La Habana, Cuba, 1964

Iván de la Nuez is an essayist, a critic and an art curator. In 1995, he received the Rockefeller Fellowship for the Humanities. He has written art and literary criticism in numerous media, such as El País and the cultural magazine, La Maleta de Portbou. He has been director of the Center for the Image of Barcelona, La Virreina, as well as curator of several highly relevant exhibitions. Author of different anthologies, such as Cuba: The Possible Island (1995), Landscapes After the Wall (1999) or Cuba and the Day After (2001), his essays The Perpetual Raft (1998) and Red Fantasy (2006) have achieved a great reception amongst the critics and the public, and they have been translated into several languages.

  • “Iván de la Nuez is a sniper that has spent twenty years publishing books that stand as milestones marking an original, coherent exploration of the contemporary symbolic environment […] and he does that with a rigorous but accessible and fun writing style.” César Rendueles. Babelia, El País
  • “De la Nuez is a very relatable outcast. […] But the Cuban author does not have a compass. Just like all outcasts, like nomads, he wets his finger to detect the direction of the wind and predict the path that the balloon will follow. Wherever it wants to go; wherever the wind decides. De la Nuez, born in La Habana, citizen of the world, pours his insides in every page […].” Franco Chiaravalloti, Revista de las letras 
  • “[…] his books aren’t variations of the same book, just like many others authors out there; and they aren’t local uses of a specific and personal beauty canon. […] In reality, the most useful metaphor—and maybe the only one—to describe Iván de la Nuez’s writing style is the cartographic metaphor.” Javier Calvo, Letras Libres
  • “You have to enjoy de la Nuez’s books (and that is something that sets him apart from other more “serious” Cuban intellectuals from his time), his stark humour, his critical tendency to spice things up, to invade speech; to flavour it and give it swing.” Alfredo Triff, Tumiamiblog

Bibliography

Memories from beyond the grave of a very much alive intellectual.

In 2015 Iván de la Nuez was astonished to discover that a Havana funeral parlour had issued his death certificate because of a bureaucratic error. In this new role of being officially certified as dead, Iván de la Nuez reviews his main intellectual concerns: current political affairs, Cuba, the confrontation between communism and capitalism, and the artistic avant-garde.

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Non-fiction

Memories from beyond the grave of a very much alive intellectual.

In 2015 Iván de la Nuez was astonished to discover that a Havana funeral parlour had issued his death certificate because of a bureaucratic error. In this new role of being officially certified as dead, Iván de la Nuez reviews his main intellectual concerns: current political affairs, Cuba, the confrontation between communism and capitalism, and the artistic avant-garde.

Likewise, with the irreverent spirit that comes with existing in the hereafter, he tackles many other issues imposed by the present, such as the vengeful act of urinating on other people's graves, the ever-increasing mumbo jumbo that surrounds the term "postmodernity", and the selfie as a cultural act.

In Posmo the reader will not only find Fidel Castro, Donald Trump and Andy Warhol but also a colourful mix of key figures, including Dakota Johnson, Rambo and the North Korean dictators, Pokémon, Julio Iglesias, Eric Cantona and Carles Puyol, Adam Curtis and Martha Luisa Hernández Cadenas, plus a long list of other artists, creators, writers, intellectuals and politicians, all of them providing an extraordinary overview of today's world.

“When Iván de la Nuez was told that he was dead in Havana, he realised that it was time to resurrect himself and start writing one of his best collections of analyses of current reality – the reality of the living. Masterly in all respects; from the geopolitical to the artistic.” Agustín Fernández Mallo

"This is a spectral journey that goes from personal experiences to the cultural effects of a pandemic or the war in Ukraine, ending with that statute that De la Nuez calls the New Normal Order (...) Posmo is a revenge written with the freedom that only those who are already in the other world can achieve in this world." Zenda Libros

Cubantropía does not set out to explain Cuba to the world, but rather the other way around: it uses Cuba as a scale containing the world and its conflicts.

Written from the socialist perspective of the Cold War and the neoliberal perspective of subsequent years, Cubantropía is a harsh criticism of both that explores the connections between Cuban culture and geopolitics in the global era. Zigzagging its way from the Berlin Wall to Havana’s Malecón, this book examines recent clashes between the market and democracy, the digital era and post-colonialism, the centre and the periphery, utopia and tourism, the diaspora and the nation, racism and Big Data, Guantánamo and Reggaeton, soccer and baseball, Obama and the Rolling Stones, Europe and Donald Trump.

With his usual ironic, erudite style, Iván de la Nuez has written a sensational essay that can be read as an intellectual autobiography and map of the itineraries of the New Man born from the Revolution.

“Nothing explains our vexed world quite like Cuba and no one anywhere writes more brilliantly, more prophetically, more impossibly than Iván de la Nuez. As in all of his finest work, Cubanthropy delivers you beyond your old horizons into a realm of startling possibilities. Do not miss this extraordinary book or this extraordinary warlock of a writer.” —Junot Díaz, author of This Is How You Lose Her 

Four decades ago, Peter Burger published The Theory of the Avant-Garde. It was a cult book focused on the two main tasks that art demanded at the time: to break its representation and to destroy the barrier that separated it from life. To fail in this double task would have had supposed, according to Burger, the defeat of the Avant-Guarde and maybe something worse: its impossibility.

Forty years later, The Rearguard Theory is and ironic manifest that has emerged from that failure, even though he does not waste his time mourning it or disguising it. Primarily because in the book it is understood that our times are not characterized by the distance between art and life, but by a tension between art and survival, which is the continuation of life by any means necessary.

In the discomfort that emerges from that survival, The Rearguard Theory talks about an art that leaves splinters in politics, iconography or literature; fields from which he comes back more and more battered every time to his usual Ithaca: the museum. Ever since that round trip, this austere and sharp book—in which Duchamp stumbles upon Lupe, the revolution upon the museum, Paul Virilio upon Joan Fontcuberta or Fukuyama upon Michael Jackson—wonders if contemporary art will ever end. Because if it were mortal, then it would be necessary to write its ending.

“Iván de la Nuez  is one of the sharpest art critics that can be read today in Spanish.” El Confidencial 

“We have to read Iván de la Nuez to convince ourselves that art critic can be an essay nicely thought-out and well-written.” Letras Libres

'El arte de la contradicción', Babelia, El País

 “Iván de la Nuez is a sniper that has spent twenty years publishing books that are milestones of an original and coherent exploration of the contemporary symbolic environment […], and he does that with a rigorous but accessible and fun writing style.” César Rendueles. Babelia, El País

“Iván de la Nuez transforms art criticism in the art of criticism.” Rafael Rojas

Dos décadas después de finalizada la Guerra Fría, el fantasma del Comunismo ha renacido en el territorio de los vencedores, siempre preparados para cavar su tumba, pero no para lidiar con su vida de ultratumba. De esta ironía trata este libro; y de cómo la cultura occidental ha acabado reciclando, en una mezcla de fascinación y venganza, la iconografía del Imperio desplomado.

Un repaso a los grandes temas del arte contemporáneo desde 1989.

Veinte años de transformaciones políticas. Veinte años de arte contemporáneo. Solo veinte años van de la caída del muro al desmantelamiento de la prisión de Guantánamo. Del fin de la Guerra Fría a la confirmación de la impotencia estadounidense para controlar el mundo que surgió del colapso comunista. A modo de dietario, con un capítulo por cada uno de los 21 años transcurridos, Iván de la Nuez recorre, con su brillantez habitual, todos los recovecos de nuestra experiencia para iluminar el impacto del arte en la historia contemporánea, y de la historia contemporánea en el arte.

Un ensayo que demuestra la irremediable unión que existe entre arte, política y sociedad.

'Inundaciones y El mapa de sal de Iván de la Nuez', Javier Calvo, Letras Libres 

¿Por qué ha cautivado a gentes tan diversas el mito de la revolución cubana y la figura de su líder? ¿Cuáles son los componentes que han hecho de esta isla un reducto en la conciencia de intelectuales, artistas, cineastas y gentes de la farándula en general? Este libro recorre de forma irónica e inteligente, no exenta de humor, la actitud y opiniones de docenas de intelectuales mundiales de diferentes ámbitos sobre los aciertos y errores de la revolución cubana.

Un libro a caballo entre la autobiografía y el ensayo más libre. Un libro de culto por donde transitan en igualdad de condiciones Jean-Paul Sartre y Pedja Mijatovic, Sergéi Bubka y Jean-François Lyotard; donde la artista Orlan se convierte en la «protagonista femenina» de un texto con tantos niveles de sugerencia que se expande mucho más allá de estas páginas. La sal es para Iván de la Nuez lo que el Libro de arena para Borges o el Territorio de la Mancha para Carlos Fuentes, sólo que su mapa no se adscribe al tiempo ni a la lengua. Entre el pasado dulce de las nostalgias y el presente ácido, y cínico, de la globalización hay un futuro que puede ser nombrado con la punta de la lengua. Un porvenir salado.

«Textos como éste cifran la supervivencia del pensamiento.» Pablo López Álvarez, El País

Una interpretación de la cultura cubana ante la globalización, la posmodernidad y la caída del muro de Berlín.

Anthology / Selection

Selección y edición a cargo de Iván de la Nuez.

Ivan de la Nuez fue el director de la antología, que incluye artículos de José Antonio Évora, Natalia Bolívar, Gerardo Mosquera, Raquel Carrió, Coco Fusco, Osvaldo Sánchez, Emma Álvarez Tabio, Antoni Benítez Rojo, Antonio Vera León, Madeline Cámara, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, José Triana, Rafael Rojas, Iván de la Nuez, Manuel Moreno Fraginals y  Bladimir Zamora Céspedes.

Prizes

  • 2007 - Premio Ciudad de Barcelona por Fantasía Roja
  • 2007 - Premio de la Fundació Espais d’Art Contemporani de Girona, a la mejor crítica publicada en el año 2006, a su artículo “Autocrítica del Arte”