Carlos Garaicoa

(Born in 1967 in Havana, Cuba. Lives in Havana)

Carlos Garaicoa internationally come to the forefront after his participation at Documenta 11 and for having been invited at Johannesburg Biennale (1995), at Sao Paulo Biennale (1998), at Gwangju Biennale and at numerous editions of Havana Biennial. No one represented the 'social unconscious' of the contemporary city, the downfall of the utopia and its present ruins better than Carlos Garaicoa.
'Since the early 1990s Carlos Garaicoa has been investigating the urban reality of old Havana in times of its obsolescence. His photographic and architectural interventions physically change an urban fabric, and also preserve the remembrance of what was left to decay under Cuba's socialist revolution.
Still bearing the odour of a colonial past and the old eclectic bourgeois lifestyle, many locations in Havana have become focal points for tracing political crisis and social change. Havana's ruins unleash Garaicoa's desire for a utopian architecture that alludes playfully to American modernist architecture: panoptic structures, temples, skyscrapers, freestanding blocks, and one-store buildings.
Making drawings and creating archiscapes from elaborate wooden scaffoldings, supporting poles placed against buildings, or rank pyramidal towers, Garaicoa extends the actual into the realm of the imaginary in works such as Frank Lloyd Wright y la casa del agua (1999), Abraham Lincoln y san Juan Bosco, o los mapas del deseo (1996), Torre de Babel (1991), Primer sembrado de hongos alucinogenos en La Habana (1997), Acera de esos incansables atlantes que sostienen dia por dia nuestro presente (1994/95), ect.
The city as a space of perception, imagination, and mental projection is photographically explored in Cuando del deseo se parece a nada taking the primitive tattoo of the world trade center towers on an immigrant worker's arm as a starting point. In times of growing commodification - a process that always negates memory as new commodities must replace previous ones - garaicoa's projects turn into an urban archaeology, actively coming to terms with a collectively repressed and neglected past as promoted by a hegemonic political discourse.
Like the benjaminian angel of history looking back at the pile of debris, ruins, and defeats of the past in the effort to redeem them, Garaicoa continues to be caught up in the force fields of desire, the landscape of the body, the map, and the urban fabric interweaving reality and fiction, while at the same time being pushed forward by the forces of progress and modernization'. (Nadja Rottner, from the catalogue of Documenta 11, 2002)