Our Story

In 1995 the house of the Figueroa-Vives family in Havana became a new model for its time in Cuba: a space for independent management for art and the artists. Its vocation for collaboration as a way of life started when curator Cristina Vives together with photographer José A. Figueroa began to transform their house into a quasi-public space, a project considered today as pioneer within the Cuban cultural panorama at that moment for being one of the first autonomous and self-financed studio-gallery of Cuban contemporary art.

More than twenty years have gone by of the said initiative (9 October 1995), which has promoted numerous research projects, publications and exhibitions, both domestic and international; management and artist representation models, and, unwittingly turned – from a family project into a cultural space. This space, up to date, is a private space that, while still defending its independence – as “tentative” as the term in Cuba may be -, has never been estranged or indifferent to collaboration with every stratum of cultural management within its reach: academia, artists, curators, art students and managers/dealers, all of very diverse nature and backgrounds. On the contrary, it has kept a relationship of involvement – and when necessary – of complicity with all of them.