Hypothesis 2025: Inventario de ausencias

This exhibition is based on the archive "Los subterráneos", composed of films and materials salvaged from Cuban amateur cinema—a nearly invisible territory in Cuban film narratives. These are works created by film clubs and communities that were left on the margins, condemned to oblivion. We propose to inhabit that intermediate space between loss and survival, where fragments and minimal records allow us to glimpse another possible history.

This exhibition stems from a collection of films and materials rescued from Cuban amateur cinema, a territory that is almost invisible in the official narratives of the country's film history. Faced with the centrality of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) and its institutional apparatus, these works made by amateurs, film clubs, and local communities were left aside, condemned to deterioration and oblivion. "Inventario de ausencias" (Inventory of Absences) proposes inhabiting that intermediate space between loss and survival where fragments, unfinished reels, scripts, and minimal records offer a glimpse of another possible history: that of the cinema that barely caught fire, but whose flame persists in the ruins.

This exhibition, curated by Fabio M. Quintero, a Film Curating Studies student, is part of the program of the "Time of Hypotheses", the event in which the Master's students of the three specialties of Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola —Film Archive Studies, Film Curating Studies and Filmmaking Studies— exhibit the works they have developed throughout the course.