For millions across the globe, tracing one's ancestry is a journey back through clear, documented lineages. For others, whose roots were violently severed by the transatlantic slave trade, it is an endeavour akin to nurturing a tree with no roots. This is the challenge at the heart of Jorge Luis Álvarez Pupo's profound multidisciplinary project, Sweet Thing.
A Puzzle Missing Its Main Pieces
The catalyst was a simple question at a family reunion. When an elder asked if he had ever traced his Cuban ancestry, Álvarez Pupo responded with a mix of irony and cynicism. He explained that assembling his genealogy would be like trying to complete a puzzle with most of the central pieces missing. The reason is a brutal historical fact: some of his ancestors are counted among the millions trafficked during the slave trade, a process that began by stripping them of their names and any connection to their origins.
This exchange spurred him to begin Sweet Thing, an attempt to reconstruct an uncertain past. He uses sugar as a central symbolic motif, weaving it into a fragmented family album composed of archival photos, contemporary images from his parents' birthplaces, and conceptual self-portraits. The visuals are often intentionally blurred, not as a flaw, but as an honest representation of how memory softens and falters at its edges.
Walking the Grounds of Exploitation and Rebellion
Álvarez Pupo's research is anchored in two remote Cuban communities tied to the sugar industry, both now suffering population decline. His work physically retraces this history, from the remnants of his great-grandparents' home near a plantation on the UNESCO Slave Route, to the old Triunvirato plantation. It was there that an enslaved woman named Carlota led an uprising in 1843.
Standing in what is now the Slave Route National Museum, once the overseer's house at Triunvirato, he confronted the space where plans for bondage were made. The project starkly confronts the mechanics of slavery: colonial records note an annual death rate of about 5% on Cuba's sugar plantations, plus approximately 102,000 deaths before even reaching Cuban soil. Tools of torture—shackles, branding irons, whipping posts—were commonplace.
The scale of the trade is numbing. Based on available records, an estimated 879,800 people were shipped to Cuba, with about 766,300 disembarking; roughly 12.9% perished during the horrific Middle Passage.
Translating Absence into an Ethical Act of Remembrance
Sweet Thing is a meditation on how cataclysmic events like slavery, war, and the Holocaust fracture historical memory through omission, amnesia, or a simple lack of references. The title plays on words from Nina Simone's Four Women, addressing the core reason why drawing a coherent line to origins remains impossible for so many.
The artist's own father's life embodies the enduring weight of this history. He began working at just eight years old, hauling water for cane cutters, later cutting cane himself, and labouring on coffee, tobacco, and docks. Education was a distant dream pursued in night school after gruelling days. When asked about his elders, his frequent reply was, "I don't remember"—answers that, Álvarez Pupo believes, were etched into his very body.
Ultimately, each image in Sweet Thing is an attempt to translate absence into presence. The project insists that remembering is itself an ethical act—a steadfast refusal to consign those lives, and that not-so-sweet chapter of human history, to silence.
