EVERY COUNTRY IS A FICTION, EVERY TERRITORY A POWER STRUCTURE. ADD A FLAG AND A CURRENCY, AN ANCIENT HISTORY, A FEW WARS AND A FEW COLONIES, AND YOU GET A NATIONAL ANTHEM. EVERY COUNTRY HAS ITS OWN IDENTITY, BUT IT IS ALSO AN INVENTION, AN IMAGINARY COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATION. FROM ‘NATIONAL MYTHS’ WE CAN CONSTRUCT A NARRATIVE TO TELL THE WORLD AROUND US. EVERY SOCIETY IS POSSIBLE. WE ACCEPT ITS STRUCTURE, BUT WE DON4T CONTROL IT.

From 26 April to 6 July 2025, Garage Fontana, conceived as a container for places imagined by artists, welcome EVERY COUNTRY IS A FICTION, the visual reconstruction of the Republic of Cuba by French artist and photographer Romaric Tisserand. A country of myths and revolutionary narratives, but also of paradoxes and contradictions that emerge from the artworks on display.

While Cuba has been living for decades under an economic siege and an energy, food and social crisis that seems to have no solution, under the pressure of the restrictions and the economic embargo that the US state still imposes on it, Cubans, those who have not escaped, are trying to resist, struggling against the scarcity of basic goods and finding imaginative solutions to the many problems of daily life.

EVERY COUNTRY IS A FICTION brings together some examples of this revolutionary frugality, including a collection of colourful everyday objects made from recycled plastic (in an installation and a video projection) and a fridge containing frozen sunglasses to be worn in the tropical heat and to be served iced as dessert when there is no dessert. The cold spreads over their faces and everyone laughs with delight. Exile is illustrated here by two ways of escape: a contingent boat (balsa) and a pneumatic chamber, as shown in the video WATER HAS NO ENEMY. The artist also alludes to escape as a hope for a better life far from Cuba in PATRIA O ARTE / PATRIA O IRTE, two variants of the statement Patria o muerte.

COHABITATION / COHIBATATION

At the centre of the exhibition space is the installation FIRE CAMP, a campfire made from the pages of Granma, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba. There is also a TV, a tiny one by the Cuban collective NyL, which broadcasts a static image of Fidel Castro, as if to remind us that the government controls the media, restricts access to outside information, and censors.

L’HOMME DE LA HAVANE - a remake of Jean-Paul Belmondo's legendary run in the 1964 film 'The Man from Rio' - is a video in which the protagonist is a figure in a white smoking jacket, a sort of Robinson Crusoe lost among the buildings of the 1970s architectural experiments, from which he tries to escape in an endless race. We are in the Alamar district, on the suburbs of La Havana, where the Caribbean atmosphere blends with the prefabricated housing, in which each worker occupies the house he has built for himself, as a natural fulfilment of the socialist collective project. The most radical recycling is the protagonist in Cuba, and the urban landscape is modified by the experience of the inhabitants: a building emerges from the ground, floor by floor, as illustrated by a photograph with an intense blue background.

The Cuban illustrator René Cardénas showed his creativity and inventiveness, when he designed the poster for François Truffaut's BESOS ROBADOS (Stolen Kisses) in 1970, for the film's premiere in Cuba, using a touch of red to appeal to the public. In the same vein, Romaric Tisserand turned the pesos convertibles banknotes into BESOS CONVERTIBLES, giving a new artistic value to a devalued currency.

Garage Fontana, Via Fontana 199 Modica

Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.