Aguas de Cardenas, 2025

Aguas de Cárdenas (Waters of Cárdenas), 2024
acuarela sobre papel Arches; 25 paneles sobre pared; 565 x 565 cm.

 

Building a Nation

Group Exhibition

Curated by Cristina Vives

While in Miami, Arrechea thought of Cárdenas. There, he saw the book Arechabala. Sugar and Rum. 1878-1969 for the first time, a volume that condenses the history of this industry and its legacy in Cuba. He painted a 36-square-meter watercolor on paper, summarizing his vision of the connection between these territories—Cárdenas, already in the 1940s, was heralded as “the closest port in Cuba to the United States.”

Some of the photographs from the Arechabala collection encapsulated this history for Arrechea: the towering structures of the sugar industry, the port built and modernized by the Basque immigrant, the sugar his company produced, and the ships that carried it across the Florida Strait. These same waters continue to link both shores, though today they are marked by migration in the opposite direction.

Loaded with references and symbolic codes, Arrechea’s work merges geographies, architectures, sugar, labor, people, entrepreneurship, exoduses, and culture. That is why he dissolves his pigments in the very waters that unite us—as a tribute to this history.

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Hacer País is an exhibition that weaves together the back-and-forth history of migration between Biscay, Cárdenas, Madrid, Miami, and Havana from the 19th century to the present. It is a story of migration and return, labor and success, intelligence and audacity, creativity and progress—dedicated to those who paved the way.

A project by Estudio Figueroa-Vives, curated by Cristina Vives and Inés Atienza Arechabala, co-produced with Estudio 50 Habana.