Urban Pathologies (2018), is a site-specific installation, where the artist has decided to use the floor of a large theater / auditorium of the Architects and Engineers Guild of Cuba, in Havana (UNAICC). The public walked on top of thousands of sketches scattered through the space, creating a kind of controlled chaos. Pages full of drawings and notes that referred to “illnesses” and “symptomatology” that afflict architecture: cracks, underpinnings, landslides, humidity, which are probably excuses to address pressing problems of society and the contemporary city in a direct and at the same time poetic way. In Urban Pathologies we are witnesses of an open archive, scattered on the floor, stripped of its order, and also vilified to the beat of the hands of the video-animation Abyss. Either iconic or practically unknown buildings in Havana appear sketched in an architectural plan in whose box -which substitutes the classic blue color for the sanguine one- these diseases of materials appear, which often coincide with the so-called “social diseases”. These pages scattered in the wind could be erected in the anarchic gesture, as delicate as it is violent, of constituting an alleged architectural archive that testifies to the decadent beauty of the city where the artist grew up. Tribute and critical vision are a constant duality in the work of Garaicoa.

Installation view at Unión Nacional de Arquitectos e Ingenieros de la Construcción de Cuba UNAICC (2018) and at Centro Atlántico de Arte Modero (CAAM), Las Palmas de Canaria (2024).

Photo: Néstor Kim (2018) y Paco Rocha (2024)