Garaicoa works in a variety of mediums to probe the relationship between architecture and visual art and to explore themes of urbanism, politics, and history. His unusual photographic works chronicle dilapidated buildings and the creation of new structures in place of old. He begins by photographing buildings that have fallen into disrepair and decay or whose construction has been halted. On the finished photograph he inserts pins that allow him to trace in colored thread above the image the pattern of a real or imaginary structure.
Garaicoa has focused on the impact of Fidel Castro's regime on architecture in Cuba and especially in his native city of Havana, but he has also photographed changing cities across the globe, recording the erasure of their architectural pasts. The left panel of Untitled (L.A.) depicts the Lyon warehouse near downtown Los Angeles, which was demolished soon after the artist visited the city in 2004. On the right, Garaicoa’s thread drawing of the original structure hovers over a photograph of the empty site. This ghostly afterimage alludes to the past, questioning the rapid turnover of buildings in modern cities, and also hints at the future, imagining what could be.
Publication excerpt from The Musuem of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights since 1980, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007, p. 256.
