Carlos Garaicoa – Orden Inconcluso

23.11/2014 – 08.03/2015
CA2M,  Madrid

Carlos Garaicoa (Havana, 1967) is a key name between Latin American artists of the nineties, and a referent  inside and outside Cuba to understand the artistic speech through the internationalization of Cuban art from the decade. Since then he has maintained a loyal interest in his work regarding the social, economic and political changes resulting from the history of the twentieth century, which are encoded in the territory of the city as a field of study. He focus on architecture and urbanism through his work. Garaicoa has been living in Madrid for nearly nine years, where he has installed his studio simultaneously with Havana. This fact makes him an artist who has developed his practice from two moments and specific geopolitical situations and has been the starting point of reality generated by this situation. Orden Inconcluso is the first project related to the two contexts the artist faced.  First his stage of artistic development in a country like Cuba, marked by the contradictions between social movements and utopian values that have skewed some of the hopes of that system; and second, his nearest and current confrontation with a country in Southern Europe such as Spain, and more specifically to a city like Madrid, reflecting the decline of utopia from the other extreme of the late-capitalist societies and the welfare desire. These two terminals are connected within the practices of architecture and are reflected in the city as a backdrop where they occur, as a theater, all these choreographed accions for the loss of a project, including demonstrations, painted walls words and acts that claim the city feel. The project takes a word of many meanings,  and one which  Garaicoa finds discomfort, such as Order; precisely so that it is annihilated, transcended, criticized, to which must be destabilizing. Although the order can range from political and religious economic and architectural, wandering of this Ornen Inconcluso (Unfinished order) puts us in something that repeats and does not close. Something unstable and unfolds on several series by the artist from the nineties to the present, building bridges between Castro’s Cuba and architectural utopias to pass through economic value to position ourselves in a Europe burdened by a crisis where the powers are underpinned by the imperative of a false European identity, which makes the individual power is in the hands of those great macrofinance. Thus, on exposure plan postulates a thinker such as Michel Foucault, by the combination of both the great social projects of revolutionary Cuban architecture, as new architectures macroeconomic and micro-realities citizens. The project speaks in parallel play, economic macro-structures and micro-claims of the city, the citizen and therefore the social individual.

Curator: Agustín Pérez Rubio