Interview with Carlos Garaicoa

Interview conducted in Barcelona May 2006

Cecilia Andersson:
I wonder if you’d like to give a bit of background to the introduction of architecture and to ideas concerning the city in your practice.

Carlos Garaicoa:
My interest in the city started 1991. This is when I did a project in my street in the north of Havana and invited kids to make a large graffiti. Drawing in the streets with chalk was something I was interested in; the trace and the ephemeral. This was the beginning of my reflections about what an artist is, what you do with language by representing something and when you tell a story and make contact with people. It was questions of representation that put me in contact with the city.

CA: You’ve said that the city was your laboratory.

CG: Yes, it was in the beginning. I did my second piece in the house where I was living - a huge apartment building. In Cuba we call them solar and they’re built around a patio where the neighbours can see each other at all times. I proposed an object to the solar, an object which was meant to change relations between the neighbours. My idea was to cover the central patio by stretching a coloured sheet of nylon across, like a kind of Christo and Jeanne-Claude project. One week before the installation I distributed four different sets of information. One for the people in the neighbourhood, one for the people in the surrounding streets, one for the people living below the nylon and one for the people living above. And on that Sunday when people woke up, the red ceiling was in place.

CA: Meaning you were equally interested in how it was received as in the actual staging of it?

CG: Yes, what is it we’re actually saying with art? If you display an object in a building, in the street or in a museum obviously makes all the difference. These are questions about context, about language, about how far you can go with an aesthetic experience. In my building I very clearly staged an aesthetic experience. If I had said: I will place a red nylon above your head and it will be beautiful, nobody would accept it. But if I say this nylon will affect your life, or from now on your relation to the sky will be different. I believe you have to inform people in different ways to achieve acceptance for art.

CA: So your general proposal is that people will accept as long as you set up the experience adequately?

CG: In general I believe that art is not enough. What we call art, the experience of it, is a very closed and elitist idea. We really have to find different ways and several contexts for art to be analysed. For me it’s easy to put a piece of mine into a museum because by now I know how it will be perceived. If you have enough skills to install, audiences accept the work. They can say they like it or they don’t, but the audiences outside the museum and gallery contexts are much more complex. The experience of art is the experience of language, and language is to communicate. All the pieces I’ve done so far in city contexts are developed as results from what I learned by the nylon experience. Another aspect of my work is that I’ve been trying to find a way to create art from nothing, from a certain vacuum of the city, and from that point starts this relation with architecture where I disguise my work as architectural.

CA: Disguise?

CG: Yes, it’s a disguise. The first time I really worked with an architect was for Documenta 11 in 2002, but even then it was important for me to keep my vision entirely on a conceptual level. I never wanted to build even if I had all the plans and permissions to do so.

CA: But now something has changed. Your commission for the library in Castleford (Yorkshire) seems like it is actually going to be built.

CG: This is a new situation, still related to my early works. In 1991 when I proposed the nylon roof I tried to convince people that the nylon would be something different. What happens to a building when you change its routine? What happens to the community? What I’m proposing for Castleford is quite similar. I say: this is a piece of art and this piece of art can be turned into a multifunctional situation. You can have a building around this object but you don’t have to look at it as art. You can see it as a library, you can see it as dance floor, a planetarium, but you don’t have to refer to it as art. My responsibility in the city is not to make a Mark DeSuvero or Henry Moore sculpture. That could be beautiful too but beauty in the city and in public space is all about function. My goal is obviously not to become an architect but to stay in theory and close to space related issues making my work more credible. But at times I cross the lines and say ok, I will do a library but this library comes from an art piece. I want to prove that art can be useful.

CA: Is that something you otherwise doubt?

CG: No I don’t doubt it. I think it’s useful but it’s limited and I want to give it more range. I believe that many of my pieces are sculptures and unfortunately mostly only stay as sculptures. It can be a smart sculpture, but it’s still a sculpture. I’m against the idea of bringing artists to public spaces and tell them to do art. I’d rather people forget it’s art.