Grenade/Cuban photographer Carmen Rivero presents in Granada Against all oddsan exhibition that looks at Cuba through its inhabitants, everyday spaces, objects and traces. The exhibition takes the poem as its leitmotif Well let’s saywhich Virgilio Piñera dedicated to José Lezama Lima in the early 1970s. In it, Piñera uses an unusual “we” to take stock of their lives and a relationship marked by disagreements and reconciliations. Carmen Rivero transfers that “we” to her photographic look at Cuba.
That “we” serves Rivero to build a visual story about the Island where beauty, wear, dignity and resistance coexist. The exhibition brings together photographs of faces, interiors, landscapes, gestures and symbols that avoid a monumental representation of Cuba to concentrate on the marks that the passage of time leaves on people and places. The writer and curator María Herrera highlights precisely this capacity of images to show “one’s own way of inhabiting the world,” according to the text that accompanies the call.
The series It also has a text by the Cuban poet Jamila Medina Ríos, who describes Rivero’s gaze as an exploration of the traces of memory. The photographs appear walls, skins, furniture, streets, statues, altars and domestic spaces in which humidity, rust, cracks, vegetation and bodies make up a kind of archeology of everyday life. The landscape, Medina Ríos points out, takes a backseat to the people who face daily life “against all odds.”
Born in Havana and resident in Granada, Rivero has developed a good part of her career around contemporary photography and its dissemination. She is co-founder of El Trapiche, a project created in 2011, and participated in the creation of SUMA a Photography Day. Since 2017 she has worked as a communication coordinator and teacher at Deriva Escuela de Photography and currently also teaches classes at Escuela Arte Granada. He has been a jury at film festivals in Cuba and Spain and has participated in exhibitions and projects in both countries, as well as the United States and Portugal.
His work maintains a persistent link with Cuba, memory and the transformations of spaces. One of his best-known projects is EXIT. Atlas of Havana cinemaspresented in Cuba, Spain and, in 2025, in Miami, a visual investigation into the old movie theaters of Havana and what remains of them. His publications include Loss of the absolute, where does the mountain retreat? and, already in 2026, before the noise and her own Against all odds.
The inauguration will feature music by DJ Pista Manxega. The headquarters, La Empírica, has been operating since 2016 as an independent cultural association and space dedicated to contemporary art, exhibitions, meetings, conferences and debates.
