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His dissatisfaction with traditional means of art made it possible for experimentations with objects and installations to become among his most used resources to reconstruct scenes from his memories.
In the Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451, Granger and the rest of the town had to burn books to stay safe from the law. In Fors's work, we can find photographs tied together, painted leaves trapped in transparent cubes, broken ceramics transformed into a new medium, pages of books turned into entire libraries, and incomplete stories behind it all. But he and the others decided to read them before burning them, and to save all that knowledge in their memory, so they could rewrite it again when the war was over. Cuban artist Jose Manuel Fors has tried to rewrite the silenced, fragmented history of his generation in Cuba, through his reconstruction of memories, of what “Beauty” he was able to save.
With his photographic work and his Objects, Fors has created a metaphorical language to reconstruct the identity and social memory that were taken away from him by political interests alien to him and to his generation in Cuba. His work comes from minimalism, recycling and repurposing objects, where fragments become his autobiographical statements. This accumulation of distorted factual evidence demonstrates the selective nature of memory, and its ability to save truly momentous events. Fors, like Granger, found light in the age of Darkness because he knew how to reinvent himself again and again in each of his works’ fragments.
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