Thursday December 4, 2025 | 9:00AM  10:45AM

Diboll Gallery, The Commons

Session Abstract:

This panel explores diverse approaches to investigating and curating the Cuban revolutionary and postrevolutionary archive, with a focus on the bridges and disruptions present in practicing a combination of documentary filmmaking, curatorial practice, criticism, and theoretical scholarship.

Documentary film work, grounded in social and political realms, seeks to enact change by forging a relationship among filmmaker, subject, and audience. It also necessitates collaborations that render it always-already public, from start to finish. Scholarship, even when it seeks to enact change, can be an individual pursuit whose conventions often demand limiting the scope of its audience. Curatorial practice, by contrast, entails a bold interpretive act: the curator shapes a canon of filmic production, evaluating both the aesthetic and political imperatives of the works and their relevance for contemporary audiences.

The presentations in this panel challenge conventional professional trajectories, pushing against disciplinary boundaries to engage theoretical questions that traditional scholarship alone may not be equipped to answer. Why and how do researchers move between writing and audiovisual production? Why do curators and producers turn to academic scholarship? What questions remain inaccessible through the modalities they previously relied upon?

These presentations argue for the urgency of going beyond disciplinary expertise to tell stories that not only reframe our understanding of the archive but also open up new possibilities for shaping regimes of affect, identification, and historical reflection.

Panelists

• Jacqueline Loss (University of Connecticut, chair and moderator), “Filming Contradiction: Translating Lo Fino Across Image and Word”

In this presentation, I reflect on hybridity, translation, and subjectivity in FINOTYPE, a visual essay that I am creating with Cuban photographer and filmmaker Juan Carlos Alom. The film explores the cultural, racial, and aesthetic implications of the concept lo fino—refinement—in Cuba and its diaspora. My presentation combines a screening of selected scenes with an analysis of key concepts and creative processes that have reshaped my approach to scholarship.

FINOTYPE examines how perceptions of phenotype intersect with ideas of refinement, style, and comportment. It traces how, despite the Cuban Revolution’s commitment to democratization, competing understandings of what is fino continue to shape Cuban emotional and social life. At its core is a recurring question posed to interviewees: “What is the basis of the category?” Their responses open up nuanced interpretations, prompting me—as both scholar and “now” documentarian—to guide the conversation toward three aims: (1) intralingual translating — dissecting conventional associations for Cuban audiences; (2) translating the term’s meanings into international contexts; and (3) understanding how lo fino functions both as a weapon of the marginalized—enabling aspiration and status transformation—and as a tool of the powerful to guard social boundaries.

The answers evoke entangled notions of modesty, dignity, class, authenticity, debility, sophistication, simplicity, and the respondents’ own racialized identities. These ideas are grounded in historical and material referents—from early colonial economies to the Ministry for the Recuperation of Embezzled Goods (1960s), the House of Gold and Silver (1980s), and their impact in Cuban society today. Rather than defining lo fino within the confines of traditional academic frameworks, FINOTYPE embraces its contradictions, allowing visual language and research to bring the term’s fluid meanings across race, class, and geography to life.

• Katerina González Seligmann (University of Connecticut), “Cultural Infrastructure, Censorship, and the Bounds of Revolutionary Anti-Racism: Mixed Methods Notes on 1966-1975 in Cuba”

In this presentation, I will share work from my recent textual production as well as video footage from documentary work that elucidates conclusions from a cross-section of two projects that converge in the 1960s and 1970s in Cuba. I will put together scholarship on the extraordinarily transformed terrain of cultural infrastructure in Cuba during the 1960s with scholarship on the revolutionary state’s regime of censorship. I will consider both the radical infrastructural investment and the cultural proliferation it facilitated as well as the all-subsuming and yet amorphous censorship that drove it with and through the highly conscribed but nonetheless visible anti-racist revolutionary cultural project that persisted alongside and through the policing of radical Black thought and art, from 1966-1975.

The work I propose to present highlights the interstice where my scholarship informed by textual archival research combines with my documentary film work. The single-authored scholarly project I draw from is a book-in-progress called “Solidarity in Translation: A Relational History of Cuban Aimé Césaire”; the documentary film I am working on, in collaboration with Cuban photographer and experimental filmmaker, Juan Carlos Alom and Brazilian documentary director Petra Costa, is tentatively called “Edmundo Desnoes: In and Out of the Cuban Revolution.” As I present research that shapes both projects, I will also draw attention to the ways that each project feeds the other.

• Ivonne Cotorruelo Pérez (University of Connecticut), “Reencuadrar el archivo: contraarchivo y justicia curatorial en el documental cubano contemporáneo”

Esta ponencia dialoga con la propuesta de justicia curatorial, formulada por Karim Ahmad y el colectivo Restoring the Future, que plantea la curaduría como una práctica ética de mediación entre comunidades, obras y públicos. Analizaré dos entregas cubanas recientes Crónicas del absurdo (Miguel Coyula, 2024) e Isla familia (Abraham Jimenez & Claudia Calviño, 2024) las cuales desafían el imaginario institucional de la Revolución Cubana al construir, desde sus márgenes, formas de contraarchivo. Estas cintas demandan ser curadas desde una posición que reconozca su potencia crítica y sus condiciones materiales de producción, evitando las lógicas extractivas que trivializan el sufrimiento o instrumentalizan el disenso. Asumir esta responsabilidad implica construir marcos curatoriales capaces de acompañar la radicalidad de sus formas, que repiensen el lugar del archivo no como depósito de verdad, sino como campo de disputa. Para explorar el cine documental como un medio que no solo registra, sino que se filtra dentro de una película. Lejos de acumular evidencia o representar verdades históricas cerradas, estas obras ensayan modos de reconfigurar lo visible y lo decible en el espacio documental, mediante estrategias formales que interrogan los regímenes de representación impuestos.
Discuto como Crónicas del absurdo se funda en la elisión de la imagen como gesto político: su materia visual es mínima, y sin embargo lo que emerge es una densidad sonora y textual que insiste en narrar lo inenarrable. El filme rehúsa la espectacularidad del testimonio y opta por una estética del vaciamiento, donde el archivo ya no remite a un cuerpo presente sino a la violencia de su borradura. Demuestro que Isla familia por su parte, articula una contra-memoria desde el espacio doméstico, restituye la centralidad afectiva de la familia como núcleo de sentido y agencia política, y traza una línea directa entre la intimidad erosionada y la fractura del proyecto revolucionario. En ambos casos, lo que se produce no es una simple inversión del archivo dominante, sino una forma alternativa de organizar el mundo sensible: una contra-arquitectura construida con fragmentos, silencios y afectos menores.
Estas operaciones formales y éticas no pueden ser disociadas de los marcos desde los cuales se exhiben, circulan o se legitiman.

• María C. Cumana (Tulane University), “The Curatorial Work of Memory Through Film: La línea del ombligo (2023) by Carla Valdés León as an Example of Filmic Curatorship”

This paper examines the 2023 documentary La línea del ombligo, directed by Cuban filmmaker Carla Valdés León. It considers the film as an example of curatorial authorship in contemporary documentary cinema. The film functions as an intimate archive centered on the experiences of the filmmaker’s grandmothers in Cuba, going beyond the conventions of documentary through the thoughtful selection and arrangement of voices, images, home movies, television interviews, and memories of the past.

In her previous work, Los Puros, 2021, Valdés begins with a documentary dedicated to her parents and their experiences studying in the former Soviet Union. During a reunion of her parents’ former classmates at their home, details emerge about a generation educated under the influence of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. The conversation then shifts to their professional aspirations and dreams.
I analyze La línea del ombligo using feminist film theory and current frameworks in curatorial studies. I argue that Valdés León’s directorial choices reflect the methods of a cultural curator. She intricately weaves narratives of family, components of everyday life, and the tangible features of the environment into a unified and affective composition. The contemplative experience resembles an exhibition, where family memories are effectively conveyed through the filmmaker’s avoidance of linear storytelling.

Rather than providing mere documentation, the film takes on the role of a careful listener, embodying an ethical framework of feminist care and relationality. In this sense, La línea del ombligo constructs a counter-archive that serves as an alternative to the patriarchal narratives of the Cuban state, recovering embodied knowledge and domestic memories. This work situates Valdés León’s film within the broader landscape of Latin American feminist cinema, considering how curatorship can transcend institutional boundaries and act as a vehicle for both political and poetic narratives.