In a poignant exploration of his family’s history, journalist Jorge Luis Álvarez Pupo delves into the remnants of his great-grandparents’ Cuban home, located near the sugar plantation that is part of UNESCO’s Slave Route programme. Each artifact and personal memento paints a picture of an uncertain past, one that has been severed from its roots.
Álvarez Pupo’s journey began when a relative presented the family tree at a reunion in Belgium, prompting an elder to ask if he had ever traced his ancestry back in Cuba. The journalist’s response was tinged with irony and cynicism, as he explained that piecing together his genealogy would be akin to assembling a puzzle missing most of its main pieces.
The reason for this, as Álvarez Pupo discovered, is that some of his ancestors were part of the harrowing statistics related to the slave trade – a shameful process in which millions of human beings were trafficked and stripped of any connection to their land of origin. The first step in this dehumanizing process was to change their names.
This realisation became the catalyst for Álvarez Pupo’s project, “Sweet Thing,” a multidisciplinary attempt to reconstruct an uncertain past using sugar as a symbolic motif. The project includes archival photographs, contemporary images from the journalist’s visits to his parents’ birthplaces, and conceptual self-portraits created in his studio.
One poignant memory Álvarez Pupo holds dear is the narrow ribbon of earth winding down from his grandfather’s house towards the old Triunvirato plantation – the same fields where an enslaved woman named Carlota, who led an uprising in 1843, raised her voice against the chains that bound her.
The visual elements of “Sweet Thing” often appear blurred, not as a technical fault, but as an honest mimicry of how recollection falters and often fades at its margins. Unlike traditional genealogical records, Álvarez Pupo’s process is non-linear, as missing documents and eroded narratives force him to construct memory through place and imagery.
Through his research, the journalist has explored two remote Cuban communities tied to the sugar industry – one with just over 1,200 residents, the other nearly abandoned, where Creole remained a spoken language even in 1998. Both places have suffered population decline due to economic hardship and the collapse of their industries.
Álvarez Pupo’s work aims to reflect on the impact that certain mass social phenomena, such as slavery, wars, the Holocaust, and/or meteorological events of great magnitude, have had on the loss of historical memory, either through selective amnesia, lack of references, or omission.
The title, “Sweet Thing,” is inspired by passages from Nina Simone’s well-known song “Four Women,” not as a direct reference to the content of the song, but rather as a play on words that the journalist uses to address one of the essential causes that make it difficult, in his case and millions of others, to draw a coherent imaginary line to our origins.
This work refers to a tiny fraction of a not-so-sweet chapter in the history of humankind that took place not so long ago. Each image is an attempt to translate absence into presence, and to insist that remembering is itself an ethical act: a refusal to consign those lives to silence.
