Plan Jaba is one of the earliest works created by Kcho, conceived during his period of military service in Cuba. The piece emerges from a deeply personal context in which everyday life, family memory, and artistic discovery intertwine.
The work is structured around a simple woven shopping bag —the jaba, a common object in Cuban daily life associated with subsistence, scarcity, and domestic routines. Suspended in space, the bag ceases to function as a utilitarian object and becomes instead a sculptural form.
The title refers to the so-called “Plan Jaba,” a state program in Cuba through which basic food products were periodically distributed to the population in a bag (jaba). This reference situates the work within the context of the island’s everyday economy and the strategies of domestic survival that shape daily life in Cuba.
The origin of the piece is tied to a specific moment in the artist’s life. As Kcho recalls in an interview with journalist Maribel Acosta on the occasion of the retrospective exhibition En ningún lugar como en casa:
“I was doing my military service… my mother had spent three months in the United States visiting family, and during that time I made Plan Jaba, but there was something about it that I didn’t like… It even has a date: May 3, 1991. My mother comes back, the bag is hanging in my house and when she sees the work she is happy. I tell her: ‘Mom, there’s something I don’t like.’ She says: ‘Of course, son! The handles are too thin.’ Those handles were woven by my mother with her own hands. Think about it… What museum in the world deserves this work? I will have to carry this bag with me all my life — restore it, care for it, pass my hand over it…”
This anecdote reveals the intimate dimension of the work: the object is not only an artwork but also a repository of family memory and affection. The intervention of the artist’s mother—who reinforced the handles with her own hands—transforms the piece into a quiet collaborative gesture rooted in everyday life.
At the same time, the suspended form of the bag inevitably evokes the elongated outline of the island of Cuba. Without functioning as a literal representation, its curved contour recalls the geography of the territory, suggesting a symbolic identification between the everyday object and the island itself. In this sense, the jaba can also be read as a metaphor for the country: a container of memory, history, and lived experience.
The work also articulates a significant tension between art and craft. Constructed through manual weaving and assembly techniques associated with popular material culture, the object retains the logic of artisanal labor even as it is presented as sculpture. This hybrid condition is central to Kcho’s early practice, in which humble materials and everyday objects are transformed into poetic structures capable of condensing social, emotional, and territorial experiences.
Within the broader trajectory of his work, Plan Jaba anticipates several of the concerns that would later define Kcho’s artistic practice: insularity, migration, memory, and the symbolic weight of origin. What initially appears to be a simple domestic object ultimately reveals itself as a powerful metaphor for identity and belonging.
