If such an entity actually existed, its circumstance would be completely unprecedented. Because we are talking about a transnational, delocalized and diverse cinema, without stylistic prescriptions or office editorialisms like those of the old ICAIC. The Cuban filmmakers of the present, who work with the same difficulties as most of the independent creators of the world, are in fact a completely new species because they are not formatted from the duty to be that prevailed until a few years ago. The project of a national cinema is reformulated with them in the direction of a transhumant condition from the referential point of view and, it must be said, also ideologically. We are more than two decades away from the family conflict and the claim for a common homeland that Video de familia (Humberto Padrón, 2000) narrates, with the children of that community aging in a diaspora that produces its own imaginary through the desires and memories, the images and sounds of a possible Cuba, as in A media voz (Heidi Hassan, Patricia Pérez Fernández, 2019).

Such pretensions are summed up in the 175 pieces of Land Without Images, the show curated by Cuban filmmaker and critic Jose Luis Aparicio for Documenta 15, which during July were exhibited in an improvised hall of the documenta-Halle museum in Kassel, Germany, in daily programs lasting more than ten hours. This, thanks to the invitation of the Hannah Arendt Institute for Artivism, directed by Tania Bruguera, one of the projects invited to the art fair.

The curator is only 28 years old and that is not a minor fact. When the last generation of Cuban filmmakers who claimed their adoption by the ICAIC made the AHS Young Film Exhibitions in the late 1980s, in its Ojo: pinta section, they curated their referents in the same way, but those were very different.

Aparicio begins his particular catalog of Cuban cinema presented in Kassel with PM (Orlando Jiménez Leal & Sabá Cabrera Infante, 1961), the original sin of film censorship in Cuba under the spell of Fidel Castro. And he closes it with an elegy for the unleashed vices of extreme cinema that have their peak in the work of Jorge Molina, but includes a growing repertoire of adherents, which in Land Without Images are embodied by Miguel Coyula, Juan de los muertos, Terence Piard, the Magdiel Aspillaga of El regreso de la mujer de Onán (2006), Marcos Díaz and the curator of the show himself, who is inscribed in that current with El secadero (2019) and Tundra (2021).

In between, the selection gathers from seminal pieces by filmmakers like Nestor Almendros, Fausto Canel, Fernando Villaverde and Miñuca Villaverde, some of them produced within the ICAIC of the early 1960s, the one with less narrow dogmas and where Nicolas Guillen Landrian was still tolerated -this, before they were all kept in a discreet trunk-, to a very tight selection of creators who in the 1980s and 1990s experimented outside the narrow frameworks of institutional cinema: Tomás Piard, Manuel Marzel, Ricardo Vega, Marco Antonio Abad, Manuel Rodríguez, Juan Carlos Cremata, plus a fragment of exile cinema: from Néstor Díaz de Villegas and Jiménez Leal to Orlando Rojas and the Landrián of Inside Downtown (with José Eguzquiza, 2001), passing through an essential piece such as El Súper (Orlando Jiménez Leal & León Ichaso, 1978), until reaching the work of Eliécer Jiménez Almeida.

I cannot resist the ironic question: what would Alfredo Guevara have thought of this collection of "deviant" cinema, often without illuminist ambition or teleological yearning, very often seduced by the cinematographic genre, and openly anti-totalitarian? What would he have said about the "repudiatory" return to the center of Land Without Images of all the dissidence that he and so many others wanted to extirpate from the cinema made in Cuba? Precisely the land without images that this exhibition invokes is a strange zone for that "virtuous" idea that, by means of impositions and decrees to administer freedom, they wanted to impose on us as the only possible territory in which to exist. In any case, what is left of it today? Besides an ICAIC that cannot reinvent itself and is torn between the pressure of the censor apparatus and the demands of the creators, what is left of Cuban cinema today?

Land Without Images suggests that the idea of national cinema will necessarily have to be divergent from the official one, without hegemonies imposed by rhetoric with hardly any seat in day-to-day practice. And it makes it clear that the chauvinistic nationalism that invoked the Homeland believing that only in it was the Nation legitimate was the most unhealthy feature of institutional cinema. Because it turned the resulting art into a derivative of normative practices alien to the free flight of imagination.

In order to make that idea coherent, so that historiography, critics and anthologists to come can trace a path that forces to rewrite the syllabus of the leftist-sick professors of the American and European academy who teach Cuban cinema, this exhibition devotes its main emphasis to telling how the dissidence of yesteryear has a firm ground in the practices of current Cuban cinema, which competes on equal terms with the most daring productions of the present and wins awards at Locarno, the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA) or Rotterdam.

Aparicio has already produced a referential body that accounts for that formidable outburst in Cine Cubano en Cuarentena (CCC), the island's largest audiovisual repository of all times available on the web, born after the ICAIC signed the death certificate of the Muestra Joven in 2020. Conceived as a necessity and under the sinister design of the Covid-19 pandemic, what began as a sort of personal vade mecum ended up becoming one, two, three, a thousand samples, which naturally exploded the limits of those other selections administered from above, where obscure officials review everything from what a character says about José Martí to the political trajectory of the registered filmmaker.

From my perspective, that vade mecum is in itself a declaration of principles. There are not much more selection criteria than the availability of the works on the web or the willingness of the creators to show them. And there is room for everything from "ICAIC authorship", so well defined by Michael Chanan, to post-national cinema. This selective criterion is exemplary for Cubans, trained as we are to decant, purify, divide into camps. On the other hand, the capital impurity that governs CCC puts the notion of fragment before that of unity.

Imagining the Nation therefore supposes that in Land Without Images there are, apart from what has been said above, the border creations, the video-creation, in exemplary pieces of the last 20 years, such as Bojeo (Celia and Yunior, 2006), Reconstruyendo al héroe (Javier Castro, 2007), Habana Solo (Juan Carlos Alom, 2000), Sucedió en La Habana (Henry Eric Hernandez, 2001) and Sucedió en La Habana II (Henry Eric Hernandez & Dull Janiell, 2003), Causa No.1, 1989. Nosotros los acusados aquí... (Hamlet Lavastida, 2019), or a cinema halfway between several traditions, but which in my opinion represents wonderfully the non-metropolitan Cuban amateur audiovisual, such as En el iglú (Emmanuel Martín & Léster Romero, 2008).