Daily life marred by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, numerous restrictions and new social controls imposed to prevent the spread of the disease until it is eventually placed under control, wherein we encounter a suspension of much of the activities and content, including cultural, has resulted in a peculiar sense of frailty and anxiety – as much as fear and anger itself. The experience is at a massive scale, the presence of death imminent, the questions are numerous, the insecurities great, and the discomfort is overwhelming. It all resembles some irrational endless Beckettian waiting that is full of absurd contradictions. In this almost suspended context, the title of Carlos Garaicoa’s exhibition When the City Sleeps, the Citizens Awake has a prophetic echo. It is as if the potential eruption of dissatisfaction and seeds of a revolution are springing from the title, as if voices questioning the current state are being articulated from the anaesthetized social body, but are critically referring to both past and present experience. Garaicoa actually articulates much of his own artistic production in this tense, but creative encounter of the historical “residue” and the contemporary gaze, building dynamic relationships and numerous possibilities of interpretation between them: from the political to the poetic, from the particular to the collective, etc. Still, he seems to primarily be interested in the social implications in the field of artistic work. From the very beginning, his marking and photographic documentation of suspended urban spaces and fragments of the city are interesting, and their transposition into an artistic practice become aesthetically intriguing and recognizable, and rather “guttural” in its speech. The essence of Carlos Garaicoa’s interest is actually urban space as an inherently social phenomenon. The interests and works that the artist prepared for his exhibition in Split are no exception.
This artist of Cuban origin stages interventions in two spaces in Split, the atrium of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Kula Gallery. The artist’s origin is mentioned here in order to point out similar cultural implants that could at one time be found both in Cuban and Croatian historical reality. These are ideological concepts imported from the Soviet Union. The experiences are nevertheless different, but comparisons can be interesting. Thus, only as an example, we should on the one hand note the export of the revolution, and of the self-governing socialism on the other. Historical studies are written about both, documentaries made, often pointing out the good, and even more often, their bad sides and results. There were contacts between the two communist realities, the Cuban and the Yugoslav – regardless of whether we talk about their rapprochement or divergence – but, as a particularly interesting curiosity we should note Che Guevara’s visit to Yugoslavia and his meeting with Josip Broz Tito at the Brijuni Islands in 1959. Why even refer, at this point, to this historical information? Precisely because the migration of these two individuals from the factual political to the symbolic artistic reality on a wider global spectrum, seems curious. Specifically, the physiognomy of both of their faces remains woven into the domain of visual culture or, more precisely, pop-art, so the face of the Yugoslav communist leader could be found in an important and well-known section of Group 2 at the famous collaborative exhibition This Is Tomorrow and its accompanying publication, that is, an exhibition that was staged in London in 1956 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery as a clear expression of public articulation of British pop-art. On the other hand, thanks to the authentication of forgeries with a portrait of Che Guevara that Gerard Malanga, because of financial trouble, covertly and illicitly created and sold in Rome in 1967, Andy Warhol practically turned the famous revolutionary into one of the biggest pop icons in the world.
In the Kula Gallery, Carlos Garaicoa presents the work To Transform Political Speech in Facts, Finally (II) with a series of postage stamps that he himself has generated, thus questioning the patterns of visual communication in the Soviet Union, but also ideologemes (and their standard-bearers and apologists) that have been adapted and transferred to Cuban culture and political territory. With this procedure, Garaicoa actually tests the idea of the possibility of an ideological unification of the world. Ideological tools are powerful and offer a perfidious way of obedience training, controlling, and manipulating collective fears. In any case, the artist transfers photographs of the publicly visible revolutionary texts from Cuba – street slogans, posters and so on – to the format of travelling stamps with a USSR frame, pointing to the expansive possibility of an ideological template and its effortless adaptability to the new geopolitical context, as well as utopian dreams and their ruins that often accompany political ideological fiction. In the same exhibition space, Garaicoa displays the work Memento mori, inspired by the filmography from this region that covers the period between World War II and the more recent Homeland War in the early 1990s. Specifically, from the available archive the artist selects film posters that deal with war themes, and thus the inherent subject of death and dying, and creates their mosaic on the gallery wall. On the floor, Garaicoa adds generic kitsch figures that local craftsmen create mostly as cemetery decoration, in addition to the posters arranged as mosaics. This constructs a certain tension between film fiction and the collective memory that is articulated in post-socialist Croatia, but also the tension between the cheap impression of graveyard sculpture and the solemnity of death itself.
The installation When the City Sleeps, the Citizens Awake, showcased in the atrium of the Museum of Fine Arts, is composed of a series of simple pictorial signs of architecture in vivid colours placed on a neat gallery lawn. This architecture evokes the emergence of dormitory cities characteristic for the socialist period, as well as the utopia of social equality that has never been achieved. All the legal regulations on the protection and care of public green spaces reflect, in a certain way, the mechanisms of new social control imposed by the COVID-19 reality. Social spaces must be emptied of the usual social rituals and life is confined to the closed communal housing blocks. A city protected and controlled by new regulations and prohibitions that encroach on many civil liberties and rights, pushes the existence of the individual to the very margin, often drawing to the surface as dominant, his anxieties and fears. Questions arise as to where the limits of repression are and what forms of rebellion are even possible.
Carlos Garaicoa’s work is based on the tension that develops when the historical layer and the contemporary gaze meet. He is often inclined to select the most difficult from the repository of the 20th century historical events, especially those referring to wars and crimes committed in them, and to confront the observer with its problematics in an extremely powerful and suggestive manner. It is important to point out that Garaicoa’s gaze is not sentimental or ideological, but he notices “anomalies according to kinship”, which move in different historical contexts and profoundly touch the here and now. The artist creates strong visual compositions as platforms for different types of speech, especially critical. And in doing so, he does not neglect the aesthetic quality as a powerful tool of receptor stimulation. Although he actually uses extremely ideological and politically motivated events or materials, his speech has no intention of being an ideological or a political pamphlet, it is instead directed towards the transcendent in the domain of contemporary artistic practices.
Dalibor Prančević
Carlos Garaicoa Manso (Cuba, 1967; lives and works between Havana and Madrid) employs a multidisciplinary approach to address issues of culture and politics, through the study of architecture, urbanism and history. His main subject has been the city of Havana, and his media include installation, video, photography, sculpture, pop-up books, and drawing.
Among his most important solo shows we can highlight those at Peabody Essex Museum; Fondazione Berengo; Lund Konsthall and Skissernas Museum; Parasol unit; Fondazione Merz; MAAT, Lisbon; Azkuna Zentroa; Museum Villa Stuck; Nasjonalmuseet; CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo; Fundación Botín; NC-Arte y FLORA ars + natura; Kunsthaus Baselland; Kunstverein Braunschweig; Contemporary Art Museum, Institute for Research in Art; H.F. Johnson Museum of Art,Cornell University; Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam; Centre d’Art la Panera; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Caja de Burgos; National Museum of Contemporary (EMST); Inhotim Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo and Caixa Cultural (Rio de Janeiro); Museo ICO and Matadero; IMMA; Palau de la Virreina; Museum of Contemporary Art; Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango and Palazzo delle Papesse.
He has participated in prestigious international events such as: The Biennials of Havana, Shanghai, São Paulo, Venice, Johannesburg, Liverpool and Moscow Biennial, the Triennials of Auckland, San Juan, Yokohama and Echigo-Tsumari; Documenta 11 and 14 and Photo España 12.
