René Francisco and the IV Pragmatica

Time Frame also worked with international renowned conceptual artist Rene Francisco, who since the end of the Eighties has been using institutional spaces of Contemporary art as tool of intervention. Professor of the ISA, Francisco developed a practice which involve a pragmatic interaction with public sphere at a wide level: intervention in social groups, education, reconstruction of public and private urban spaces.

Francesco recently initiated, inside the public institution of the ISA, a collective of artists: the IV Pagmatica. Since the Nineties, Francisco activated 3 groups of artists, born inside the ISA from the interaction professor/students and mainly focusing on the active intervention in the public sphere (urban spaces, social spaces, cultural spaces).

The IV Pragmatica is the fourth collective born as class following Francisco's classes and transformed in a cooperative organism, where the collectivity helps to shape and reinforce the individuality.
The 15 young artists of the IV Pragmatica, officially embedded in the public school, works independently from the ISA, meet in Francisco private studio and acts ad critical agent inside the institutional artistic system of Cuba.

During our staying in La Habana, at the beginning of the second year of classes together, the IV Pragmatica formalized a long term collaborative relationship during a one-day-long performance. Francisco, formally dressed, invited the participants of the group in the swimming pool of a luxurious villa, a place normally rented to rich tourists. During the day, after collective discussions and confrontations (which took place inside the pool), the collective decided to maintain its relationship based on art production and to be part of a long term horizontal creative project where Francisco disappears as professor to give space to an organism composed by several minds and approaches.