In Abstinencia (Religión) (2011), Yoan Capote transforms the hand, an instrument of labor, agency, and expression, into an image of constrained speech. Eight individually cast bronze hands articulate the letters of “Religión” through sign language. Modeled from the hands of anonymous migrant workers, the sculptures retain the physical distinctions of their subjects: the weight of the palms, the irregularities of the fingers, and the traces of bodies shaped by work. Assembled into language, these fragments appear to speak, yet their communication remains silent and legible only to those capable of interpreting its code.

The work belongs to Capote’s Abstinencia series, in which language is presented as something simultaneously necessary and withheld. “In general this series is a metaphor about the absence of voice or the incapacity of decision of common people in front of different aspects of society,” the artist has explained. Here, religion is neither affirmed nor rejected. Instead, it becomes the object of an unresolved deprivation: a powerful social structure invoked through gestures made by people whose labor sustains society while their political presence often remains peripheral. The title’s suggestion of abstinence turns belief into a condition of distance, something desired, imposed, renounced, or rendered inaccessible.

Capote connects this silence to both his Cuban experience and the broader displacement of migrant communities, describing the series as arising from his “frustration as a Cuban symbolically joined with the hand and frustration of migrants from other contexts and political systems.” Cast in bronze, a material traditionally associated with monuments, authority, and permanence, the workers’ anonymous hands acquire an unexpected public gravity. Abstinencia (Religión)thus constructs a monument without heroes and a declaration without sound: a collective statement formed from individual bodies, suspended between the urgency to communicate and the structures that determine whose voices are acknowledged.