Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/691761
After being paroled in 2005, he got a job and spent his nights and weekends turning his incarceration into the powerful series of photographs, In Dubia Tempora, which featured prison shanks set against ultra-white backdrops that evoked fine jewelry catalogues and Robert Mapplethorpe's irises. The works were then turned into a book, debuted at DiabloRosso and now grace the library walls of Casco Viejo's American Trade Hotel. Quintero followed these works with a handbook of drawings that teach new prisoners how to survive maximum security facilities (Máximas de seguridad, 2006), transfers of prison-style graffiti onto concrete panels (Cambalche), and his most recent series, Prosthesis, featuring plaster casts of hands holdings knives, strings to establish contact with neighboring inmates, and mirrors—the cellphones of prisons worldwide—that hung from the walls of Madrid's Galería Sabrina Amrani last year. (Quintero staged a performance demonstrating the communication system with the public, whom he gave drawings to via strings during the 55th Venice Biennale.) "In freedom, the basic instinct of any human being is self-preservation. In prison, this instinct is second. Atop the list is communication," says Quintero, who is now based in Verona, Italy, but travels back to Panama and contends it will always be his spiritual (if not physical) home. "Wherever I am I feel Panamanian, but when I'm home I am known as an artist who was a criminal. The justice system doesn't forgive, so I'm afraid if I ever went back to live there I'd still feel that weight on my shoulders. In Europe, I am simply known as an artist." ARLÉS DEL RIO Known by locals as the "sofa of Havana," the Malecón is a form of sculpture unlike any other in Cuba. But during the past two Havana Biennials, the iconic seawall has been dominated by the sculptural work of one artist: Arlés Del Rio. For 2012's Fly Away, he commented on the physical and political limitations of socialism by cutting the silhouette of a jetliner into an ominous chain link parcel overlooking the sea. Then, last year, for a piece titled Resaca, he created an accidental beach—frequented by thousands of locals during the course of the Biennial—by unloading dump trucks full of sand (and a handful of thatched umbrellas and chaise longues) onto the boardwalk where the city's famed sea baths once existed before the wall was built. "Every year, hundreds of meters of sand transgress the Malecón through the undertow as if it wanted to reclaim the space lost on the Havana shoreline. The idea was to allude to the past of the area and what the future might be," says Del Rio, 40, a self-taught artist who learned to make objects from his seamstress mother and the sculptors and painters in the Vedado apartment where he grew up (and still lives). His installation career first got off the ground in 1998 after he filled broken trucks from the Cayo Cruz dump with massive flies made of trash during an underground rave at a dilapidated sports center. "I was trying to get the spectator to reflect about the importance of rescuing forsaken, unhealthy places." That sentiment still seems to be at the heart of his practice. Last fall at New York's Robert Miller Gallery, Del Rio restaged The Need for Other Airs—which debuted during the last Biennial inside the Cabaña fortress, where he attached 2,500 multicolored snorkels to a vaulted ceiling inside one of the fortification's ancient cells. He is also preparing two installations for a project in Berlin next year, and working on a series of drawings made with hair collected from local barber shops, as well as a forthcoming collaboration in Brooklyn with José Parlá and JR. "As some friends told me recently, the street is the largest art gallery," explains Del Rio. "I really identify with that. I don't consider myself entirely a materialist or conceptualist. I'm a little bit of everything." DONNA CONLON JONATHAN HARKER When Donna Conlon's husband was offered a job in Panama City with the Smithsonian in 1994, the former biology student uprooted her life in upstate New York and started making sculpture in the city center. "I wanted to have some academic context for it, but at that time there were no graduate programs here," says Conlon, who traveled to Baltimore from 2000 to 2002 to get her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Upon returning to Panama, which had regained control of the Canal, she met the Ecuadorian-born artist Jonathan Harker. "People were really starting to do interesting things," says Conlon, who met Harker at a party and hit it off. "We had pretty immediate mutual respect for what each other was doing, and we were looking at some of the same things that were happening at that time in Panama City." Harker had originally moved to Panama in 1986 to be closer to his father. Conlon had seen his short film El Plomero and he had seen her film Urban Phantoms, so when she invited him to a glass recycling center on the outskirts of the city (a location for some of her earlier photos), the two ended up turning it into the subject of their first collaborative video, Dry Season, which features tossed beer bottles crashing onto a mountain of green glass. The piece had a certain poetic and polemical quality to it and in the decade since that inaugural effort they've made many more seminal works. From 2010's Domino Effect (featuring a domino setup made from bricks that traces the historic boundaries of Casco Viejo to talk about the porousness of the walled city's UNESCO World Heritage status) to 2015's Under the Rug (a video showing junk being swept beneath a sod rug to address the nation's collective memory loss), their pieces have appeared everywhere from DiabloRosso to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. "At the center of each of these projects are objects—antique paving bricks from the city's old quarter, plastic bottle caps, coins that were minted in an inflationary one-off by a corrupt Panamanian president—that represent a situation that we find ironic or offensive or somehow worth breaking open and delving into," says Conlon. Adds Harker, "Most of our ideas tend to emerge from improvisations and games based on conversations about things that interest us in one way or another." The two are now busy on a video about the beauty and chaos of spontaneous urban flooding in the tropics, and another that is intended to be, as Harker explains, "a dreamlike meta-narrative flux about existence as a continuous gamble between life and death." "I discovered that both crime and art were like twin sisters. They had in common the same appetite for transgression." —Jhafis Quintero 148 culturedmag.com PHOTO BY FRANCESCA MARCHI (QUINTERO); COURTESY OF ARLÉS DEL RIO STUDIO; DONNA CONLON AND JONATHAN HARKER