Carlos Garaicoa
175 x 125 cm
Carlos Garaicoa's "Untitled (Parqueo MINREX)" asserts the perpetual suspension of revolutionary architecture through a chromogenic print mounted on gator board, depicting the skeletal, half-built parking structure of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Havana—an emblem of stalled state modernism—overlaid with an exacting grid of pins and threads that meticulously trace phantom elevations, scaffolding extensions, and speculative completions. This physical intervention converts the documentary image into a cartographic proposition, where each thread functions as a fragile architectural directive drawn across the actual concrete decay, exposing the gap between ideological blueprint and material reality. The work unequivocally reveals the Ministry’s parking lot as a site of historical paralysis, the pins anchoring lines of unrealized potential while the threads vibrate with the tension of promises indefinitely deferred. Conceptually, it interrogates the dialectic between observed ruin and imagined reconstruction, declaring that Cuban state architecture exists in a permanent state of projection, where every official structure simultaneously embodies the ambition of the Revolution and its inevitable descent into obsolescence.
Provenance
Estudio Carlos GaraicoaExhibitions
“Carlos Garaicoa: Recent Interventions,” Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Italy, 2013–2014 (Solo presentation of new architectural intervention works, including this unique piece from the Havana series.)
“Carlos Garaicoa: The Politics & Poetics of Space,” selected venues including private and institutional presentations, 2018 onward (Included as part of focused selections of the artist’s thread-and-pin photographic works on Cuban institutional architecture.)