My Street. Cuban Stories

What My Street is About

My Street is an artistic project about the streets young Cubans live on.

It was made entirely by Cubans — they wrote stories about their streets and took pictures of them.

My Street is about the inner world of young Cubans. It is about feelings, memory, the past and the now.

Info

The My Street project was initiated in Bulgaria.

It began with Bulgarian writer and journalist Diana Ivanova and Canadian-Iranian photographer Babak Salari.

Both artists traveled to Cuba in 2009, met young people in Havana, San Jose de las Lajas, Cienfuegos, Holguin, Gibara and Santiago de Cuba, and asked them to write stories about their streets and to take pictures of them.

The concept behind the My Street project was first developed and realized in Bulgaria in 2006 by Diana Ivanova and Boris Deliradev (it became the framework for a regional project by the British Council in Bulgaria called “EU and Me,” culminating in a book and traveling exhibition).

Philosophy

We love streets. The street is a beginning, a journey, a love affair, an end.

A street is something that everyone has. It gives us common ground, the possibility for sharing.

The street (or my immediate neighborhood) is the perfect place: it is still small enough to be “mine,” to be part of my personal identity, but at the same time is big enough to represent society, rules, culture and the norms that influence us on an invisible level. We can see the street as a “micro-model” of society — a place where we clash with others, learn to understand and preserve borders, exercise our free will and choices.

If we could observe and understand how we influence the streets we live on and how the streets influence us, we would most likely start seeing our place in larger social and collective constructs differently, too.

The Process

How we started

We told our friends and people in Cuba we had met on our previous visits what we wanted to do. There was huge and immediate interest, so we worked in groups of three to twelve people.

We used four SAMSUNG digital cameras and 35 disposable cameras — we bought them in Havana and developed the film there.

Structure of the workshop

All the workshops were generally organized as follows:

We gathered the group, explained the project, and gave out disposable cameras (or in some cases digital cameras, while some people worked with their own equipment). All workshops took place on a single day with three exceptions — a theater and a school in Havana and a dance group in Holguin. In those cases, we passed out the cameras on the first day and met the next day (in the school) or two days later (with the theater and dance group) so as to accommodate the participants’ work schedules.

With the groups, we first collected the photos and then held a reading where everyone read their own story. We both understand and speak some Spanish so our assistant just gave us a quick summary of every story.

After the reading Diana asked several questions: How did they feel after listening to the stories? Do the stories share a common feeling? What makes them similar? What makes them different? Do you think your streets will change in the near future? Do you see yourselves living on those streets in the future?

As moderators, at the end we shared our personal feelings and experiences with streets, as well as how we perceived the stories. We also left space for additional questions.

A reading workshop generally lasted between two to three hours, but sometimes stretched to almost four.

In some cases we did not end with a reading and sharing session because the project developed very spontaneously and time was limited — for example, in Gibara we met people on the main square one Sunday afternoon and they took their pictures and wrote their stories then and there. In Holguin we approached a Cuban flamenco dance group; however, since it was shortly after their show we were not able to have a reading together. In some cases we also worked individually rather than in groups and made short videos of the people involved.

Feelings/Observations

By Diana

The most interesting and surprising thing for us was the shared feeling of nostalgia that Cubans sensed in their own stories. They themselves cited “nostalgia” as the most prevalent feeling. Every group gave the same answer to the question: “What is similar in your stories?” This raises an intriguing question — what is a generation in their 20s and 30s nostalgic for? There is a kind of longing for a past they never have experienced, yet strangely miss. It cannot really be defined since it has different connotations in the stories. It is A KIND OF imagined nostalgia, a longing for another time, a dream about another past.

By Ulises

For me the overall feeling in the stories is sadness. All the stories talk about the street, the way that this street has been part of everyone’s personal life, as well as the feeling of losing the best part of one’s life, just as the street is losing the shape it used to have. Everyone hopes to see the street they live on experiencing better times…We can find other feelings, like being worried about the way those who live on the same street are letting it die, forgetting its history, and living without any thought for the environment, ignoring the life of a house, as if the street could still be in great shape without human beings’ care and concern.

The Authors

Diana Ivanova

Bulgarian journalist, writer and cultural manager, born in 1968 in Montana, Bulgaria. She has traveled to Cuba four times and written numerous articles and stories based on her experiences. She writes for Capital weekly, EDNO magazine, L’Europeo, Foreign Policy, and Abitare, among others. She graduated in journalism at Sofia University (1991) and is currently a doctoral student at Sigmund Freud University in Vienna.

Diana Ivanova’s works include award-winning articles on melancholy, memory and the sense of belonging in post-communist Bulgaria (2005 International Vienna APA-Award “Writing for Central and Eastern Europe”). Her articles have been published in two volumes of the best journalistic writing in Europe: Pausing to Reflect on Europe’s Culture Wars” (London, 2006, British Council) and Which Road to Europe (Vienna, 2008).

In 2003 she co-created the New Culture Foundation and the GOATMILK memories festival in Bela Rechka — a vibrant international event that attracts creative people from all over Europe each May.

She is also the author of two books of poetry.

Babak Salari

is a Montreal-based photographer and teacher who fled Iran three years after the Islamic Revolution. His last project on Cuba, Faces, Bodies, Personas: Tracing Cuban Stories (documenting gay culture in Cuba), was published in 2008 by Janet 45 Publishing House in Bulgaria.

Babak’s main area of photographic interest is chronicling the lives of those on the margins of society. He has also travelled to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Palestine to document the lives of those displaced and brutalized by war, in particular women and children.

He has diplomas from Montreal’s Concordia University and Dawson College, where he has also taught.

Babak’s work has been published in magazines and journals in North America and Europe and displayed in exhibits all over the world.

Babak has also been the recipient of various grants and awards, including a Gold Addy award from the American Ad Federation in 2004 for his project “Locating Afghanistan.”

Raycho Stanev

Team

Moderators

Assistant

Documentation

Translators

Editors

Web design

Special thanks to: Roberto Zurbano Torres, Alexis Alvares, Esther Cardoso