ADRIÁN FERNÁNDEZ’S TEN-STORY TALL METAPHORS.

Malcolm Daniel. Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

We have now ridden the seven-kilometer length of the Malecón twice, from the Castillo de San Salvador de La Punta at the east end to the Almendares river at the west, and still have not seen the grand and fanciful—if somewhat dilapidated—propaganda billboard depicted in Adrián Fernández’s Untitled No. 01. Is it possible that our attention was so drawn to the sights on the city side of the roadway, rather than the sea side, that we have passed right by this 25-meter tall structure rising from the sea wall without noticing it? Twice? Or is it just our luck that this aging relic of the Revolution was dismantled just before our arrival? I tell myself that it’s OK, since even finding it still standing along the Malecón would fail to answer the biggest question I have when looking at Fernández’s photograph—what’s on the front side, what was the message facing the outside world?

I am on the hunt for the Cuban counterparts of the towering abstract spomeniks that dot the open landscape of the former Yugoslavia. Commissioned under President Tito in the 1960s and 1970s, those thousands of monuments memorialized that country’s World War II battles against the Axis powers and celebrated the establishment of a professed classless, utopian, socialist republic not unlike Cuba. To judge by Adrián Fernández’s photographs, the Cuban structures are generally in a sad condition, like so many spomeniks that have become victims of vandalism or neglect.

Not to be disappointed, we head further east, this time with map in hand, traveling along the Via Monumental, past Cojímar and then along the Via Blanca, ignoring the siren song of the sandy beaches and clear waters of the north shore, into more open country, heading along the route to Matanzas. And finally we arrive at our destination, the spot along the road where our notes indicate that we should see another of these magnificent steel structures (Untitled No. 03)—this one even taller, anchored to concrete blocks and cantilevered from the edge of the road hovering over the lush Yumurí Valley and the tree-covered hills as far as the eye can see. At the nearby Mirador de Bacunayagua (famed for its piña coladas), it becomes clear that Fernández is far from the first to photograph the view from Cuba’s highest bridge, the Bacunayagua, spanning the valley at a height of 110 meters. The observation deck appears to be an obligatory stop and photo op for anyone traveling this route. But again, we come up empty, finding no evidence of a structure that must once have rivaled the engineering of the bridge itself and that perhaps celebrated it as a supreme achievement of Cuban civil engineering in the late 1950s. The proprietor of the restaurant seems mystified when shown my copy of Fernández’s photograph, unsure whether we are pulling his leg or seriously confused, ourselves.

In truth, it is all a fiction. Yes, the road, the sea wall, the water and sky, the view from the Bacunayagua bridge—all of that is real and photographed by Fernández, but the structures depicted in his series Memorias pendientes [Pending Memories] are not. Inspired by industrial ruins, unfinished construction projects, propaganda billboards, and above all, the giant illuminated Christmas decorations in the town of Remedios, Fernández worked with structural engineers, architects, and computer specialists to construct—digitally—the beams and bolts and stairs and struts that would be required to actually build them. Every girder, cable, and rivet has been built only in the artist’s computer, an architect’s virtual rendering of something that could be built but never was. And then—in a move that no architect would show a client—Fernández asked his software to artificially age the materials, to show how the metal, wood, and concrete would decay over time. Finally, he layered that virtual image of a structure built and ruined in the computer onto his photograph of the chosen site.

Since they exist only in a make-believe world, Fernández could have built his fictions anywhere. Of all the spots along the Malecón that he could have chosen for Untitled No. 01, he stood at the foot of the Edificio Girón, a 17-story Brutalist apartment block, built in 1967 to house workers of the Girón Bus plant. Revolutionary in its design and method of construction (slip formed concrete), the Girón was equally an expression of the Revolution’s social ambitions, placing workers’ housing in the toney Vedado neighborhood on a prime spot with sea views that would make a capitalist real estate developer weep. Its two modernist apartment blocks towered over the neighborhood’s affluent villas and grand hotels, proclaiming both a new architectural aesthetic and a new social order. And, apart from blocking those enviable sea views, it is easy to imagine an actual structure like that in Untitled No. 01 placed right in front of the Girón, facing north like a challenge to the U.S. or a greeting to anyone arriving in Havana by sea. Although we aren’t shown that sea-facing front of this giant billboard, we can imagine a declaration even more explicit than that offered by the architecture of the Edificio Girón.

Significantly, in Fernández’s Memorias pendientes views, the structures are never shown as we imagine they were meant to be seen by the public. Instead, we view them from behind, like inhabitants of a Potemkin village, and see only the elaborate skeletal structure, now rusting and rotting, that once held up the bold image that we are left to guess at. It’s a perfect expression of the perspective of an artist who came of age during the Special Period, schooled on the grand ambitions of the Revolution, but young enough and worldly enough to recognize the precarious shell of that ambition that remains in today’s Cuba. If Fernández’s first image of the series was intended as a metaphor for the crumbling state of the Revolution’s utopian vision, he need only have looked behind him to find the corresponding reality and to see precisely how fifty years of rain, salt air, and neglect would take its toll. Although still inhabited, the Girón today resembles a post-apocalyptic bunker, corroded by salt, with crumbling concrete and rusting rebar. Perhaps metaphor is more engaging and persuasive than documentation, or more acceptable.

In the earliest of the Memorias pendientes photographs, Fernández purports to have documented astonishing, now lost structures erected in the post-
Revolutionary period at recognizable locations or key spots touting the achievements and ambitions of the nation: the Malecón; the Bacunayagua bridge; the thermoelectric plant at Santa Cruz del Norte (Untitled No. 09);  the bold but somewhat neglected Estadio Panamericano, built for the 1991 games, where the structures in Untitled No. 17 and Untitled No. 14 would have held company with the huge image of Che Guevara declaring “hasta la victoria siempre” [ever onward to victory]. As the series developed, that specificity of location proved less important, even less desirable, allowing the meaning of the photographs to become more generalized and abstract.

Startlingly original in both conception and realization, the Memorias pendientes series nonetheless grows naturally from Fernández’s background and previous work. He was born and raised in Havana, the son of two architects, surrounded by books on architecture and design and albums of travel photographs his father had taken while studying industrial design in Mexico City—pictures of architecture and of a place far from Adrián’s childhood reality. What he learned of the technical side of photography as he took up his father’s abandoned Zenit camera, was largely self-taught, with the help of a high school friend more familiar with developing and printing photographs, hand-me-down darkroom equipment and supplies, the generous advice of commercial photographers he befriended, and a lot of trial and error. By the end of high school, he had a functioning darkroom at home and photography was his after-school passion.

In the first decade of the 2000s, when Fernández attended high school at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro [San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts] and university at the Instituto Superior de Arte [Higher Institute of Art, or ISA], photography was not an approved area of specialization. (Even today, photography is only an optional workshop at ISA.) Photography may have been his passion, but at both San Alejandro and ISA, Fernández was officially a sculptor. To this day, he is as active a sculptor as he is a photographer. In a recurring dialogue, drawings and photographs lead to three-dimensional works, and those, in turn, inspire a new series of photographs. Based on the figures of a farmer and a worker on Cuban postage stamps from the 1960s that he photographed and greatly enlarged in the 2014–16 series Réquiem, Fernández began to make small sculptures in clay. Scanned and 3D-printed in resin, those small figures soon developed into balsa-wood maquettes, and those, in turn, grew to corten steel sculptures a meter or more high in a series called Monumento al hombre incompleto [Monument to the Incomplete Man]. The series’ ultimate manifestation was a six-meter tall steel sculpture placed along the Malecón for the 2019 Biennal.

As he was developing the Monumento al hombre incompleto, Fernández began to dig into his archive and scan old negatives, rediscovering a series of black-and-white images from his earliest years. “This is from 2001—literally one of my first photographs,” he says, pointing to an image of the diving platform at one of Havana’s sport centers. Although not in his mind as he embarked on the sculptural
project, the fragments of industrial architecture that fascinated the 17-year-old novice photographer clearly remained resonant in the eye and mind of the 34-year-old. At the time, the photographs were a formal exercise, he explains, “but now I see a whole new narrative here, which is the one that leads me towards the Memorias pendientes series.”

Among the early photographs he rediscovered was one that prompted Fernández to imagine what kind of sculpture might be possible through the medium
of photography and its virtual counterpart. In his second or third year at ISA, still shooting 35mm film, Fernández made the Christmas-eve pilgrimage to the town of San Juan de los Remedios, where the most famous and elaborate parranda, or street festival, pits the neighborhoods of El Carmen and San Salvador in annual competition for the most elaborate costumes, floats, fireworks, and enormous illuminated constructions on opposite sides of the town square. Thousands attend, and the nighttime festivities have been photographed by many a Cuban photographer. Still fascinated at the time by fragmentary shots of industrial architecture, Fernández, by contrast, had taken a rear view of the giant decorations’ supporting structure in daylight. Coming upon this early photograph while designing his steel sculptures in 2017, he thought of the parrandas of
Remedios as a possible subject for a new photographic project—already imagining them pictured straight-on and from behind. The idea was enticing but impractical—it would limit him to just two pictures a year! Thus was born the idea of creating his own structures in a virtual world.

This constant dialogue between works in two and three dimensions, from photography to sculpture and back again, remains critical to the artist’s creative process and to the way he wishes his art to be seen. In his major exhibition in 2020 at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, where his Memorias pendientes made their debut, Fernández orchestrated a sequence that blended his early black-and-white photographs, sculptural fragments of his Monumento al hombre incompleto displayed in open framework “slat crates,” and the largest prints he had yet made of the new series. Indeed, that same interplay is presented in this book.

Fernández typically begins each new series before finishing the last so that there is an organic transition as one series grows into the next. In the case of
Memorias pendientes, the architectural forms pictured are clearly an outgrowth of his sculptural work, but these images also followed directly on the heels of a quite different set of photographs. In the first group of pictures called El umbral de la incertidumbre [The Threshold of Uncertainty] (2016–18), Fernández found religious sculptures that exhibited the wear and tear of extended use and devotion, and he photographed their faces with a shallow depth of field that imbued them with a human quality and a sense of the passage of time. As the series developed, he followed a new strategy: photographing small devotional figurines—from the back. His description of that decision might equally apply to the Memorias pendientes pictures: “I’ve always thought that these images are about that which you don’t see—what might be present on the other side. If faith surpasses the possibility of representation, then in these photographs faith exists in the uncertainty of what we are constantly seeking but can’t see.” To depict his fictive structures in the Memorias pendientes series from the back side was a natural choice for the same reason, allowing viewers to imagine the front according to their own beliefs and imagination.

The Memorias pendientes series began in 2017 with drawings in the studio and long drives in the countryside scouting locations for his imaginary structures. The two aspects developed hand-in-hand—composing the flat shape of the imagined monument and how it would fit in the landscape. “By the time I photographed the locations,” he says, “I had to think: Where is the structure going to be installed? Is it going to be here or there or further away? Where is the focus?” From that point on, each picture took form through a slow process of teamwork, as Fernández collaborated closely with an architect and an engineer who were not only knowledgeable about the demands of real-world construction, but also adept at the CAD (computer aided design) software used to take architectural designs from concept to blueprints and, most importantly here, to a realistic rendering of the finished product. Once he found partners willing to put in all the work required for a real construction project—just to make a photograph—Fernández and his teammates proceeded in dialogue, moving step by step from the overall shape to the supporting structure and choice of materials, down to details as tiny as the nuts and bolts. That level of detail was critical, because Fernández already envisioned the final prints at a scale that would be visible from afar but that would remain fully convincing as one approached and examined them closely. Once complete, the software-rendered structure was placed in its photographic setting, positioned, sized, anchored, and the lighting adjusted to match the angle and intensity of sunlight in the photograph. The result was utterly convincing. Without waiting for Christmas Eve, Fernández had almost single-handedly built a structure that, although shown on the Malecón, could just as easily have taken its place on the plaza in Remedios.

“The first image that came out in the project blew our minds because we had managed to integrate different stages and media in a coherent photographic result,” Fernández recalls. “But as we continued to develop the series, the first result looked awful by contrast. As we went—and I’m speaking plural because we were all learning—we started to understand the way very subtle details gave higher levels of realism. One part of the image being out of focus or too dark, sometimes these were the very elements that made the spectator say, ‘ok, I can believe this.’” In fact, Untitled No. 01 went through three “finished” versions to arrive at its final form. Most importantly, Fernández realized that for his photograph to have meaning, to symbolize something about today’s Cuban society, to look from the present to the ideals of the past, he needed to add the element of time. Architectural CAD software is designed to produce the documents necessary for construction and to show the architect and client how a building will look on the day the ribbon is cut—clean, beautiful, perfectly crafted, ready for its debut. But the software also has the capacity to understand and render the characteristics and lifespan of the specified materials, though it’s doubtful that clients often ask for an architect’s rendering of how a proposed building will age over the course of a half-century or more. This is what Fernández next asked his team to visualize. “Let’s say this has been there for sixty years,” he posited. “What has happened in sixty years? How does the material behave in sixty years? In that location, which is on the coast, right next to the sea, it has probably had, let’s say, five hurricanes in between. So what happens?” Steel has rusted, concrete is stained and slightly crumbled, wood panels from the front have rotted or been blown away. It begins to look like the open staircases of the Edificio Girón!

In imagining the final appearance of the Memorias pendientes, Fernández cites the work of German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher as the most direct influence, and aspects of their straightforward, seemingly objective approach
are evident: the aging industrial subject, the choice of black-and-white, the frontal view. But for the Bechers, the diffused light and blank sky of an overcast day were ideal for presenting their subjects in the most neutral manner possible. Fernández, on the other hand, uses all of the available tools to manipulate our belief in the image and our emotional and intellectual response to it. Rather than desaturating the barely noticeable clouds in Untitled No. 01, for example, to achieve the Bechers’ blank sky, he pumped up the contrast so that one senses the weather that has taken its toll over sixty years. Most of the Memorias pendientes images feature similarly cloud-laden—even stormy—skies that replace the objectivity of the Bechers’ work with a more Romantic vision of nature and its relationship
to the works of man.

Throughout the process, Fernández always kept the end product—the photograph—foremost in mind, exploiting the history of photography, the language of the medium, the pedigree of imagery, to reinforce our belief in the fiction created in his computer. “Nothing here is taken for granted,” he says. “The choice of black-and-white, the loss of focus in the depth of field, the lens fade on the edges, the grainy texture, the square format that makes you think of medium-format film—all of these are conscious decisions to create effects that trigger a visual reference to documentary photography. This is all part of the construct I create so the spectator will believe the reality of what I’m presenting in my photographs. It’s how I prompt questions like: Is it really there? What was it for? What was its message? and Where is it located, and why have I never seen it before?”

Finally, after all our discussions, Fernández sends me on one final road trip, swearing me to secrecy regarding where, but promising that it will be worth it. I will simply say that the drive is several hours out of Havana, where the landscape is dense with tropical foliage but not with people. As instructed, we pull off the side of the road at the appointed spot, seemingly nowhere special, and I find an overgrown pathway into the moist forest, lush with ferns and flowering plants, under a canopy of majestic trees. Pushing my way through the underbrush, I gradually catch sight of a towering construction, disbelief taking hold. Years of neglect and forest growth have enveloped the structure and its surroundings, offering little suggestion as to why something so grand was ever built here, seemingly so far from anyone who might see it. Like so many others in Fernández’s photographs, it looks from the back to be in a half-ruined state, but enough of the front panels appear to be in place that I feel a rush of hope that its message from another time may still be readable. I chuckle, fancying myself the heroic explorer-archaeologist in an epic film as I push my way to the far side of structure. At last, I turn around, look up, and see...