Jorge Alberto Cadi, nicknamed ‘El Buzo’ (‘the Diver’), has no family left but his brother, who also suffers from schizophrenia. For over twenty years, he tirelessly wandered the streets of Havana in search of discarded objects, he collected suitcases, boxes, photographs, and newspaper clippings, seeing in them extraordinary narrative potential.
Photographs and objects passed through his hands: he glued, cut, and stiched, transforming family scenes into grotesque, some times satanic images—severed heads, faces crudely sewn together, bodies outlined in black thread and topped with crosses. ‘We are all a bit stitched together by time,’ he confides.
He keeps his works in suitcases—symbols in Cuba of rupture and wandering—which he transforms into spaces of possibility and reunion: “When you close the suitcase, you bring together people who have never met. They set off traveling again… so metimes into another dimension.” He now lives in Mexico.