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Cuba Project
09/10/2019

Cuba Project

Olu Oguibe
“CUBA PROJECT”

Opening Tuesday 8th October, from 6.30 pm to 9 pm
9th October 2019 - 15th January 2020

“Olu Oguibe’s recent work in Cuba exemplifies his approach and respect for people. He worked with simple materials,
scrap products of a labor-intensive manufacturing process, and reconfigured them in a way that brought to mind
the meaning and rough beauty underlying the process of making, and the hands and souls involved in it. A respect
for working people, for labor, for process, all come through, along with the nearly alchemical ability to transform
quotidian materials into objects suffused with meanings.”
- Will Wilkins
The 25 pieces in this body of work are the result of a few weeks spent at UEB “Noel Fernández” Conformat steel
factory in Matanzas, Cuba in February 2019.
I first visited the factory in December 2018 in the company of Cuban artist Marìa Magdalena Campos-Pons,
and decided to return soon after and work with the scrap metal from the factory floor which is usually
discarded or sent for recycling. Steel is a medium that I have not used much in the past, and working at the
factory offered an opportunity to explore the material without the encumbrances of fabrication. I did not intend to
“construct” objects, but rather, to follow the material as found, and whatever it suggested, which in my thinking,
is a very liberating way to work.
Over a period of nine days or so my translator Mr. Matos and I scoured the factory grounds for scrap metal
which we then assembled in a large storage wing of the facility. Beside form which was my primary focus,
I was interested also in the broad spectrum of color possibilities in industrial steel that do not require additional
intervention. Even the range of rust is fascinating, and certainly suggests that the monochrome tendency
of much minimalist sculpture is perhaps mannerist and unnecessary.
This body of work is significant in many ways. While it does not represent an entirely new direction in my practice,
this is, nonetheless, the first time that I’ve put together such a large body of sculptures or sculptural
installations in a single project, and as already noted, it’s certainly my most significant venture into steel as a
material.
The work may be viewed in any number of different ways; as minimalist sculpture, as creative recuperation of
“poor” materials, or as an exercise in the archaeology of labor. It all still revolves around the potent resonance of
form, but the objects will always record a unique period in the history of industrial labor in late revolutionary Cuba.

Olu Oguibe

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