his body must produce enough fluids to replenish the molds with plaster. To do so, over blocks of time during the exhibition, Checa must perform a series of regimented activities to create enough perspiration, collecting enough sweat onto towels rung into the basin, to maintain the system’s operation for the exhibition period. The thudding of body parts, hum of water pumps, white streaks of foot and fingerprints around the gallery space are just few clues that attest to this work-in-progress. In demonstrating and anticipating such unrehearsed roles under the guise of art-production, Checa shifts the traditional expectations of behavior in the gallery environment, continuing to underscore his ongoing refusal of product-making and dissolving the myth of the individual maestro. Instead, Checa replaces the notion of productivity with the role of caring within the context of art and broader life.

1   In 1991, Cuba, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the tightening noose of U.S. embargo, entered the Período especial en tiempos de paz, or the Special Period in the Time of Peace – a long period of economic crisis and extreme shortages, undoing loosely thirty years of economic and social growth to Cuban society. Communities were left to harsh rationing and threatened by direct reforms to their livelihoods as a means to withstand this hardship, demanding an improvised state of everyday survival. During this time, the Cuban military circulated a text titled Con Nuestros Propios Esfuerzos, translating as With Our Own Efforts, cataloguing instructions submitted by Cuban households on ways to reimagine everyday objects as tools for survival and care.

Text by Jean Chung