Carlos Garaicoa translates his fascination with the ruins of Havana into drawings, photographs, and mixed-media and video installations. “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,” he has said. His installations evoke a Havana in a state of tension between utopian ideals and dilapidated reality—Japanese Garden (2001), for example, was a room-size environment reminiscent of a peaceful, enclosed Zen garden, but its walls were plastered with photos of urban decay and neglect. Garaicoa has practiced the manipulation of photographs to explore similar themes, superimposing drawings or outlines of imagined structures in thread.
Carlos Garaicoa translates his fascination with the ruins of Havana into drawings, photographs, and mixed-media and video installations. “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,” he has said. His installations evoke a Havana in a state of tension between utopian ideals and dilapidated reality—Japanese Garden (2001), for example, was a room-size environment reminiscent of a peaceful, enclosed Zen garden, but its walls were plastered with photos of urban decay and neglect. Garaicoa has practiced the manipulation of photographs to explore similar themes, superimposing drawings or outlines of imagined structures in thread.
