Matando el Rato is the first solo exhibition in Italy of the young Cuban artist Eileen Noy (1995, Minas, Camagüey). The works on display – ranging from photography, installation, and video – follow Noy's artistic journey from his formative years at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cuba to his more recent practices marked by further studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Halle in Germany, also passing through his experience in Naples.

The exhibition takes its title from an installation created by the artist during the period of residence he spent in Naples in December 2022 as part of the exchange program promoted by the Morra Greco Foundation and financed by the resources of the Global Forum – Exhibitions project of contemporary art EDI 2021, for an agreement signed in La Havana between the Foundation itself, the CNAP Consejo Nacional Artes Plásticas, the Taller Chullima atelier and the Institute of Cooperation and Development Italy Cuba, with the moral patronage of the Embassy of Cuba in Italy.

During his stay in Naples, Noy developed a reflection on the concept of time, referring to the widespread custom among the elderly of his town, the village of Camagüey in Cuba, of spending the afternoon hours sitting and chatting outside the patios of their homes . Matando el Rato, or killing time, is the formal visualization of a contemplative slowness typically attributed to southern countries, such as those in the Caribbean or the Mediterranean. The rejection of time as a parameter of productivity that gives nature back its temporality therefore traces an underground link between the island of Cuba and the city of Naples.

The works on display, splitting into landscapes and counter-landscapes of globalized contemporaneity, oscillate between a local and a global observation lens, thus responding to a broader reflection on the concepts of identity, uprooting, and belonging. Bringing together the geographies of Cuba, Southern Italy and Germany, Eileen Noy gives expression to the questions and reflections of a generation that, renouncing its roots, is engaged in a continuous renegotiation of its position in the midst of flows of goods and people.