The bay, we were thinking how to perform a nuclear action

Juraguá – Nuclear City, Cienfuegos.
Ludwig Foundation, Havana, Cuba.
German Theater Week, September, 2018.

The Juraguá Nuclear Power Plant (Cienfuegos, Cuba) was the most important industrial work of the Revolution. It’s commissioning represented not only technological progress and the strengthening of relations with the USSR, but also the consolidation of the socialist utopia in Cuba. However, Fidel Castro’s atomic dream was a failure. The works were paralyzed in 1992 and could never be reactivated.

The Nuclear City began to be built in parallel to the power plant in the early 1980s. It was to house the workers: engineers, technicians, etc. who would operate the facilities. However, its construction was also half finished. As time goes by a veil of silence, concealment and abandonment covered both projects.

Most of the engineers and technicians left for other areas of the country after the attempt to repair their broken dreams. According to official media, today the Nuclear City and the town of Castillo de Jagua are home to about 10,000 people. For many of them, the Nuclear City is a place of passage: they come from the east of the country in search of economic improvements. For the new generations it has meant living in a ghost town.

Currently the Nuclear City suffers great economic and social problems due to abandonment and ostracism. Constant depopulation, gender violence, machismo, discrimination of the LGTBIQ+ community, as well as self-marginalization and segregation, are some of them.

Added to the above is the fact that in 2015 the Cuban government announced the construction of a hazardous waste dumpster at the plant’s facilities. However, the inhabitants of the Nuclear City and its surroundings have little information about this.

The bay, we were thinking how to perform a nuclear action is an artistic laboratory in process. Its intention is not to create a «work», but to delve into Life and the probable repercussions that the news of the hazardous waste dumpster may have. It is a gesture, a movement, a personal, collective, documentary, utopian approach… to the future of the reactor, as a coherent principle of an aspiration to discernment.

This laboratory is a pretext. The least contingent pretext that could be found to think about Cuba in the future. It is a project where the research has the condition to expand in dissimilar formats: book, concert, audiovisual work, performance-movie, poetry reading, etc…

In La bahía, we were thinking how to perform a nuclear action the documentary becomes a cycle in which photographs, notes, videos, text messages, names and radioactive anguish are archived. The documentary is a center in which there is nothing definitive, everything is questionable, transformable, and there is only regressive counting, it is not at all about how much we are capable of building as a work in time, but how much we are capable of deconstructing as a temporal experience.

+info: www.onenuclearaction.com

CREDITS

General coordination
Alessandra Santiesteban

Direction
Alessandra Santiesteban
Ricardo Sarmiento

In the process of The bay, we were thinking how to perform a nuclear action participated
Taimi Blanco Ruiz
Aleksandr Naranjo
Martha Luisa Hernández Cadenas
Laura Rodríguez (Sofía Arango)
Souvenir musical group (Celia B. Pérez Erraste, Lilliam Chacon, Sahivel Fuentes y Saydy Vera)

Acknowledgements
Atilio Caballero (Director of La Fortaleza Theater Group)
Arianna Cepero Almeida
Yoén Solana Traba
Heberto Gonzalez Perez
Abel Dominguez
Olga Perez, Gema Perez
Daylin Barroso
Sayli Arias
Osmani Domenech
Petra Röhler
Katherine Bisquet Rodríguez
Rimantas Ribaciauskas
Susana Hernandez
Lumbeh Montero
Mary Lou
Manuel Hurtado

And many other people (from the Nuclear City, Cienfuegos and Havana…) who were present in the different phases of the project.

Collaborators
Cuba’s Ludwig Foundation

Special Collaborator
Sinsentido Editions

With the support of
National Council of Performing Arts of Cuba
La Fortaleza Theater Group, Ciudad Nuclear, Cienfuegos, Cuba

Funding
Office of the Goethe Institute, Havana, Cuba.
Call for proposals to support cultural projects, German Embassy in Cuba.
Call for proposals to support cultural projects, Norwegian Embassy in Cuba.

Reviews

La bahía, laboratorio artístico by Martha Luisa Hernández Cadenas

Ocho veces teatro alemán en Cuba, by Maite Hernandez Lorenzo (OnCuba News, 2018)

LA BAHÍA (Para que Bad Bunny aprenda sobre energía nuclear o Bienvenido a Cuba Socialista) by Martha Luisa Hernández Cadenas