Matilde Marín · Biennial of Havana · Cuba
“When you see the blue smoke of Ithaca” is the work presented by Matilde Marín, official guest of the XIII Havana Biennial 2019 in the edition entitled “The Construction of the Possible”.
The video installation was exhibited between April 12 and May 12, 2019 at the Casa de México in Havana.
Setting the smoke is stopping the course of history: making all bonfires one. Just as Bertolt Brecht extracted maps and scenes from the theater of war during the Second World Conflagration from newspapers and mounted them in his Arbeitsjournal (Working diary), or as before, Aby Warburg, with his Atlas Mnemosyne, invited a re -Reading of European civilization from the free association of images, Matilde Marín cut and collected, from 2005 to date, hundreds of smoke photographs that appeared in the press, with their respective legends. It is enough to read them to have a global vision of our troubled time.
Marín summarizes the documents collected in photographic records and in a documentary video that records step by step, the end of an era: the spectacular implosion of the Kodak Building 53, which occurred on July 18, 2015 in Kodak Park (Rochester, United States) where the production line for the acetate base of the photographic film was located. These images documents the tragic beauty of destruction.