Just when the revolution of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) occurred in the art world at the beginning of 2021, two women in Cuba decided to start a project from feminism to curate and show digital artists from the island.
Luisa Ausenda, International Projects Manager and saleswoman at Galleria Continua and an Italian Master´s student at the University of Havana, decided to join forces with the Cuban art historian and professor, Gladys Garrote, to together found the Clit Splash project, a platform for Cuban digital art.
In just two months of been founded, the project has welcomed young creators of various manifestations of art, with successful sales on platforms such as Open Sea and Foundation.
The word Clit, Luisa says, comes from “clitoris” and Splash comes from the sound of splashing in the water, an allegory of navigating the open seas of digital art outlets like the Open Sea platform itself.
How did the project start?
Luisa: It started because Gladys and I were collaborating with another NFTs blockchain platform about a year ago, which is called Snark.art. And then working with them little by little we realized several things. First, that in the NFT space there is the possibility of curating. Curate not only exhibitions, for example on 3D platforms such as Decentraland, Somnium or Cryptovoxels, but also curating up a drop (a quick sale by online auction). It is even possible to curate the art work that one wants to put on their own platform, whatever it is.
And not only that, but we also realized that as in the traditional art world, in the crypto digital world the pattern is also repeated by which the most represented group of artists is always men. So we decided to focus on curating this project from Cuba for less represented Cuban artists, that is, women and any type of minority, whether of gender or race. That’s when Clit Splash was born as an idea, and then it became something else, because we also collaborated with international artists.
What have Clit Splash been able to achieve so far in the world of crypto art?
Gladys: Although the crypto world is a new circulation channel more appropriate for digital native creation, it also has its own rules, its own visual universe and it has been very interesting to learn and create Clit Splash from this notion of crypto art, of digital art, digital native art. And it is very interesting what we have been seeing in the Cuban artistic circuit, how the proposals have been developed towards these initiatives and how there are also artists who already had a work developed digitally and had not had the resources or the channels to present this in exhibitions, in galleries and I believe that Clit has served as a bridge for many to enter this universe.
Luisa: Right now we are trying to create a project that can be visually and conceptually recognizable by a series of themes and characteristics that interest us, such as gender, identity, what femininity is and who works on it, which according to us It is not only women who have the right to represent the feminine.
What challenges does Clit Splash have on the way?
Gladys: I think there is obviously a technological difficulty, which no longer depends on us but on the situation with technology in the country where we live. Also that although we had been working as curators in the NFT universe for a year, it had been a passive role as long as we had the resources ourselves when placing the works on these platforms. We functioned as curators who mediated between the artists and the platform, but that area was not part of our tasks. And it is something that we had to incorporate, to study to become familiar with these websites and these ways of making NFT visible and selling.
What are some of the artists you have sold or shown so far?
Luisa: I have invited Idania del Río, founder of Clandestina, and one of her works is the famous Google Chrome dinosaur, the T-Rex, which is a work that Idania designed in 2014 when there was almost no good internet access in Cuba. It was sold immediately.
On the other hand, Alejandra González, a 24-year-old Cuban artist who has a physical work, she is a photographer, performs performances, and in that sense it was a success because she not only had a new channel to express herself artistically, but also the Clit Splash’s audience and customers really appreciated it. The digital auction was a “sold out” in eight minutes.
Another artist we work with is Liz Capote. She is also a very young 24-year-old artist, graduated from ISDI as a graphic designer. Liz Capote has a work that includes not only drawing but also painting through watercolor and has also done other works such as scenery. And Liz sometimes renders her drawings in digital, being a graphic designer she works very well with digital.
Gladys: This is something that is just beginning. We work with several more artists and others will be joining soon. We believe that this is the future and we will be there to manage and represent more creators, always from what unites us as a feminist and plural collective.
Transcription: Leyda Machado Orama
