Diego Vivanco was an Artist-in-Residence in Havana, Cuba. The two-month residency was part of the artist exchange program between Havana and Leipzig, a joint project of D21 Kunstraum e. V. and the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba. The exhibition “Palabras Clave” was developed in collaboration with the Cuban artist Felipe Dulzaides and takes place at Centro Bahía in the Regla district of Havana.
Diego Vivanco understands his work as an invitation to continuous questioning. In the works he created in Cuba, he primarily reflected on everyday life in the country, continuing a practice he has developed over the years: in every country he visits, he collects discarded shopping lists, as they reveal insights into the daily life of a place or culture. They function as archives of a specific time and location. He processed Cubans’ ways of dealing with everyday challenges into a series of photographic still lifes, depicting precisely the items written on the found shopping lists.
Diego Vivanco was born in 1988 in Bilbao, Spain. After completing his fine arts degree in Bilbao in 2011, he finished his Meisterschüler (master student) studies in 2013 under Prof. Alba D’Urbano in the Intermedia class at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. He subsequently completed postgraduate studies under Prof. Michaela Schweiger in the Time-Based Arts class at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle. Diego Vivanco has received awards in video and photography, as well as scholarships and international residencies, including at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the “Future Frontiers” residency grant from the Paese Museum in Sardinia, Italy. He is a co-founder of the artist collective “Situation Room,” which focuses on site-specific installation work. In addition to several solo exhibitions, his work has been shown since 2008 in numerous group exhibitions across more than ten countries, including at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Galerie Eigen + Art in Leipzig, and Galerie Salzamt in Linz.
