About the Work:

Nowadays, the creation of meaning that comes from the field of aesthetics has all the power to summon emotions, affections and expand knowledge that stimulates diverse ways of understanding. Free La Hookah captures these intentions in a set of visualities and sounds that relate recent uses of public spaces and recreational devices whose connection does not occur precisely by chance.

In the Dominican Republic, urban spaces not only define a certain architecture or an order that is really another type of order, but also ways of appearing in them, of relating and of practices that are escape routes from imposed realities and desires marked by the search for living with less pressure. There the Hookah appears, as a testimony of a not so celebrated – locally prohibited, rather – influence of cultures from Southeast Asia and the Middle East, as so many vehicles to prolong optimal states in certain recreational contexts. Fula, a river in the foothills of the Cordillera Central Mountain range with a series of improvised bathing sites, is one of those meeting places. You go to Fula to enjoy, to refresh yourself, to touch your affections and your body with nature and other bodies.

The landscape drawn by the uses of Hookah and the falsified aesthetics generated by human presence in natural and urban spaces converge in the interests of artists such as Amy Hussein and Maurice Sánchez for the way in which these creators approach their origins and places of enunciation. Hussein being Dominican-Lebanese, traces new routes in which the conversation about identity and the ways in which complexities are woven to determine an idea of Dominicanness serves to broaden inquiries that integrate migrations and cultural origins that have been scarcely investigated.

Both artists focus on an investigation of links inserted in routines traceable in geolocalities in apparent opposition; They do not take these dynamics for granted and delve into the logic that makes unforeseen relationships germinate.

These two spheres, the sustained research of both artists and the motivations of the subjects in the spaces they refer to, are decidedly inscribed in the terrain of emancipation. There is here a wanting that learns to question differently and a desire that forms an apparatus of understanding that has minimal records. Records that, now with Free La Hookah, are beginning to be inserted into the Caribbean and digital archives that are articulated to discern our presence, our relationships and our way of existing together, aware of all the sources that inform such ways of living.

Luis Graham Castillo, Curator Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.