Yoan Capote | Nostalgia | 2013

Cuban artist Yoan Capote balances a broadly conceptual, experimental artistic practice with the realities and histories of his native Cuba. He uses different materials to express different ideas, searching for intellectual, and perhaps physical, freedom from a culture isolated by the sea. He is part of a new generation of artists testing the limits of the changing political atmosphere of Cuba and of the changing attitudes towards Cuba in the world.

For Nostalgia, 2013, the artist used his luggage while traveling from Havana to New York. The interior space of his suitcase, as an allegory of a window, is closed with the bricks of Manhattan. It is a piece that embodies, in a poetic manner, the situation of travel for immigrants. Our bags can contain memories and bare necessities, as well as loss and longing for what was left behind. While many of look at travel as providing life-changing adventures, for many, the suitcase may carry the weight of a lost pass.