TANIA BRUGUERA (b. 1968)

A self-styled “artivist”—artist and activist—Bruguera has developed an interdisciplinary practice of social and political critique that has, since the 1990s, addressed aspects of freedom, power, and censorship, often in defiance of the Cuban state. She has mounted interventions and performances around the world, notably at the Seventh Havana Biennial (2000), at the Tate Modern (2008, 2018), and at Documenta 15 (2022). Through her commitment to “arte útil” and the creation of the Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt, Bruguera has collaborated with museums and community organizations—as well as ordinary citizens—to effect social transformation.

Bruguera performed El cuerpo del silencio between 1997 and 1999. Seated naked inside a metal box strewn with slabs of raw lamb meat, she began by correcting an official book of Cuban history with a felt-tipped green pen. She then licked her handwriting from the page, ultimately ripping apart and attempting to swallow the pages of the book—and implicitly, the narrative contained therein. Contemporary with the performance El peso de la culpa (1997-99), in which Bruguera ingested dirt in tribute to the indigenous Cubans who resisted Spanish colonization, El cuerpo del silencio similarly critiques the abuses of history perpetrated by the Cuban government, here internalized and literally embodied in a desperate act of self-censorship. The present photograph shows Bruguera confined in the meat-lined, cave-like space—a simulation of the viscera and innards of the human body—as she ritually expunges her text, silencing her truth (her dissent) in a performance of self-abnegation.

Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park