incompatible elements. In this regard, the new photography
seems like a particularly appropriate medium to help convey Cuba’s recent history.
Carlos Garaicoa’s Open Wound
What has come to define Carlos Garaicoa’s (b. 1967)
prolific career is his preoccupation with the vulnerability
of cities, beginning with the city of Havana. In the 1990s,
after years of neglect, crowded housing, and acute economic
crisis, the once elegant city of Havana looked like it had
lived through a war. In his first works, Garaicoa treated
Havana like a body in distress, and the peeling surfaces of
the old buildings as troubled skin. This was the concept
guiding Garaicoa’s early installations, which paired photographs of a collapsing Havana building with architectural
drawings of an imaginary classical structure in the same
place. In Garaicoa’s more-recent photographs (p. 34) he
uses a non-traditional material (gelatin-coated cow bone) to
print images of Havana in ruins. By pairing up a material
so basic as bone with images of the devastated city, Garaicoa invites us to think about what keeps a city in place, and
about the metaphorical implications of a city’s remains. Even
though Garaicoa has at times shifted his attention to places
other than Havana and to media other than photography,
his work has retained his original sensibility. Even his most
futuristic installations distill the sense that there is something structurally wrong below the glossy surface.
Garaicoa’s treatment of Havana as a city ravaged by an
invisible war led to an invitation to deal with the traces
of a real war. During the Cold War, acting as a proxy for
the Soviet Union, Cuba participated in a war in Angola
that killed over 2,000 Cuban troops. When Angolan artist
Fernando Alvim (b. 1963) invited Garaicoa to participate
in a project on war and memory in 1996-97, the Cuban
artist made close-ups of the impact of bullets on the walls
of hospitals, schools, and other buildings in the town of
Cuito Cuanavale, where the final battle had taken place
(figure 1, p. 37). In Garaicoa’s large color photographs, wall
textures suggest human skin, and the traces of bullets on
the walls look like illegible writing. Even though the marks
are concrete testimonials of the war, the pieces are decontextualized and abstract. Entitled Abstractions, the works
in the series invite emotional detachment in the viewer by
testing the limits of our empathy. Garaicoa’s images make
us reflect on the relationship between art, the experience
of war, and memory. When contrasted with the images of
Havana, Abstractions simultaneously reinforces and questions
the view of Havana as a survivor of an economic crisis of
warlike proportions.12
While war remains a subject in Garaicoa’s diptych
Noticias recientes (Brasil)/Recent News (Brazil), (p. 36)
included in this exhibition, it takes the concept to a more
abstract level. The diptych consists of two large, frameless
photographs positioned at a 90-degree angle to each other,
and depicts a street corner in a large, non-specified South
American city. The composition in each of the two images
is similar and almost symmetrical: the corner of each building rises towards the upper central corner of the photographic frame, giving the impression of being one building.
Furthermore, the perspective of the diptych suggests the
corner is coming toward the center of the room, when in
fact the two images are meeting away from the spectator.
11