Born in Havana in 1967, the character and content of Garaicoa’s practice is inextricably linked with the city where he has lived for most of his life. With an acute, almost archaeological, sense of social, cultural and architectural histories, much of his inspiration comes from the gradual accumulation of personal experiences. Often made over a number of years, and from countless walks through the city’s streets, Garaicoa transforms the ephemeral everyday residues of urban experience into a multifarious and often playfully conceptual framework. ‘The Cuban Gardens’ series (1997–2002), for example, includes over-exposed photographs of rubbish in the city’s public parks, echoing conceptual works by artists such as Gabriel Kuri and Francis Al˙s. A later work, El dibujo, la escritura, la abstracción [The Drawing, the Writing, the Abstraction] (2000–5), includes photographs of graffiti on peeling Havana walls.
In a nod to the conceptual and post-conceptual practices of the 1960s and 70s, an early work, Homenaje al seis [Homage to the Six] (1992), identifies Garaicoa’s exploration of the relation between the city and the origins of language. This work comprises simple photographs of a column on a street with the number ‘6’ painted on it. In some images pedestrians stop and look at it, as if contemplating a public statue, while others walk past oblivious. These prints are coupled with a small painting of the column with the word ‘six’ written as a footnote. The purpose of this number is not clear and the ambivalent relation between the sign, signifier and the street is something repeated in much of his work.
The dependency between documentation and imagination is a particularly pressing concern in Garaicoa’s work. A series of diptychs of large black-and-white photographs, recently shown at MoMA New York, juxtaposes two images of the same street scene, separated by a few years. In Untitled, Hotel San Carlos (1995–2004) or Untitled, Neoclassical Building (2002–4), for example, the earlier image captures a dilapidated building, while the later image captures the same scene but as a demolished or empty plot, with a delicate arrangement of pins and threads tracing a shell of the original.
For his exhibitions, Garaicoa often combines architectural models and renderings as well as photographs, as in Continuidad de una arquitectura ajena [Continuity of Somebody’s Architecture] (2002), which was presented in Documenta II in Kassel. His interest in architecture lies ‘…where the border between artistic experience and architectonic experimentation became blurred and ever more tenuous.’ He has also produced a number of projects in response to Cuban architectural and political history, and in particular to an unsuccessful phenomenon of 1970s socialism called the Social Microbrigade, when the city’s inhabitants were encouraged to build their own houses through collective means. The remnants of this failed utopian project have become modern-day ruins. Garaicoa makes and remakes photographs, models and drawings of these buildings, re-imagined as straight documentary photographs, renderings of original plans and ghostly three-dimensional drawings in pin and thread, indicating architectural structures that are either real, forgotten or imagined.
Garaicoa’s simultaneous engagement with the past, present and future of the city recounts a personal and poetic journey into his relation with space and place and provides a compelling meditation on how history and storytelling inform everyday life. Appropriately, the French philosopher Michel Foucault evoked a heterotopia as ‘something like counter-sites: a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other sites that can be found in culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.’
Like a palimpsest, when seen as a whole, Garaicoa’s layered and textured practice covers and reveals, erases and builds up, deftly evoking parallel time zones, levels of reality and planes of representation. However, his interests are not nostalgic: rather than recover failed or utopian projects, he engages with a continual reappraisal of the present.
CLARE GRAFIK IS A PROGRAMME ORGANISER AT THE PHOTOGRAPHERS’ GALLERY, LONDON, AND PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR FOR CONTEMPORARY