David Castillo presents Juan Luis Matos: The Only Way Out is Love and Forgiveness, a solo exhibition featuring four archival films selected by the artist alongside his own recent short film, The World is Not Our Home; together, the five works examine the fraught history of ethnographic and observational cinema, and the camera’s multifarious role: a nefarious tool and—alternatively or simultaneously—an invaluable instrument to bear witness, to remember.

As a child, Matos was often in front of the lens. After his family emigrated from Cuba to South America and eventually the United States, they documented their new lives, filming birthdays and summer trips to send back to relatives in Cuba. “These videos were not for us,” Matos says. “My parents were sharing our progress, our survival.” He received his first camera as an adolescent and while in high school, learned, he says, to love cinema. As he developed a freelance video practice making artist documentaries, he became aware of the camera’s power: its ability to both illuminate and objectify.

These early experiences inform the four archival videos on view. There’s a home movie, Juancy’s 5th birthday (2001), highlighting the family’s return to Cuba to celebrate young Matos. Beginning chronologically, the additional works include At the foot of the Flatiron (1903), A.E. Weed’s two-minute glimpse of the titular building’s Broadway side on a windy day. Bewildered, predominately white passersby glance at the camera; only two Black men appear, one of whom loses his hat, an accident that establishes an inadvertent narrative in an otherwise observational project.

In 1928, Zora Neale Hurston began documenting scenes of Black Southern life—some of the first ethnographic films by a Black woman—including one Matos has labeled Children Playing (1929), in which Miami children laugh and dance. These children were part of Hurston’s community. Is a film still anthropological if the subject is not otherized by its maker, and is instead part of their own beloved world? Matos also asks this question of Sara Gómez’s De cierta manera (1974), the first feature film by a Black Cuban woman. A hybrid documentary blending fiction with the true stories of a Havana neighborhood, Matos isolates a scene in which Gómez showcases an Abakuá ritual. Two men hold Gómez’s gaze, breaking the fourth wall and briefly disrupting the conventions of documentary itself. Continually, these subjects contend with the camera, stare back at it. Its role as an apparatus for reframing the colonial subject is interrogated; Matos wonders if that framework is too entrenched to be dismantled with its own tools.

The World is Not Our Home (2025) is an exploration of migration, nonfiction, and mythology filmed during Matos’s residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. Here, he unabashedly becomes the unreliable narrator; he weaves the story of Saad Eltinay, a Sudanese artist in exile at the residency, with the histories of other American and Caribbean artists who found refuge in Paris throughout the 20th century. He interviews Eltinay and narrates impressionistically, fantastically: identifying the unknown haunts of artists like James Baldwin, “directing” a sunset, recounting tales that may or may not be true. The World is Not Our Home includes footage by the Lumière Brothers and the anthropologist Félix Regnault used chronophotography from the Ethnographic Exhibition of West Africa at the Champ de Mars– now understood as a human zoo, to further the colonial agenda. The World is Not Our Home’s title is drawn from Banjo by Claude McKay, whose words inspired Matos’s own recent poem, a reflection on finding tenderness and care amidst life’s systemic cruelty and relentless artifice. Perhaps the same could be said of Hurston’s film, of Gómez’s, even of Weed’s, or perhaps not—but The World is Not Our Home is certainly a kind of love letter.

Juan Luis Matos (b. Havana, Cuba) is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker based in Miami. He studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, Germany and received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He is a member of Third Horizon, a film collective that hosts an annual film festival in Miami, and he is a four time Emmy Award Winner. He is a 2025 Cité Internationale des Arts Resident in Paris, in collaboration with the Bakehouse Art Complex; and was a 2022 MacDowell Colony Fellow. His films have exhibited at DOC NYC, Blackstar Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, and Miami Film Festival, among others. His work with the Institute of Queer Ecology has exhibited at the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hanover, Germany as well as the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York. Matos was the top prize recipient for the 2022 Knight Foundation Made in MIA Award at Miami Film Festival for his short film, ‘You Can Always Come Home’ and was a 2024 Cinematic Arts resident at Oolite Arts working on his debut feature film.

Juan Luis Matos