La Habana, Cuba, 1969

I live in a sort of Animal IslandRecycling is the basis of the Cuban domestic culture, that is why I use maps as a reference center of the daily life of my physic space (room), from the place I live and from other places or cities that I always visit with an artistic objective and that I assume as my own fictions and utopias or mere interpretations about them.Literature- poems of the Cuban poet Virgilio Pinera or José Lezama Lima- and cartography- maps of Cuba- are a complement of the images that I print or paint. I live in an Island full of natural attractions, valleys, mountains, beaches that are among the most beautiful of the world, and at the same time are like stopped, like if they were from another planet; an Island full of human mistakes as the world itself, of idealism in its highest expression, shared or not, but present, of carnival and vulgarity, of education and mistreatment, autocratic governments and homesickness…That is why I turn my Island into something that one never knows what exactly it is, because it experiences an endless metamorphosis, like the cities in which you never know if you are part of a whale or an elephant, or a fish that swings in the streets of Jerusalem… Ibrahim 2012