Forbidden Posters

Forbidden Posters is an art and decoration project that resumes 10 years of illustrations, each of which has now been adapted to a poster format. Every poster tells a story, sometimes personal, or one in which I was just another bystander. In occasions, only a word or shout that you hear in the streets, or a simple remembrance from childhood, are enough for an illustration to explode. Forbidden Posters is just the life that we all share, translated in colors, forms and fonts, strident or barely perceptible, many times encoded; it doesn’t matter whether we are in Havana, or Tokyo. In my case, the majority of these illustrations were born in the Havana neighborhood of Vedado(*), and always the idea and inspiration stems from it, no matter if I am staying a million miles away. (*) Vedado literally means “Forbidden”. The name of this Havana neighborhood comes from Spanish colonial times when this area was located outside the stone walls that surrounded and defended the city from pirates and invasions. The area could be used for farming, but it was forbidden to construct permanent houses.