CAMAGÜEY.- Collecting and living accompanied by dolls was Maso's leitmotif, an old woman who, at 84 years of age, caught the eye of Rogelio Enrique Loret de Mola López del Castillo. Casa de Muñecas (House of Dolls) was born from that meeting, the second personal exhibition of the young photographer, opened at the Alejo Carpentier Gallery in Camagüey.

The 15 pieces are arranged in the main room of building number 153 on Luaces street, built in the 19th century to be a house. I insist on detail because of the urban dialogue, immediate, with the proposal of immersion in a home without a mark of rancid ancestry, from the Monte Carlo neighborhood.

A first reading reveals the personal and intuitive version of Latin American baroque brought to the scale of the interior of the small house. The variety of designs, a sense of beauty through colorful figures, a taste for sharing and enjoying the wonder of the curious are clues to a passionate, orderly and careful hostess. At the same time, the ornamental excess conveys the obsession with leaving no space for the void, revealing the loneliness of someone whose story remained to be told in an audiovisual project.

Rogelio, accustomed to studio photos for portraits of the human figure, assumed Maso's objects as posed models, excited about the transcendence he could confer on them. Indeed, they are lasting images even if that was not the initial objective of the 2019 sessions.

The complexity in deciding what to focus on due to the series of elements in a scene profuse in points, lines, planes and textures is evident. A bad gesture could break something in the attempt to capture as much information as possible in each frame.

From science there is an answer to why human beings tend to collect. The brain releases dopamine when we achieve something. We inherited the condition of seeker from our ancestors, from then to now we face each new challenge of survival; therefore, we need to experience the sensation of searching and finding, to reach states of joy, well-being and pleasure.

From the anthropological point of view, Casa de Muñecas has the magnitude of a photographic essay that subverts the paralogism of old age through a different person, especially if the social representation of old age goes through the cultural construction of ages.

The photographs and the entire imaginable universe reinforce an idea: Maso was happy in her world. Through a three-minute audio, shared at the opening of the exhibition, we hear the old woman: “I have liked dolls all my life.” She tells of when her father pleased her with a black doll, of the surprise of finding others in her closet as a gift from her mother. Before they were filled with sawdust. She preferred cloth and named them all.

The interview fragment concludes with this expression: “They say that remembering is living again”. She inevitably refers to the human device against the fatality of oblivion. Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude attributed to the gypsies a device to erase bad memories and to José Arcadio Buendía the desire to invent the memory machine to remember everything.

Rogelio moves human sensibility for everything implicit in what he shows. Maso's impression of the photographer is curious. In the audio she describes him as "a most pleasant young man, fuck, he followed my current, everything I said." She knew that at that time he was in China, where he stayed until 2020 to teach Spanish. There something nice happened to him, because of the extension of the name they went to the equivalent of the diminutive and he was identified as Luo Jie.

Rogelio's resume is varied. He has been linked to the audiovisual media for some time. For fun, lately he has been seen playing acoustic guitar in the band Unauthorized, on Sundays at the Seven Lounge Bar on 7 San Ramón Street.

Member of the Hermanos Saíz Association (AHS), of the Caguayo Foundation, and of the Registry of the Audiovisual Creator, he wants to settle a family debt with a documentary to the Loret de Mola and the López del Castillo, rash, patriots close to Ignacio Agramonte, the eponymic hero of Camagüey.

In 2018 he won the pitching of El Almacén de la Imagen for the fiction project Camino a casa, with financing from the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry. He released it the following year. In 2021, as part of that same festival organized by the AHS, he made the first photography exhibition of him, entitled Esquirlas de un paisaje desnudo.

From the Casa de Muñecas series, he took three works to the collateral exhibition of Fotonoviembre 2022, International Photography Salon and Colloquium convened from Matanzas. As for the exhibition at the Alejo Carpentier Gallery, it will remain until November 24th, an opportunity to meet a spiritual heritage. There is not only his personal testimony, but also the door to questions about childhood and old age today, even though the fever of Reborn dolls, fashionable in the world for hyperrealism in vinyl or silicone, has not reached Cuba, and also widely used for grief therapy.

Maso embroidered an imaginary of beauty and fantasy from the rawness of solitude. Regardless of contact with other individuals, relatives, a person may feel lonely due to losses. She named her objects after her loved ones: Teresa, Esperanza, Bienvenida as the aunt, Margarita, Lázara, Gardenia... She found relief from that sorrow by reconciling herself with her taste for dolls. She died during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Translated by Linet Acuña Quilez