SAMSARA
This work was exhibited in Cuba during the 10th Havana International Biennial. It was shown in a former cell of the Catholic Convent of Santa Clara, the first religious cloister that was erected in Havana in colonial times. The work was an environment generated from the placement of this tombstone in the spaces of that religious precinct without altering its appearance. The idea was to use the aura of seclusion, solitude and almost abandonment of the impoverished place, as a symbol of decadence (decay and decrepitude) of Cuban society.
This is a funeral stele (a gravestone) that bearing inside a clock/calendar (designed and programmed for the piece) that runs in real time and changes each second, minute, hour, day… to remind us that the present goes instantly becoming past and future is the present constantly persistent.
In the cloister this little piece would seen tiny… retreat, is thus revealed not only related to the budgets of our existence, but also forgotten in its own forgetfulness; its own amnesia. Something very in tune with the social reality in my country.
As we know samsara is the cycle of transmigration in the reality of the temporal and phenomenal world. Participation in it is seen by some Eastern traditions of thought as fundamentally illusory and as mere ignorance of the true nature of being. You have to escape it and the way to release somehow resides in the renounce (resignation, for Cubans… another way of death)
Samsara The term refers to worldly existence and means 'flow together', 'pass through different states' or 'wandering' in the limbo of non-enlightenment in which we live. Good analogy (the last one) to summarize the Status Quo that prevails today in the contemporary Cuba. This work discourses about it, but in that sense this work, speaks with a subverted speech while proposing a set of ontological-existential reflections about death (to live life dying) in order to generate new births at each instant.
This work, in short, proposes a metaphor about death and the spiritual void from what is known as Life History and describes the tendency to retreat or withdrawal due to the uncertainty of the future. Discourses on the resignation, isolation and the feeling of existential anguish caused by the enclosure and, of course, speaks about the detachment that it generates. A work that talks about lack of options or alternatives to which are subject -watching the progress of time and waiting "does not know what"- Cubans in Cuba.
In this piece I replaced my name with a number I have drawn of personal documents. A number whose origins have never revealed and will not reveal yet, but I may allude to the idea of existence as travel, as traffic in the mystical sense, but also, ironically, I may also refer the discourse on the meaning of the journey that in Cuba acquires special and peculiar connotations always associated with the possibility (never quite certain) of temporarily or permanently 'escape' from a static, stopped and "Samsaric" reality.
'Samsara' is a work that evokes different discursive levels simultaneously (parallel or intertwined but many of them subverted), many of them are autobiographical and are arcane references in the piece. Samsara is a work that draws on my experience of life. It shows my tears, my sweat and my blood. It is a work that tells a story of splits, renunciation and impoverishment, of indifference, laziness, deathand emptiness, a retired history and cloisters. A history of resignedanguish and uncertainty about the future. It is forgotten as life history: history proscribed by history, is, in short, forgetting our ownforgetfulness.
'Samsara' is a work that evokes different discursive levels simultaneously (parallel or intertwined but many of them subverted), some of them are autobiographical and are arcane references in the piece.
Samsara is a work that draws on my experience of life and shows my tears, my sweat and my blood. It is a work that tells a story of splits, renunciation and impoverishment. History of detachment, apathy, death and emptiness. It is a story of cloisters and retreat. A history of resigned anguish and uncertainty about the future. It is the forgotten as Life History... a history proscribed by the History; it is, in short, the forgetting of our own forgetfulness.

Ernesto Benítez
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Marble and programming electronic system with digital clock and calendar in real time designed for the particular piece (Real Time Clock / Calendar inside the piece). Three 7-segment Led lamps board. Edition of 3