Artworks
Sem título [Untitled]
installation
Date
2013
Technique
Wooden model, thread and pins
Dimensions
Dimensões variáveis
Carlos Garaicoa is one of the contemporary artists who takes a distinctive stand in thinking about real-world and clearly-defined issues, that affect communities and their own cultures. His work is largely rooted in a long-term practice of-
photographic documentation of his immediate surroundings in Havana, Cuba, where the urban landscape is characterised by the presence of lost and destroyed buildings, of voids, ruins and vestiges of all sorts. Unifying memories of the past with innovative constructive projections of the future, the artist intervenes on the photographs with superimposed drawings to virtually repair or recreate the dilapidated collective heritage. Combining a rational and technical engineer perspective, a deep passion for urbanism and architecture with a poetic and literary background, Garaicoa developed a visual language that interweaves all those components into extended and unfolding mixed-media installations.
For Documenta 11, Kassel 2002, Garaicoa displayed an installation composed of wall-mounted urban topographic drawings and of an impressive modernist six-level rotunda scale-model. The following year, in the context of the Valencia Biennial and other exhibitions in Spain, he gave the combination of architectural models and drawings further visual and spatial expression, multiplying the 3D models and dematerializing the drawings through wall projections of computer-based renderings.
The present artwork, which was part of a repertoire of different architectural typologies, is a model made of five rectangular translucent towers, all identical in size and shape, perfectly symmetrical with a central semicircular opening at the top and base. The buildings, which only differ by their slightly different orientations are interconnected via a semicircular covered passageway that goes through each unit. The scale is given by the inclusion of small human figures standing outside or inside the totally empty towers. The projected digital drawings, with their rational, linear and geometric aspect - although imaginary, oneiric and phantasmagorical - give the ensemble a captivating spatial and aerial expansion.
Katherine Sirois
photographic documentation of his immediate surroundings in Havana, Cuba, where the urban landscape is characterised by the presence of lost and destroyed buildings, of voids, ruins and vestiges of all sorts. Unifying memories of the past with innovative constructive projections of the future, the artist intervenes on the photographs with superimposed drawings to virtually repair or recreate the dilapidated collective heritage. Combining a rational and technical engineer perspective, a deep passion for urbanism and architecture with a poetic and literary background, Garaicoa developed a visual language that interweaves all those components into extended and unfolding mixed-media installations.
For Documenta 11, Kassel 2002, Garaicoa displayed an installation composed of wall-mounted urban topographic drawings and of an impressive modernist six-level rotunda scale-model. The following year, in the context of the Valencia Biennial and other exhibitions in Spain, he gave the combination of architectural models and drawings further visual and spatial expression, multiplying the 3D models and dematerializing the drawings through wall projections of computer-based renderings.
The present artwork, which was part of a repertoire of different architectural typologies, is a model made of five rectangular translucent towers, all identical in size and shape, perfectly symmetrical with a central semicircular opening at the top and base. The buildings, which only differ by their slightly different orientations are interconnected via a semicircular covered passageway that goes through each unit. The scale is given by the inclusion of small human figures standing outside or inside the totally empty towers. The projected digital drawings, with their rational, linear and geometric aspect - although imaginary, oneiric and phantasmagorical - give the ensemble a captivating spatial and aerial expansion.
Katherine Sirois