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Lot Essay
“In the complexity of a big city, a lot of people are fighting for something, looking for something,” Garaicoa once remarked. “So the city is a very rich subject to make work about love, hate, history, beauty, what people expect from life and how politics get involved” (quoted in A. Wallach, “Below the Surface: Daydreams of Havana, and Other Cities, Too,” New York Times, 19 May 2005). The city has long fascinated Garaicoa, and his multimedia practice—spanning drawing, photography, installation, and video—imaginatively reconstructs relationships between architecture and urbanism; utopia and decay; past, present, and future. A graduate of Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte, Garaicoa emerged during Cuba’s Special Period of the 1990s, and his work reflects the critical dissonance of that time around revolutionary and Communist ideology.
“For several years now, Garaicoa uses pins to create drawings with thread,” notes curator Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy. “At first, these pin-and-thread drawings were of an imaginary architecture of forgotten pasts and projected futures.” But more recent works, including Aerostática, represent “interventions over photographs of building facades and sidewalks of urban spaces in Havana,” she continues. “By imagining a different world, the literary and visual exercises presented in the artist’s works critique the present. The urban scenes and landscapes he draws are meta-utopias—utopias of a socialist fantasy island that was to be, at some point or another, his native Cuba. Yet, beyond this or that intention and interpretation, whether herewith inappropriate or true, the works are ultimately propositions for inhabiting and drifting through a space differently” (“Proyectista-Farsante,” Carlos Garaicoa: Overlapping, exh. cat., Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2010, p. 13).
“After the fall of European socialism, many Cuban construction and architectonic projects were halted or abandoned,” Garaicoa has explained. “In Havana, as well as in other Cuban cities, idyllic and nostalgic ruins from the colonial and first republic periods coexist with the ruin of a frustrated political and social project. Unfinished buildings abound, neglected and in a sort of momentary oblivion. The encounter with these buildings produces a strange sensation; the issue is not the ruin of a luminous past but a present of incapacity. We face a never-consummated architecture, impoverished in its lack of conclusion, which is proclaimed a ruin before it even gets to exist. I call these the Ruins of the Future” (“Carlos Garaicoa,” BOMB 82, Winter 2002-2003, p. 25).
Aerostática presents just such a “ruin of the future,” overlaying a photograph of architectural debris with a pin-and-thread drawing of a geodesic dome, which floats incongruously at the center of the image. Garaicoa studied thermodynamics at the Instituto Hermanos Gómez before completing his mandatory military service, and he doubtless appreciated the elegantly efficient design of the dome, most often associated with the American architect Buckminster Fuller. Here, the dome is airborne, transformed into an aerostat—in the form of a hot-air balloon qua spaceship earth—that portends a brave new world. “This social and visual panorama has been the platform of my projects and has influenced my views on how one can win over reality from the realm of the imagination,” Garaicoa reflects, “turning human and social frustration into a victory in the realm of dreams, but real and possible dreams” (ibid., p. 26).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“For several years now, Garaicoa uses pins to create drawings with thread,” notes curator Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy. “At first, these pin-and-thread drawings were of an imaginary architecture of forgotten pasts and projected futures.” But more recent works, including Aerostática, represent “interventions over photographs of building facades and sidewalks of urban spaces in Havana,” she continues. “By imagining a different world, the literary and visual exercises presented in the artist’s works critique the present. The urban scenes and landscapes he draws are meta-utopias—utopias of a socialist fantasy island that was to be, at some point or another, his native Cuba. Yet, beyond this or that intention and interpretation, whether herewith inappropriate or true, the works are ultimately propositions for inhabiting and drifting through a space differently” (“Proyectista-Farsante,” Carlos Garaicoa: Overlapping, exh. cat., Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2010, p. 13).
“After the fall of European socialism, many Cuban construction and architectonic projects were halted or abandoned,” Garaicoa has explained. “In Havana, as well as in other Cuban cities, idyllic and nostalgic ruins from the colonial and first republic periods coexist with the ruin of a frustrated political and social project. Unfinished buildings abound, neglected and in a sort of momentary oblivion. The encounter with these buildings produces a strange sensation; the issue is not the ruin of a luminous past but a present of incapacity. We face a never-consummated architecture, impoverished in its lack of conclusion, which is proclaimed a ruin before it even gets to exist. I call these the Ruins of the Future” (“Carlos Garaicoa,” BOMB 82, Winter 2002-2003, p. 25).
Aerostática presents just such a “ruin of the future,” overlaying a photograph of architectural debris with a pin-and-thread drawing of a geodesic dome, which floats incongruously at the center of the image. Garaicoa studied thermodynamics at the Instituto Hermanos Gómez before completing his mandatory military service, and he doubtless appreciated the elegantly efficient design of the dome, most often associated with the American architect Buckminster Fuller. Here, the dome is airborne, transformed into an aerostat—in the form of a hot-air balloon qua spaceship earth—that portends a brave new world. “This social and visual panorama has been the platform of my projects and has influenced my views on how one can win over reality from the realm of the imagination,” Garaicoa reflects, “turning human and social frustration into a victory in the realm of dreams, but real and possible dreams” (ibid., p. 26).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park