Basic Necesities

Basic Necessities portraits the dynamics of the informal economy in Cuba as it unfolds in Telegram groups and analyses the eclectic and creative uses of product photography within this digital context.

When the COVID-19 pandemic led to scarcities in the government-run shops, the inhabitants of Cuba’s capital Havana begun to use semi-public chat groups on messaging applications such as Telegram or WhatsApp for accessing food, hygiene products, medication and other basic necessities. During the period of isolation and the government's #quedateencasa (stay at home) campaign, these groups created digital spaces where people shared information about the availability of products in the state-owned shops, creative entrepreneurs created online delivery services, and black-market vendors offered scarce goods for sale. Some of them quickly garnered member numbers in the ten thousand and became an inescapable necessity for many Habaneros seeking to fulfill their daily basic needs.

First WhatsApp and then increasingly Telegram replaced the traditional black market that had always existed in Cuba, stepping in when state delivery systems failed to deliver. Instead of relying on a few trusted contacts in their neighborhood, people now turn to chat groups because they have a much wider reach and are perfectly organized. Despite persisting internet scarcity, digital black markets are nothing new in the Cuban context. Since 2007, the online classifieds website Revolico has facilitated the buying and sale of foreign consumer products such as smartphones, computers, or clothes by international brands that are brought into the country by importers (so-called mulas). It is also used to be (and still is) distributed as an offline archive file through Cuba’s offline distribution network the Paquete Semanal. Yet the recent expansion of internet access has created new opportunities for illicit e-commerce. The rapid success of chat groups as online market spaces became possible only when the government introduced a 3G network in December 2018 (and upgraded it to LTE in summer 2019) and smartphone owners were finally able to enjoy 24/7 internet connection, a prerequisite for participation within these groups.

Based on long-term artistic/ethnographic research into these practices, Basic Necessities presents a real-time documentation of the fascinating social dynamics within these groups and the current day-to-day economic situation in Havana: What products are currently in high demand? What is available through state distribution channels? What is impossible to obtain? What is the current price of a kilogram of chicken meat? This video installation for the Media Wall offers a visual record of the functioning and aesthetics of this digital black-market via four of the most active Telegram groups and documents the interactions of some 300 thousand users. Further, it provides an investigation into the everyday visual genre of product photography, into the peculiar ways in which black market sellers present their products.

For the online version of Basic Necessities, a meta search engine allows users to access hundreds of Telegram groups at the same time, and our server is connected to the API of TgCuba, an online platform dedicated to the search of information in Cuban Telegram groups. This platform updates its database in real time and has about 476 groups, 707.000 users and approximately 17,8 million posts. Following the completion of the live project, all queries made with the search engine while it was connected to the Cuban Telegram channels were saved forming a database. The current documented website utilises all the searches undertaken during the projects’ ‘live’ phase and can still be explored using this database.

Basic Necessities is a commission by The Photographers’ Gallery digital programmes, as part of the Imagin(in)g Networks programme.

Rafael Rodríguez and Christopher Kamper worked on the documentation of Basic Necessities.

[Nestore Siré & Steffen Köhn]