Abstract

The paper focuses on an art-project: “Bar Candela” by Kristin Bergaust and Alexis Parra as it appears in three video works documenting different aspects of this ongoing art-project. Bar Candela has been arranged in various existing bars as a platform of artistic and cultural communication related to the Cuban immigrant situation in Europe and elsewhere. A Cuban bar is an important social venue, a meeting place that seems to escape the otherwise strict monitoring of daily life experienced by many Cubans. Both satellite television and Internet connections are illegal, the jokes and stories of the bar is part of the informal exchange of information and rumor. In this spirit the Bar Candela project documents, recreates and investigates Cuban street music and popular culture through video, sound and live performances in the context of a bar. Each event has a new theme and title. In analyzing this ‘bar in move’ the paper will have a threefold structure: It will in the first hand give a presentation of the art by excerpts of the videos, and the artists’ statement. This presentation will be followed by and academic analysis from two different angles, none of them from within a traditional field of art theory, but emphasize both epistemological and sociological aspects of public art and urbanity. Our intention is to show how art can communicate identities and places in different national and urban contexts, and also how art can be analyzed as transgressing works, in different perspectives.