From Samuel Riera and Derbis Campos I first learned about Art Brut and Outsider Art, two terms that barely couldn´t remember when I left that initial session where I heard about the project they manage: Art Brut Project Cuba, and about the artists in their collective. I became not only a frequenter of Riera Studio, but also of disconcerting worlds in those where cordiality is understood as deautomatized slaps. There I faced the most aberrant and grotesque images that I had ever seen, and I imagined the reactions of Dubuffet, Gauguin, Picasso, when they would have encountered, in their time, these creations — so full of contrasts and revelations.

On my own I gathered more information about this unusual art. I reviewed contents that led me to a web of endless questions and definitions. Just to mention two: there was a denial of the term “artist” — to instead denominate creators of Art Brut and Outsider Art, as “authors” or “people,” and to call their creations “works,” seeking, in this way, a differentiation of those denominations used in the institutional system of art such as “master” and “piece.” What would the term Art be for?, I thought then. Besides, in another text I found definitions where they pointed out that Art Brut’s “authors” work in solitude, secretly and anonymously. Samuel and Derbis had spoken to me about these artists, but I realized that history changed; so I decided,to pay no attention to those obsolete considerations that didn’t help me to get closer to Art Brut Project Cuba, a sui generis project on this island, that has been developing its own theories with its own rhythm.

In my research, something more serious got my attention: all the documents I saw insisted on classifying Art Brut and Outsider Art as “another art,” “a marginal art,” “an art located in the pole of the otherness,” ideas that don’t indicate another thing but a demarcation from tradition. If together with this there’s a concern that emerged, at the same time, of workshops where methods of artistic therapy are applied, that apparently jeopardize the pure art —purity that is only achieved if the creator remains in total isolation, in environments of absolute solitude— then a nascent thought starts to take shape —as I see it— it looks for to elevate the CREATION, but not the creator; a thought in which it is left to the grace of God, not to be somewhat interventionist, people who became sick in the same society. Who then, but the same society —represented in specific sectors in the field of arts and sciences— should be in charge of rectifying actions?

For the peace and quiet of confused spirits such as mine, there are programs like INUTI, LAND, and Art Brut Project Cuba that move in the limits of Art Brut, in the strict sense of the term, and art therapy. These are programs that, without setting aside their search for those creators that work in solitude and that produce the kind of pure art, they also invite people in the same situation to join in creative workshops where participation and social reinsertion are at the same time a fact and a right. Programs like INUTI, LAND, and Art Brut Project Cuba naturally act as empowering spaces. Individuals that historically have been disapproved by the same society in which they live —deprived of civil and juridical right— enter these programs for a status of independence that allows them to create, destroy, rave, materialize imaginary realities, without any objection curbing their impulses; they operate in this way, inside the frame of the artistic creation, that is without doubts, where humanity can enjoy the highest freedoms.

According to the French philosopher Michel Foucault, these programs are perhaps heterotopies (1) of our time, heterotopies of inclusion. And as just as Foucault analyzes it, the heterotopies are transformed, they are replaced, according to the requirements and considerations of a society that decides the place and the way that those will have inside or outside of its margins.

As considered in this way, I like to think that spaces like INUTI, LAND, or the workshops of Art Brut Project Cuba program at RIERA STUDIO, as well as other similar ones in intention, could be a new kind of space, one that is able to gradually replace those other heterotopies that Foucault called deviation places — disciplinary, excluding places, reclusion places. For example, psychiatric hospitals and jails that are so closely related to Art Brut and Outsider Art. We all deserve to be released from confinement. To trade these holes for ships. That’s it! These programs could be like ships. According to Foucault, ships are by excellence the heterotopia, a space without place that exists by itself, subtle or skilled enough as to want to dissipate the reality with the pure force of illusions (2)

Yenisel Osuna Morales, curator and art historian

1. The concept for heterotopies was introduced by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. He coined the term to define real spaces that he considers as “other spaces”, “real places outside of any place”, “counter-spaces” that do not fit into any established category to order physical spaces within society. They cannot be classified as public, or as private, neither as work, nor as recreational. They are places where the actions that occur are separated from the normality or the daily life of a seemingly logical and orderly world. Foucault, Michel. Des espaces autres. Conference at Cercle d’études architecturales, 14 March 1967, in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, no 5, 1984, pp. 46-49.

2. Foucault, Michel. Topologies. Fractal, no 48, January - March, 2008, year XII, volume XII, pp. 39-40.