Jorge Alberto Cadi, known as El Buzo (“The Diver”), is a Cuban artist whose only remaining family is his brother, who, like him, lives with schizophrenia. His practice emerged from the methodical collection of discarded objects found on the streets of Havana. For more than twenty years, he gathered suitcases, boxes, anonymous photographs, newspaper clippings, and other abandoned materials, treating them as fragments of stories waiting to be reactivated.
Using collage, cutting, and stitching, Cadi transforms these found elements into unsettling assemblages. Family photographs become compositions marked by fragmentation, repair, and metamorphosis: severed heads, stitched faces, bodies bound with black thread or marked with crosses. Through these interventions, his work explores memory, time, and individual and collective trauma. “We are all, in a way, stitched together by time,” he reflects.
The suitcase is central to Cadi’s work. In Cuba, it evokes exile, separation, and displacement; for the artist, it also becomes a space where objects and images are brought together to generate new narratives. “When you close the suitcase, you bring together people who have never met. They set off travelling again… sometimes into another dimension,” he explains. Now based in Mexico, Cadi continues to explore memory, displacement, and the narrative power of found objects.