Programming

Cuerpo et esprit brings together reflections that began when I was diagnosed with cancer at twenty-nine, just as I was finishing my studies and eager to reconnect professionally with the visual arts. The book gathers fragments of conversations spoken through several “I”s, perhaps to be read as the point of balance evoked by Henri Michaux: an average of selves, a movement of the crowd. Fragmentos renegados de su imán is another nod, this time to a poet from Havana.

It is a logbook hardened by rough days, during which the language I speak today was learned and refined reluctantly—not in classrooms, but in hospital rooms. The collection is inhabited by the psyche, by muscle and fat; by illness and by poetry, each inseparable from the other. It carries both joy and sorrow, circling a bittersweet courage that emerges when tomorrow is not guaranteed and one must practise a fierce, grounded, everyday hope, forged while caught between the hammer and the anvil.

That kind of hope—refractory, defiant—is what I wish for all of us.

Raquel Cruz Crespo

Raquel Cruz Crespo is an art historian with over eight years of experience as a cultural worker in both Cuba and Quebec. She has developed a multifaceted career that combines independent curatorial practice, scientific and cultural research, and cultural programming. In recent years, she coordinated the programming at DARE-DARE and then continued her work within Montreal’s network of Maisons de la culture, where she currently serves as a Cultural Development Officer in the borough of Montréal-Nord. Through her various roles, Raquel is interested in the ecosystems that support both artistic production and civic participation. A writer in her spare time, she maintains a complex relationship with writing—one she must continually reaffirm. In this work, that relationship is approached as a space for exploring the margins of her multilingual identity.

Raquel alternated in co-coordinating the artistic programming at DARE-DARE in 2022 and 2023.