2011 / Object / Variable dimensions
The political and military tensions between the United States and Cuba, persistent for decades, have marked the destinies of their people with a complexity that transcends generations.
The traces of a past never fully overcome persist in both Cuban and American memory: Cuba as an island besieged by great military powers; the United States as a superpower vulnerable to its own paradoxes.
There, the right to bear arms legitimizes the private possession of weapons; here, the “right” is proclaimed to fight with ideas and words.
The flow of weapons from U.S. borders to the rest of the world has long been a matter of international dispute.
Cuba, however, has upheld an anti-armament discourse that—save for historical exceptions—has remained under the premise “for peace and by peace.”
In this context, a Cuban citizen is absolutely barred from legally acquiring a weapon, either inside or outside the country.
In the United States, that right belongs exclusively to those who hold citizenship.
My work is inscribed in this crossroads. The project consists of an unprecedented process: the legal purchase of a firearm, specifically a Magnum Desert Eagle, designed in the United States in the 1980s.
Transformed into a luxury object and cultural fetish—protagonist of Hollywood films, video games, and the iconography of power—the Desert Eagle carries an aesthetic and political symbolism that far exceeds its material condition.
The objective is to grant it a new status. Once purchased, the firearm will cease to be one in the strict sense: it will be transmuted into a work of art under the title Love.
As a ready-made, the artistic gesture redefines the object, tearing it from its original function.
For the process to hold validity, the acquisition must be formalized through a legal contract in my name, and the brand-new weapon will be placed in the custody of a museum institution.
The contract will explicitly stipulate that it shall never be used for military, self-defense, hunting, or entertainment purposes: its sole purpose will be to exist as art.
This project does not end with the object: it encompasses the documentation of every stage—the journeys, the paperwork, the bureaucracy, and the political and media attention it inevitably provokes.
The work is conceived as a work in progress, where process and object merge into the same tension.
By titling it Love, I seek to subvert the imaginary surrounding the weapon, softening the edges of a symbol that has historically embodied violence, death, and power.
The piece aims to shift that meaning toward another interpretive horizon, almost as moving as Bernie Boston’s iconic photograph of a flower offered into the barrel of a rifle—a simple gesture that reconfigured the perception of history.
With equal simplicity, it suggested the serene possibility of resolving a greater conflict.
Thus, this work stands as an ambiguous monument: an object of war transformed into art, a sign of extermination transfigured into a symbol of hope.