The Gran Canarian palms,
The city is the symbolic space in which Carlos Garaicoa’s work unfolds, and architecture and traditional photography are his excuses for proposing a reformulation of past artistic languages. Born in 1967 in Havana and resident in our country for decades, he is one of the Cuban authors with the greatest international projection of his generation and in his work he incorporates constant references to politics, history and social relations, combining utopian fiction and the most direct reality.
His immersion in art derived from literature and his fascination with books as archives of thought; in fact, one of the most representative works of his career is My personal library grows along with my political principles (2008), compiled from a collection of volumes on Chinese architecture that, for Garaicoa, reveal hypocrisies about spectacle buildings and star architects. Books are also the origin of the project. How my Brazilian library is fed with fragments of a concrete realityproduced again in 2008 and composed of bullet-riddled publications alluding to the turbulent social life of that country.
Books, empty spaces and ephemeral architectures also made up the pop-ups of towers either Minneapolis (2005) and the sculptures of paper, candles, sugar or glass present in Basic principles for destroying (2005-2009), the recreation of a city built with clods of earth that gradually disappeared at the hands, or in the bites, of ants.
In addition to reading and architecture, communication is another of the axes of Garaicoa’s work: many of his proposals contain ironic inscriptions relating to today’s ways of life on urban elements (fences, facades, floors, etc.). Ultimately, he tries to challenge the viewer and invite him to think about the capacity of architecture to change the course of history and our individual stories, using diverse disciplines and languages and paying close attention to processes.
The latest of Garaicoa’s many exhibitions in Spain is being presented this summer at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas and, although it is largely based on pieces linked to architecture, in them this subject is associated with his concerns for the preservation of nature and for the human place in the natural order, especially since the pandemic, which meant a period of introspection for him, in which he returned to drawing and also to the use of natural elements or those that refer to the environment, such as vegetation and trees that gain weight even to the point of devastating the roots of buildings.
Garaicoa argues that the physical roots and past of every large city are underpinned by the usurpation of a territory and resources from nature: from the animals and plants that inhabited these enclaves, from the now polluted air, from the water in the same condition. And in the present of cities this impact on the land continues, thanks to the imbalances caused by a consumption that does not decline.
The coexistence of buildings and fruits of the earth in some of his latest installations is therefore a call for harmony between humans and the environment, of which the former cannot be a part, even though it has seemed to follow, since the industrial revolution, the path of self-exclusion. Some point of confluence, Garaicoa seems to demand, between protofuturism and the jungle.
From September this exhibition, curated by Lillebit Fadraga, can be visited at Es Baluard Museum, in Palma de Mallorca.
Carlos Garaicoa. “Every utopia passes through the belly”
ATLANTIC CENTER FOR MODERN ART. CAAM
C/ Los Balcones, 11
The Gran Canarian palms
From June 20 to September 1, 2024
