In 1991-2, Maria Martinez-Cañas worked on a series of photographic prints, Quince Sellos Cubanos (Fifteen Cuban Stamps). The postal stamp as the main referent in this group of works served as a counterpoint to the significant presence of the map in her photographs at the time. If the latter marks a place, sets it down in print, anchors it to the representation of a topography, the former speaks to the potential routes through which one can be rid of such a place, to the vectors that may link it to irreducibly dissimilar territories. Where the map aims at concreteness, the stamp revels in the virtual, fires up the imagination. The epistolary in this scheme is a genre of liberation, but it is often the literature of a freedom that we find only when forcefully moored to a location.



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