Event #1 (March 2026)

Venue: “La Clínica,” Havana.

Text on fabric: “We must make peace with our poisons.”

Diagnosis: Complexes generated by canonized and dehumanized concepts of beauty: we are not dolls.

This performance opens a new space for participants and performers at La Clínica (Castillo de Kolhy).

Participants:

Sandra Ceballos

Amanda Gutiérrez (1 audience member, doctor of dentistry, winner of the drawing)

Mariela Brito (witness, actress with the theater company El Ciervo Encantado)

In Cuba life stifles the mind and drives us into such an overwhelming state of helplessness and numbness that creation itself becomes a therapeutic catharsis, an almost physiological necessity.

Starting with my *Expresión Sicógena* art project in 1989, my work has been a tool for expressing my dissent against hypocritical moral standards and the various repressive systems that governments impose on society: racial discrimination, as well as discrimination against women and homosexuals; abuses, censorship, corruption, and the overwhelming and ruthless punishments imposed by reckless individuals in power who generate trauma and psychosomatic conflicts in the citizenry. I explore this  tangle of data, and from that endeavor emerges an effect as raw as its cause—a presentation without embellishment or adornment.

  In recent years, repressive violence, unjust acts carried out by police and the judiciary, and shortages of food, medicine, and the essentials of life—such as water, electricity, gas, and transportation—have created mental chaos among the Cuban population, and this has triggered psychosomatic illnesses. These psychological conflicts spread and corrupt physical health.

In my research, I observed a growing wave of people experiencing panic attacks, anxiety, and depression that have led to shortness of breath, outbreaks of skin conditions, digestive problems, and insomnia, among other issues.

  The Clinic is an intervention program I created in my studio for artists who need to create actions and performances based on these conflicts. It opened with two performances of my own, the first titled “Performances for an Audience.” In it, I presented a formula for letting go of the physical complexes and constraints that many women fall victim to. Of course, in this case the conflict refers to psychological complexes created by a specific pathological physical condition: varicose veins. This stems from the aesthetic social rejection that many women with varicose veins face and the complexes to which we are subjected. This was a healing action that reaffirmed them as a valid natural physical adornment, drawing them with a black marker. “We have to make peace with our poisons” (text written on a cloth at the back of my performance).

The Clinic is open to projects that express trauma, transgressive attitudes, pain, etc. It involves self-psychoanalysis and a demonstration of healing or relief from a specific conflict.

Sandra Ceballos