Skin and Grace – Episode I
Gazing Soft: The Macho and the Muse
Project Introduction
I arrived in Cuba to meet five professional 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 remains 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 that 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: bodies moving beneath faded vaults, framed by windows crossed by ancient light. Then came the journey 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.
It was there that a second presence appeared: the students. Sixteen and seventeen years old, still suspended between childhood and the discipline of adulthood. Their bodies carried promise more than certainty, softness more than definition. They were not yet dancers, not yet men, but already deeply shaped by expectation.
This first book and film follow four professional dancers.
Their lives, their discipline, their private struggles, and the fragile balance between strength and exposure.
It is about bodies already shaped by choice, sacrifice, and survival.
One reveals what discipline produces.
This is a portrait of masculinity in its present tense.
Skin and Grace – Episode II
The Becoming
Introduction
We met them when they were sixteen and seventeen, at the threshold of adulthood. Students of the Escuela Nacional de Ballet of Havana. We photographed their bodies as they were: uncertain, elastic, not yet fully claimed by identity or performance.
This second chapter begins two years later. In 2027, we will return to them as young adults, when time has crossed their bodies, when choice, fatigue, ambition, and compromise have begun to leave their marks.
This is no longer about professional lives already in motion, but about formation itself. About what is still open. About what is being shaped.
What remains of softness?
What has hardened?
What has been lost, and what has been gained?
If the first book was about grace as lived experience,
this second becomes grace as emergence.
Together, the two works form a single arc:
One reveals what discipline produces.
The other reveals what discipline begins.
This is a portrait of masculinity in its becoming.
