Cuba Street Art Project
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Dates2016 - Ongoing
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Author
- Topics Street Photography, Travel, Documentary
- Locations Cuba, Havana
A short photographic journey into Cuban Street Art
Cuba is a country embarking on great political change and a country whose people are renowned for using the medium of street art to express their cultural and domestic views. Amato has recently travelled through Cuba with camera in hand in order to document streetscapes – a series that captures the old and the new, the Cuba that was and the Cuba that is, and will present his subsequent series in an exhibition at Ambush Gallery.
For Amato’s new series The Cuba Street Art Project, he documents some of the old propaganda – ‘moral graffiti’ - painted on old buildings and peeling facades, and follows emerging local and international street artists painting their way around Havana, capturing in a frame essential elements of an urban context - someone opening a door, an open window, cars passing by, locals passing by; all elements that add up to a living contemporary environment.
Amato has a deep-seated interest in history. His studies and early childhood growing up in the ancient city of Naples have etched into him an appreciation of the omnipresence of the past. From a philosophical standpoint, he looks at the history and his photography as layers – past, present and future – that interplay on a continuous loop. He looks at buildings and structure in an investigative fashion, peeling back the patina, layer by layer to look at the integrity of the structure itself. Thus more profoundly within each frame, Amato’s work is not only about street art and street artists, nor the presented streetscape – but about capturing the history and culture of a people in an unstructured moment of everyday life. It could be said that Amato’s interest in following street artists around Havana, and in general, is about the opportunity to witness the perspective of an individual who is very much integrated within the cultural landscape of the environment, a guide who shares an understanding of the journey from the past to the present, whilst granting us the freedom to imagine a future.
