Cuba, un Popolo … | Mestre

CUBA Un Popolo Una Nazione

February 9 - March 16 2008 | photography | Candiani, Mestre

Curated by Alberto Zanchetta

Catalog with texts by Roberto Ellero, Alberto Zanchetta

In 2008 the Candiani Cultural Centre hosted CUBA: Un Popolo Una Nazione / One People, One Nation, a major solo exhibition by Andrea Morucchio. With eighty photographs and an installation of remarkable scale, it ranked among the most visited exhibitions ever held at the Centre.

The project stemmed from Morucchio’s extended stay in Cuba in 1995, when he immersed himself in the everyday life of the island. Choosing to “camouflage” himself within its environments, the artist set aside any distance of artistic otherness to embrace what he defined as the “fluidity” of Cuban life. His images, therefore, deliberately avoid falling into ideological rhetoric or folkloric cliché, offering instead an empathetic and open-ended narrative.

As Alberto Zanchetta writes in his essay In the Pearl of the Antilles: in the Drift of the Iris, for Morucchio “photography is much more than a simple means of communication. It is an experiential practice… a participatory gaze which does not permit him to document in a detached manner.” His work seeks a direct transmission between photographer, medium, and subject—“a face-to-face dialogue, no matter how voiceless, with that round eye… which gazes with famished curiosity and amused complicity.” Each image, while often the result of contingent encounters, demonstrates “the rigour and precision of a technique in which the selection and framing always make the difference.”

From one neighborhood to another, from individuals to collective scenes, the photographs trace what Zanchetta calls a “psycho-geographic postcard”: a visual map of contradictions, dreams and hopes that define a nation. What emerges is not a closed narrative, but a living, fluid experience—an invitation to share in the vitality, diversity, and humanity of Cuba through Morucchio’s eyes.