"La Cura" screening with Steve Fagin

https://visarts.ucsd.edu/news-events/20260204_stevefagin.html

Steve Fagin is an American artist and Professor Emeritus of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. He has produced a series of feature length videos, including The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel, The Machine That Killed Bad People, and TropiCola (the latter produced in collaboration with some of the most important theatre actors and producers in Havana).

These films have been featured prominently at museums, international film festivals, art biennials and have been screened on Bravo International in Latin America, Canal + in Europe and PBS in the United States. His work has had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and is the subject of a book from Duke University Press, “Talkin’ With Your Mouth Full”: Conversations with the Videos of Steve Fagin. The work has been presented in the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in many contexts, including both of their summary shows of the essential art of the twentieth century.

From 2005-2009, he worked as Creative Consultant for the haudenschild Garage and Commissioning Editor of the hG, Spare Parts project. The Last Book, an hG, Spare Parts project, was conceived and directed by him. He also completed a series of “smart phone pieces”, Cell Phone Stories, both as Commissioning Editor and as one of the artists for LACMA, Los Angeles. After directing Ideal Glass' production of Vestiphobia at Fábrica de Arte Cubano in Havana in early 2017 he wrote and directed the feature, Who the F*** is Clifford Odets? (2018), an 8-episode Web Cabaret series, The Batista Syndrome, shot in Havana, 2019 completed the feature, 45 Minutes from Edith Wharton (2022) and recently completed News from No Where (2023), shot in Havana and La Cura (2024), selected for the Bienal de la Habana.

https://www.stevefagin.com

On La Cura:

"Enter – as if in response to my dream – Steve Fagin’s La Cura (2024) which, as he jokes, 'is the best I can do to make a musical'. It is comprised of episodes – of tableaux. These jewel-like pieces do not add up to a plot. Even when something recurs – like the studio set that stands in for a nightclub, proudly stripped bare under the final credits – or a performer reappears in a different situation, it is not for the purposes of narrative linkage. The connections between tableaux come about in a different way: through an accumulated interweaving, threaded on music."

"Like many, I receive the stereotypes from afar. La Cura is made, in part, for people like me, as much as it’s made for Cuban audiences. Doubtless a high number of its references, nuances, and jokes are lost on me. I learn a lot of names and dates and facts along the way, and I jot them down for future reference. But something else comes through, viscerally, in this torrent of words, images, sounds, motions, and songs: a strong, palpable sense of how inextricably tangled up everything is – the sensual joy with the political pain, the individual with the collective, the everyday with the longue durée – and how everything is knotted, unknotted, and reknotted, over and over again, in the music of a time and a place. "

– Rag Doll, Adrian Martin

"Steve apuesta –intención estilística entre lo surreal, la locura, el absurdo, la farsa, lo grotesco–por interrogar la Historia desde la historia, desde la concepción de tiempos y géneros entremezclados. Podemos seguir en este director una traza de ideas que dan ciertas pistas para su lectura, y que destacamos de su largometraje precedente, Noticias desde un no lugar: "Filosofar y cuestionar ʽla gran historiaʼ, que acaso no sea más que una invención de la imaginación.”

"En otra de las escenas canta un tema de uno de los íconos y considerado fundador de la timba, José Luis Cortés, el Tosco, y NG La Banda, Tú eres una bruja, una bruja sin sentimientos, tú eres una bruja. La fantasía radiofónica, La cura que lo cura todo, desde la excentricidad del músico-personaje nos divierte por su desparpajo. Esos hits musicales evocan nuestro propio mapa de asociaciones, las de aquellos cubanos que rememoran esos años 90 en circunstancias distintas, la beca, el bailable en La Piragua o el Salón Rosado de La tropical, el barrio… constituyen una crónica epocal resuelta a escapar al discurso historiográfico. Exige la calidez de quienes recuerdan, de quienes lloraron y bailaron con esa música, pues la música también los lloró y bailó. Su gente como raíz nutricia."

– La Cura Que Lo Cura Todo: El Cronista Lo Sabe, Yanay Prats Herrera

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