This exhibition presents two new projects, Memento Mori, and When the city sleeps, the citizens awake. In the first, he takes as a starting point posters of war films known in Croatia, that trace part of its history from World War II to the Homeland War. Using the fiction proposed by these posters, he contraposed them to burial sculptures that decorate local cemeteries, and which are made by local artisans. It is in the tension provoked by this encounter between the collective memory of the recent past in Croatia, its post-communist iconography, and the Kitsch motifs that accompany the solemnity of death, where Meme nto Mori wants to remind us about our human fragility, and emphasize in the ephemeral of our existence.
When the city sleeps, the citizens awake, analyzes the concept of the bedroom town common to the architecture of socialist countries, and the utopia that encloses that notion of city and bedroom unified for all, in that process of social equality never achieved and which has gained significance after the COVID 19 Pandemic. The Lawn and Garden as a protected space of the city, where the ordinance of protection and care of its green areas emphasizes the new social mapping of control imposed in the last year. The city protected and controlled by the impetus of a citizen policy that violates many of its rights, and advocates it for a marginal existence and enclosed in its fears and anxieties.
To transform the political speech in facts finally (II) is a work that appropriates the aesthetics of communist design, to establish a dialogue between the political projection of an ideology originated in the Soviet Union (exported to other European countries, and capable of impacting in a remote place such as Cuba), and the true dreams and breaks that this ideological fiction entails.
The three projects are interconnected by the use of design as a space for communication and mobilization of ideas, which establishes these visual strategies still in vogue, as a promoter of ideologies in present-day capitalism and neoliberalism.
Carlos Garaicoa (1967 Havana, Cuba,) 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 are CAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2020); Lunds Konsthall and Skissernass Museum, Lund (2019); Parasol Unit Foundation, London (2018); MAAT, Lisbon (2017); Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo (2015); NC-Arte and FLORA ars + natura, Bogotá (2014); Kunsthaus Baselland Muttenz, Basel (2012); Contemporary Art Museum, Institute for Research in Art, Tampa (2007); Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (2010); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2011); Caixa Cultural, Río de Janeiro (2008); Museo ICO (2012) and Matadero (2010), Madrid; IMMA, Dublin (2010); Palau de la Virreina, Barcelona (2006); MOCA, Los Angeles (2005); He also exhibited at Havana Biennial (1991, 1994, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2009, 2012, 2015), Shanghai Biennial (2010), São Paulo Biennial (1998, 2004), Venice Biennial (2009, 2005), Johannesburg Biennial (1995), Liverpool Biennial(2006) i Moscow Biennial (2005), Triennials: Auckland (2007), San Juan (2004), Yokohama (2001) i Echigo-Tsumari (2012); Documenta 11 (2003) and 14 (2017) and Photo España 12 (2012).
