Art grants—especially those linked with visual arts—propitiate new opportunities to the artists as to mobility, financing, logistic…; they constitute recognition in the field of the art critics, curators and galleries and favor the cultural diversity. The creators, when discovering cultures totally different to theirs, enrich their inner world and, therefore, their ideas.
The Fundación Marcelino Botín, created in 1964 to promote social development, with head office in Santander, grants every year eight Visual Arts Grants and two for Curatorship of Exhibitions and Management of Museums. The International Visual Arts Grants, in progress since 1994, have as a purpose the promotion of ambitious artistic projects that incorporate apprenticeship and investigation.
To date, numerous artists have enjoyed International Visual Arts Grants of the Fundación Botín, which function as promotional platform of emerging art and support for those consolidated artists who want to develop an artistic investigation or of training. The group show Itinerarios (Itineraries) and the edition of a catalogue with all the Works produced make up the main exhibition of the chosen projects, which are shown once the period of Grant ends.
During these years, several Cubans have been winners of the grant: Liset Castillo (Camaguey, 1974), Wilfredo Prieto (Sancti Spiritus, 1978), Felipe Dulzaides (Havana, 1965), Levi Orta (Havana, 1984) and Armando Mariño (Santiago de Cuba, 1968).
Creative journeys marked because of living in several countries, numerous trips and stays in various cities of the world, arrive in the Santander institution in a collective return where common preoccupations and shared reflections converge, although every artist maintain their own path and ground.
(…) In the most recent edition of the grants, corresponding to 2016, another Cuban was among the chosen ones: Felipe Dulzaides, who centered in Havana his project Deja tu tono después del mensaje (Leave Your Tone after the Message). This city’s landscape is occasionally interrupted by a sound that calls the artist’s attention, a sort of flute that is no more and no less the sound of the knife-grinders. A sort of music which is at the same time the way to announce a service and that for Dulzaides is a sort of call to poetry. His project will consist in a series of sonorous interventions that will take place in the entire city and for which he will work with those knife-grinders, establishing collaboration between them and professional musicians. The final result will be a video-documentation, although the artist does not exclude the possibility that, in this process, other work formats will emerge. (…)