2 Dancers, 2 Athletes in Old Havana
Project Introduction
I arrived in Cuba to meet five dancers, drawn to a grace I had known only through screens and fleeting digital fragments. I wanted to photograph their bodies, of course, but above all to capture what emerges when movement stops: an inquiry into masculinity in a country where the body is at once discipline, resistance, and identity.
Joining the Cuban group was David, who traveled from Bucaramanga. A companion in many of my projects, he has become a steady presence in my work. William and Andrés were meant to be there as well, but both had to withdraw at the last moment — a quiet reminder of how every creation is a fragile balance between desire, possibility, and chance.
Guided by Kelly, Cuban-born and the organizational heart of this journey, I encountered an island both rigorous and vulnerable, where written and unwritten rules shape every step. With me was a small crew: Lena, the videographer, and Michel, the sound technician. Around us, a landscape marked by tropical viruses, sudden fevers, decaying dance halls, and a beauty that survives through sheer stubbornness.
The first images took shape in Havana, on its streets and inside the Escuela Nacional de Ballet: young students moving beneath faded vaults, framed by windows crossed by an ancient light. Then came the trip south — waterfalls, beaches, towns suspended in time.
Unexpected events — illness, withdrawals, absences — constantly reshaped the path, forcing me to reinvent the project in real time.
And it was precisely there, in the fragility of the plan, that a decisive intuition emerged: to pair the story of the professional dancers with a second narrative, that of the students we met at sixteen or seventeen. We will return to them in a few months, and again when they reach adulthood. We will follow their transformation, the tension between dream and reality, the slow unfolding of the individual.
This portfolio gathers the first steps of a broader investigation:
a journey into male vulnerability, into grace as an act of resistance, into beauty that keeps moving even when the world around it stands still.
