La experiencia DUPP

de René Francisco, Dalia Gutiérrez

In 1989 artist and academic René Francisco (Holguín, Cuba 1960) started up the artistic collective "Desde una Pragmática Pedagógica" (From a Pedagogic Pragnatism, DUPP) with a group of his students from the Instituto Superior de Artes (Higher Institute of Arts, ISA). His unorthodox classes and the formation of creative groups with many of his students, where intellectual exchange was essential in his classroom, resulted in DUPP, a group of artists/students that began with a project known as La Casa Nacionalʺ where the members lived in tenements (solaresʺ) along with the regular residents and used their artistic skills to improve and transform the living spaces following the residents needs and desires. In 1992 the group DUPP was revived as the Departamento de Debates y Exposiciones and included names like: Carlos Garaicoa, Chino, Jaqueline Brito and José Francisco. "A book consisting of texts of very different nature -images, essays, programs, collective debates, catalogue texts. epistles- that document the work of his students within the context that he created for them, displacements and concerns that have marked much of the Cuban plastic art landscape of the last twenty yearsʺ --Verso Cover.