Todo lo sólido se desvanece en el aire

A bubble can also be a place to stay. Inside the installation, a machine continuously releases soap bubbles while a selection of Cuban songs about migration plays. From Celia Cruz and La Lupe to Orishas, Raúl Paz, and El Taiger, the playlist spans more than half a century of Cuban music, bringing different generations together around the same experience: leaving, longing, returning, or imagining a life somewhere else.

Heard one after another, the songs shorten the distance between periods that once seemed distinct. Each generation finds its own words for an experience that continues to repeat itself. Past and present end up sounding within the same space. The promise of a shared future thus coexists with a migratory experience that persists from generation to generation.

Meanwhile, the bubbles appear and disappear. Inside the installation, people play, listen to music, and enjoy themselves; yet what they hear speaks of leaving, of longing, of leaving a country behind. Pleasure does not erase the weight of that history: it coexists with it. Pleasure, nostalgia, memory. The bubble as a refuge from disillusionment, but also as an image of what once seemed solid: promises, certainties, possible futures that ultimately dissolve into thin air.