When the Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa looks around him, he sees ghosts—of failed utopias, broken dreams and false promises. In photographs, installations, texts and videos, Garaicoa makes the city his subject, reading its architecture as a fragmented narrative of hope, disappointment and, ultimately, decay. In many ways, his work is a critique of modernism and its complicity with ideology; “I’ve wanted to write a parallel history, to say something different than what we’ve been hearing for years,” he says of Havana, where he lives.
For his current show at New York’s Lombard-Freid Projects, Garaicoa has once again turned to his home city, with nostalgic black and white photographs of shops and other locations, their old signage transformed by new texts that he has overlaid in thread. In one image, the brand name “RCA Victor” becomes the phrase “Puerca Victoria” (Filthy Victory). In another, “Camisería La Gran Vía” (The Gran Via Shirt Shop) morphs into “Carnicería La Gran Vía” (The Gran Via Butcher Shop).
Garaicoa, who will also be the subject of a show that opens January 20 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, hasn’t set foot on American soil since being denied a visa to attend the opening of his 2005 exhibition at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Recently, we reached him in Rio de Janeiro, where he’s on an artist residency, and learned why—for now, at least—he’s given up on America, why those living in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones and why hope is not a pipe dream after all.
Aric Chen: The idea of place and memory resonates in your work. Given your problems entering the U.S., is America becoming just a memory for you?
Carlos Garaicoa: It’s been quite complicated for me psychologically. I’ve been visiting the U.S. for over ten years, and it’s only recently that I started to feel this idea of seeing it, and mostly New York, as a shadow. It’s strange; you start to erase your memories and your relations. But to tell the truth, for this exhibition [at Lombard-Freid], I didn’t make any effort to get a visa.
Why’s that?
The U.S. government has created a lot of bureaucracy. Sometimes, I think they don’t deserve the work that I have to do to get a visa. It’s become clear to me that it’s a big game and a very stupid policy, not only for me but for the relationship between the people of America and the rest of the world. Before, my generation was traveling a lot to the U.S. It was a really good moment during Clinton. And now, the pressure is not just from the American government, but also the Cuban government, because the war has become so crazy between the two of them. At some point, you just say, “I’m not a fucking politician. I don’t care. I’m just going to do my work.”
Tell me about your current show.
It’s a theory of photography that I’ve been developing for a few years. My work deals a lot with writing, urbanism and architecture—in this case, new photographs of places in Havana from the 1940s and ‘50s, like shops and so on, that still have fragments of their original names and titles. And what I do is complete the writing to create a tension. Recently, I have also been making drawings on photographs, creating new buildings on top using threads and pins. So I started to create this kind of overlapping memory of the city by adding to these old titles [in thread].
It seems that, for you, architecture is inseparable from its utopian aspirations. Is the thread a way of healing—or stitching back together—what are in fact its false or broken promises?
I’ve never thought about the stitching idea but, of course, it’s there. But my work is a lot about the reportage of the city. If you see the photographs, the writing is very ghostly, it’s almost not there. It’s like a thought that somebody might have when walking by these places—a very fragile memory, or poetry. At the same time, they’re very strong, very aggressive. It’s like you’re living, but crossing cities today that are bringing this feeling of impossibility, fragility, death and decay. Right now I’m in Rio, one of the most fantastic places I’ve been. But you still get this feeling that you have to say something. At this time of war, you want to scream, “Fuck, what happened? What’s going on?” In Havana, I want to say things I’m not able to say, with my art.
Would you call it political?
My work is not a political statement, even if it deals with a lot of critical issues.
But there’s a political element.
It’s the same everywhere. OK, I’m not living in a democracy [in Cuba] but, in recent years, you don’t have the opportunity to look at America as a paradise of democracy, either. In my country, you have to deal with a very clear political structure, but I’ve been doing my work very easily. I never get censored, I never get controlled. How to explain that, I don’t know. There are limits, of course, and there’s something interesting in Cuba about how artists exist within these limits.
There’s a sense of being let down that you convey in your work.
Living is a lot of disappointment, you feel disappointed all the time. Sometimes, as an artist, you have to build this very critical position, this kind of cynical position, and say, “No, what you’re offering is not good.” Probably, for me, it’s the idea of the future we’ve been building in socialist countries that is the beginning of all this. But more and more, it hasn’t just been about living in this position [in Cuba], because I’ve been traveling a lot to different places. And I have the same feeling. After 9/11, when I started to feel that even the dream of America was not real—when I saw the American government clearly betray the whole world—then I felt the whole circle was closed for me. It’s the same in Europe, with the whole right-wing situation there. You find there’s no way to escape, not only as a person, but as an artist. I’ve been expressing this, in some part, through the idea of architecture and this idea of utopia.
Is there still a place for utopia?
Actually, these days, utopia is not a word I want to talk about anymore. My work is discussing a certain reality; when you’re proposing something to create a dialogue with this reality, to criticize this reality, it’s not about utopia anymore. What I feel at this moment is that you can touch the earth. Like now, I’m making a proposal for a new library in Castleford, one of those cities in England that was suffering; it was a coal-mining city through the ‘50s and ‘60s and now they are trying to recuperate. And in this case, it’s not a utopia; it’s a reality you’re giving to people. Sometimes, even though you have this bad feeling about the situation around you, you see that it’s also beautiful and possible and that there’s hope.Hintmag
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