Alessandra Santiesteban

Cuban author and transdisciplinary practitioner. Her work is socially engaged and encompasses a range of media and formats, such as writing, performance, photography, film, and installation. Based on ideas of proximity and interference, she activates networks of people and places through the intersection of art with issues related to identity, gender, environment, immigration, multiculturalism, history, and cultural heritage. Alongside Karina Pino, she founded El Trailer in 2020. This collective has conducted artistic and socio-documentary research investigating the migratory experiences of Latin American women living in European cities. For the past five years, she has been developing initiatives of artistic, social, and environmental impact in the Nuclear City (Cienfuegos, Cuba), a place originally built for the workers of the failed Juraguá nuclear power plant project, whose inhabitants live at risk of social exclusion.

Juraguá Nuclear Power Plant. Current image. Photo by Daniel Antón Morera

The Cuban Atomic Era: A Ghost Living in the Landscape

by: Alessandra Santiesteban

When construction of the Juraguá Nuclear Power Plant (Cienfuegos, Cuba) was halted in 1992, an entire marine and terrestrial ecosystem of human, animal, and plant life began to populate the area. Today, more than three decades later, the island’s government has announced that it intends to install a toxic waste confinement system that threatens the way of life of a community that has grown among its ruins.