Daniel Garbade traveled to Cuba in 2014 and since then he has not stopped investigating his Cuban roots. In this exhibition, the artist shows us the fruits of this search, and the parallels and connections between the Cuba of his ancestors and the current one. His grandfather Teodoro Garbade emigrated to Cuba at the end of the 19th century to dedicate himself to the tobacco industry; He married Aida Heydrich Cubero, granddaughter of the illustrious Fernando Heydrich Klein, an engineer who devised and built the famous Matanzas Aqueduct.  

Fernando Heydrich, in addition to being an engineer, was an artist and sculptor, sculpting, among others, the bust of Bismark. Garbade, great-great-grandson and also an artist, follows in his footsteps; In 2016, he made the plaque for the tomb of Mijail Bakunin commissioned by the Dadaists of Cabaré Voltaire. Garbade offers us in this exhibition, a collection of works that speak of his Cuban origins. They are portraits of their ancestors, self-portraits and some landscapes, made up of hundreds of photographs digitally processed to achieve the desired artistic effect.

To narrate his story, Garbade uses fabrics, clothing and t-shirts as a support for his works.

The title Vest + Menté alludes to clothing and the verb to mention: which means to make an explicit reference to a person or a thing. Clothes have become a very important sign of identity, like selfies on mobile phones. Clothes tell us about fashion and the ephemeral nature of the things that pass through our lives; but fashions also return with different perspectives, as is the case with Garbade's look at his family past in Cuba. If we approach the details of the works, we discover fine drawings on works by Goya among others; thus Garbade reinterprets its past, its DNA, reinterpreting part of the history of art.

The exhibition is completed with the series “rolling again”; formed by intervened photographs of objects that belonged to their ancestors.

During confinement, Garbade delved into his physical and emotional attic, finding forgotten objects from his ancestors that spoke of movement. Old bicycles, old and rusty scooters that during the pandemic recover a new meaning of freedom, movement, escape and identity. They therefore symbolize the return to the origin, now reinvented and reopened, once again celebrating life and memory.

In this way, he achieves a surprising and surreal aesthetic, both familiar and new, giving new life to these old objects as if it were a movie; a film that resumes its shooting. Thus Garbade encourages us to return to our lives, loaded with the past, the good and the bad; symbolizing the connection between the two eras, also between two moments, pre and post pandemic.

The exhibition is the result of a close collaboration of the Provincial Center for Cultural Heritage of Matanzas, the Pedro Esquerré Gallery, the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba, Vesaniart Gallery Málaga and the Swiss Embassy in Havana.