Architectural Ruins and Urban Imaginaries Carlos Garaicoa’s Images of Havana

Contemporary Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa juxtaposes photographic images of Havana’s architectural ruins with timidly articulated drawings that trace the outlines of the dilapidated buildings in empty urbanscapes. Each of these fragile drawings, often composed of de licate threads adhered to a photograph of a site after demolition, serves as a vestige of the sagging structure that the artist photographed prior to destruction. The dialogue that emerges from these photograph/drawing diptychs implies the unmooring of the radical utopian underpinnings of revolutionary ideology that persisted in the policies of Cuba’s Período especial (Special Period) of the 1990s, and suggests a more complicated narrative of Cuba’s modernity, in which the ambiguous drawings—which could indicate construction plans or function as mnemonic images—represent empty promises of economic growth that must negotiate the real socio-economic crises of the present. This article proposes that Garaicoa’s critique of the goals and outcomes of the Special Period through Havana’s ruins su ggests a new articulation of the baroque expression— one that calls to mind the anti -authoritative strategies of twentieth-century Neo-Baroque literature and criticism. The artist historically grounds the legacy of the Cuban Revolution’s modernizing project in the country’s real economic decline in the post-Soviet era, but he also takes this approach to representing cities beyond Cuba’s borders, thereby posing broader questions about the architectural symbolism of the 21-century city in the ideological construction of modern globalizing society.


About the Author
Dr. Jodi Kovach is the Curator of Academic Programs at the Gund G allery, Keny on C olle ge .Her scholarship focuses on contemporary Latin American art, specifically in the Mexican context.She has also taught art and design history, and has contributed to multiple exhibition catalogues, including Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2009), The Geometry of Hope: Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de C isneros Collection (Blanton Museum of Art at University of Texas and G re y G aller y, NY U,  2007), Reality Bites: Making Avant-Garde Art in Post-Wall Germany (Mildred La ne K em pe r Museum, Washington University, 2007), and Inside Out Loud: Visualizing Women's Health in C ontemporary Art (Mildred Lane Kemper Museum, Washington University, 2005).
C ontemporary Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa ta k es the architectural ruins of Havana as a point of departure for imagining new urban land s ca pe s in C uba's post-Soviet era.For example, his photograph/drawing diptych, El sueño de algunas ciudades es llegar a convertirse en otras (The Dream of Some Cities is to Become Another) (2001), shows pedestrians passing through a narrow city street in the heart of Havana's historic district, unencumbered by abandoned sewage trenches and rubble scattered through the passageway (fig.1).They seem unconscious of the crumbling buildings that are literally collapsing around them -as if they are acquie sc ent to time's degenerative process, which has not only taken form in the archite ctur e , b ut ha s also shaped their everyday existence. 1This atrophic ethos conveyed through the photograph has a strange, insidious vitality as nature overtakes the remaining fragments of architecture, creating a mass of wooden beams that look more like malignan t outgrowths of the languishing buildings than structural supports.In his photograph of the site, Garaicoa highlights this corrosive dynamic by framing the image to focus on a makeshift arch of wooden scaffolding that braces the sagging structure against the b uild ing d ir ec tly a c r os s from it in a desperate attempt to salvage the remains of the drooping edifice.Ironic ally, he then pairs this photograph with a small pencil sketch of the same scene in whic h he ta m ed the ungainly architectural forms by straightening lines and smoothing surfaces, by replac ing the wooden buttresses with delicate bridges connecting the buildings, and by drawing a s et of stairs leading up to an entryway in place of the beams that prop up the façade.
El sueño de algunas ciudades es llegar a convertirse en otras highlights the conceptua l underpinnings of a series of photographs for which Garaicoa used the deteriorating sectors of Havana as a touchstone in his practice of representing and ima g ining ur ba n a r c hite c tur e through the lens of the ruin.In his depictions, the improvisational construction and persistent decay of these architectural relics culminate in a clichéd b a ro que tr a g ic b e a uty that he overwrites with provisional models and modifiable architectural plans.He pairs photographs of dilapidated architecture with drawings of imagined construction to e x a mine the interplay between concepts of ruin and utopia, which have long figured differently in local and foreign perceptions of Cuba.Intertwined in tourists' exotic imaginings of C ub a's tr a g ic baroque beauty, and enveloping the historical narratives of oppression and dreams of modern progress that together fueled revolutionary ideology, the ruin/utopia metaphor romanticizes the link between poverty and creativity, mytholo giz es m eta pho rs o f C uba n resilience, and destabilizes the historicity of C uban modernity. 2In the 1990s, however, utopia-the Revolution's ideological dream of a unified, pan-Latin American socialist society-1 Benjamin des c ribes the experience of s pace through architecture-it organizes experience, its presence is rec eived c ollectively, unc onsciously.T he relationship is reciprocal: arc hitecture s hapes experience but als o aris es out of it.See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans .H oward E iland and Kevin M c L aughlin (C ambridge, M ass.& L ondon: Belknap P ress, 1 9 99).

Architectural Ruins and Urban Imaginaries
Carlos Garaicoa's Images of Havana  unmooring of the radical utopian underpinnings of revolutionary id e o log y, a nd s ug g es t a more complicated narrative of C uba's modernity, in which tentative construction plans represent empty promises of economic growth that must negotiate the real socio-e co no mic crises of the present.
This paper explores how Garaicoa intervenes in images of Havana's ruins through diptych photograph/drawings of dilapidated architecture before and after buildings were demolished.In the diptychs of urban scenes in Havana discussed here, I investigate Garaicoa's method of writing over the image of a site after a building's removal.Using delicate pencil or thread, he creates ghostly mirages of the demolished structures, thus reimagining what once existed rather than envisioning something new.These timidly articulated visions of reconstruction bear the persistence of Havana's present state of poverty, decay, and disrepair, which Garaicoa attributes to blind f a ith in the g o a ls o f the C uban Revolution and the collapse of Eastern European communis m.I p r o p os e tha t this strategy for critiquing the goals and outcomes of the Special Period through Havana's r uins suggests a new articulation of the baroque expression-one that calls to mind the antiauthoritative strategies of twentieth-century Neo-Baroque literature a nd c r itic ism.I the n show how the lens of Havana's failed modernity has shaped Garaicoa's perceptio n o f ur b an landscapes beyond Cuba, particularly in a photograph/drawing diptych in which he f e ature s the destruction/imaginary reconstruction of an unremarkable site in Los Angeles.A comparison of these two works demonstrates how the artist historically grounds the le g a cy of the C uban Revolution's modernizing project in the country's real economic decline in the post-Soviet era, but also poses broader questions about the architectural symbolism o f the 21 st -century city in the ideological construction of modern globalizing society. 5raicoa's interpretations of ruins share affinities with the work of othe r conte mp or ar y international artists like C yprien Gaillard and Tacita Dean, for example, who represent Eastern European modernist architecture in its present dilapidated state to reveal the failur e of its ideological underpinnings and to provoke consideration o f what the s e r uins c o nv ey about the changes taking place in post-communist European societies. 6Garaicoa's ruins likewise criticize the fallacies of the Revolution and its promise of improving Cuba n s o c iety , but his artwork also ironically reconstructs his downtrodden city.This seemingly paradox ic al gesture is underscored by a sentiment of ambivalence about the future that has distinguished the work of his contemporaries in Cuba since the early 1990s.S pe cif ica lly in Garaicoa's work, it is driven by the concern that development will not happen unle s s p la ns for social and economic progress are grounded in C uba's material reality. 75 A nthony D .King, Writing the Global City: Globalis ation, Pos tcolonialis m and the Urban (N ew Y ork: Routledge, 2 0 16), 7 5 -79.
7 E nwezor explains how c ontemporary artists working in C uba, while not c onforming to a s pec ific s tyle or c onc eptual practice, s ubvert the rhetoric of the State without c ompletely as similating to c ontemporary "Wes tern" art.See O kwui E nwezor, "Between A pparatus and Subjectivity: C arlos G araicoa's P ost-Utopian A rc hitecture," in Carlos Garaicoa: Overlapping, ed.E nrique J unc osa (D ublin, I reland: I rish M useum of M odern A rt, 2 0 10), 1 6-21.See als o Abelardo Mena Chicuri, Cuba Avant-Garde: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Farber Collection (G aines ville: U niversity of Florida, 2 007), 2 1 -23.T his exhibition s uggested that the juxtapos ition of utopia with dys topian realities and ironic humor often found in c ontemporary C uban art s uggests a potential for new beginnings in the troubled pos t -Communist era.
C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://c ontemporaneity.pitt.eduV ol 5 , N o 1 "A gency in M otion" (2 0 16) | I SSN 2 155-1162 (online) | D O I 1 0.5 195/c ontemp.2 016.1 30 Growing up in Havana during the C old War, Garaicoa saw the stagnancy of modernization in C uba as a unique moment for critical reflection on the m y th o f p r o g res s that undergirds the country's modernist plans for societal reconstruction.Garaicoa explained: Afte r the fall of European socialism, many C uban construction and architectonic proje cts we re halted or abandoned.In Havana, as we ll as in other C uban cities, idyllic and nostalgic ruins from the colonial and first re public periods coexist with the ruin of a frustrated political and social project.Unfinished buildings abound, ne glected and in a sort of momentary oblivion.T he e ncounter with the se buildings produce s a strange sensation; the issue is not the ruin of a luminous past but a present of incapacity.We face a never-consummated architecture, im poverished in its lack of conclusion, whe re ruins are proclaimed before th ey e ve n get to e xist.I call these the Ruins of the Future. 8 In this statement, Garaicoa describes Havana's ruins as the m ate ria l e mb od ime nt o f C uba's inability to fully realize its socialist goals for implementing modernizing processes.He explained that as a child he found that the baroque aura of Old Havana's ruins, the palp ab le and material aesthetic of its decay, emanated a gritty authenticity that disclosed real existing conditions under C ommunism: "It was a very intense part of the city, a very poor area, dangerous in some places, but rich in its architecture and people…We would g o walk ing in the streets competing to discover places none of us had ever noticed b e f or e." 9 G ar aic oa 's depictions of Old Havana's ruins do not aestheticize poverty and human suffering, nor do his images convey an exotic escape from modern life or express nostalgia for the greatness of a past era.In his work, decay disrupts the utopian imaginings of a socie ty b e yo nd the he r e and now; it is material, tangible, and present.Furthermore, the city is a metaphor for society's potential and, by contrast, the ruin is a device Garaicoa uses to represent the passage of modern time as fragmented and non-linear.This depiction of modern temporality through Havana's deteriorating urban landscape undermines the futur e-g az ing o f uto p ian imaginings.
Architectural ruins hold particular significance in urban imaginaries, both histo ric al a nd modern.As a visual form, the ruin expresses the seventeenth-century Baroque f as c ina tion with decay and destruction.Using it to give form to his modernist conception of temporality, Walter Benjamin explained that the ruin in Baroque allegorical expressions co ncr etiz es the fragmentary movement of time and gives a layered picture of history. 10The ruin complicates notions of historical time as linear and evolutionary and for this reason is used in postmodern 8 C arlos G araicoa in "C arlos G araicoa by H olly Block," BOMB 8 2 (Winter 2 0 03), http://bombmagazine.org/article/2523/carlos-garaicoa 9 C arlos G araicoa quoted in M arc Spiegler, "C ity L ights," in Trans (ient) City (Barc elona: Bom P ublishers, 2 0 0 8), 2 04. 10 T he ruin repres ents the allegorical structure, whic h Benjamin c ontrasts against the "s ymb ol," whic h embodies "momentary totality," as it is "s elf-contained, c oncentrated, s teadfastly remaining itself."Benjamin's thes is on Baroque allegory c riticized affirmative tendencies in the tradition of idealist philos ophy and laid the groundwork for what evolved into his modernist s ensibility: the allegorical pers pective, or a way of des c ribing nature through the fragment as opposed to a unified whole.For Benjamin allegory is dialectical, "a s uc cessively progressing, dramatic and mobile, dynamic repres entation of ideas whic h has ac quired the very fluidity of time."See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans .J ohn O s borne (Frankfurt am M ain: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1 963), 1 6 5.For Benjamin's ideas on his torical materialism, s ee also "T heses o n the P hilosophy of H is tory," I lluminations , 2 62-263.A s Benjamin s uggests, "[a] his torical materialist approaches a his torical s ubject only where he enc ounters it as a monad.I n this s tructure he rec ognizes the s ign of a M es sianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary c hance in the fight for the oppres s ed pas t." art to question the teleology of modernism.It figured in Robert Smithson's critique of modernism in the 1960s and seventies when he depicted the architectur e of sub ur b an Ne w Jersey as "ruins in reverse," or monuments to banality that rise, rather tha n f a ll into r uin, thus making visual the condition of entropy that Smithson believed cha ra cte r iz ed m o de rn society. 11In postmodern expressions, the ruin is often viewed as the antithesis of uto p ia ; it emphasizes the inescapability of a present state of dystopia with the s a me inte ns ity tha t utopia reaches toward an unattainably perfect future.While utopia is pristine, intangible, and untouched by time, the ruin is concrete, worldly, and fragmented by time's ravages. 12 the years between 1995 and 2004, Garaicoa documented sites in Havana before a nd after abandoned or neglected architecture was torn down.From these he created a series of untitled diptychs, for which he then pinned red, green, or blue thread o n the p ho tog r ap hs taken after the demolition, outlining the razed buildings on the sites where they once sto o d.For example, Sin título (Hotel San Carlos) (Untitled [San Carlos Hotel]) (1995-2004) includes two black-and-white photographs of the same site: a vacant and deteriorating s e ve n -s to ry building (fig.2).The photograph on the right depicts the timeworn, hollowed -out encasement that was once the hotel.In the adjacent photo of the same site taken af te r the destruction, Garaicoa used red and blue thread to outline the geometric shapes of the slender windows, the superimposed pilasters ornamented with small scrolled c a pita ls, a nd the carvings along some of the windowsills, all of which crumble and seem to f a d e into the surface of the façade.Both photographs were taken from the ground looking up, emphasizing the massiveness and verticality of the looming structure in spite of its s ta te o f decay.In the earlier photograph, the building hovers above this vantage point in the c e nter of the composition and seems to force the smaller adjoining buildings to the e d g e s o f the frame.At the same time Garaicoa's oblique perspective emphasizes the build ing 's v e rtic a l thrust, delineated by the narrow elongated windows and the lines of superimposed pediments that extend the entire length of the building, which nearly reaches the top o f the frame.In contrast to this portrayed grandeur, the building's dark empty windo ws e v id enc e its somber, haunting vacancy.Meanwhile a stray electrical wire extends fr om a s tr ee tlig ht and dramatically intersects the form of the hotel at a right angle, but this thin, tenuo us line appears as useless and insignificant as the abandoned building in this completely uninha bited space.
C uba's vernacular architecture, shown by Garaicoa in a state of disrepute, also expresses creative adaptation and inspires Garaicoa's ironic visions of reconstruc tion. 13T he accumulation of multifarious styles, pulled together from European sources and modified f o r local purposes, is apparent in his diptych Sin título (Hotel San Carlos).Here, Garaicoa animates this dynamic, showing Havana's architecture simultaneously decaying and  the subversive critique of the official culture and politics of C ub a. 16 Ne o -B ar oq ue lite r ar y theory composed in these decades by Cuban writers and scholars José Lezama Lima (1910-76), Alejo C arpentier (1904-80), and Severo Sarduy (1936-93) spearheaded notio ns o f the New World Baroque as evidence of a period of artistic "invigoration" in C uba, and of the origins of peculiarly Latin American and Cuban modernist sensibilities.As scholar of Spa nish literature César Augusto Salgado has demonstrated, the positiv e f o r mulatio n o f the Ne w World Baroque as a regeneration of the European aesthetic model was augmente d b y Ne o -Baroque theorists in considering how this mutation functioned as a form of resistance within the oppressive regimes of colonialism. 17 In the 1950s, Lezama Lima wrote about the broader significance of the New World Baroque and its revival to a pan-Latin American modernism.A c co rd ing to Le z a ma Lim a , baroque expressions created in Latin America represented a form of resistance-a c o unterconquest culture that signaled the onset of a new modern sensibility.I n o the r wo r ds , the New World Baroque was a collection of cultures operating outside of tradition, and which w as concerned with the secular and the present, rather than with the theatrical styles and mystical content that characterize Spanish Baroque art.The New World Baroque a e sthe tics of rupture that Lezama Lima identified could then be used as a springboard for formulating a peculiarly Latin American modernist expression.According to Lezama Lima in his essa y "La curiosidad barroca," the "barroco americano" is underscored by plutonismo, which he defined as an eruption of a deep-seated, subterranean creative impulse within an assimilated European style.The metaphor of a volcanic eruption, evoked to describe the productiv e, a s opposed to the destructive, power of the baroque, connotes a resurgence of hidden grotesque impulses that break apart a unified, closed, balanced aesthetic a nd g iv e wa y to open and inclusive forms. 18ejo C arpentier saw the radical aesthetic qualities of the Cuban b a ro que in te m p o ra l terms: he discovered the modern baroque expression in the rhythms of New World 16 O n this topic , M onika Kaup argues for a trans historical and transnational c onception of the baroque, s ugges ting that "we need to replac e the notion of a s ingle baroque -usually identified with the E uropean baroque of the C ounter-Reformation and abs olutism, mas terfully analyzed in J os é Antonio Maravall's Culture of the Baroque-with that of multiple baroques."See Kaup, "'T he Future is E ntirely Fabulous': T he Baroque G enealogy of L atin A merica's M odernity," in "G lobalism on the M ove," ed.M ars hall Brown, s pec ial is s ue, MLQ 6 8 , no. 2 (J une 2 0 0 7): 2 3 3. 17 C es ar Augusto Salgado, "H ybridity in N ew World Baroque T heory," in "T heorizing the H ybrid," eds .D eborah A .Kapc han and P auline T urner Strong, s pecial issue, The Journal of American Folklore 1 1 2, no. 4 4 5 (Summer, 1 9 99): 3 16-331.Salgado notes that although N ew World baroque "often s tands as a formula for a utopian ethnic integration, the neobaroque theoris t also reminds us that this 'pos itive' mongrelization of E uropean high s tyles res ulted from the painful and inc ongruous overlapping of foreign and native morphologies in c onflict." 18 J os é L ezama L ima, "L a C uriosidad Barroca," e n La Expres ion Americana (Santiago de C hile: T alleres de E ditorial Universitaria, S. A ., 1 9 6 9), 34.L ezama L ima portrayed the Baroque era as the explosive origination of modern L atin A merican c ulture, having s tated that, "…we c an s ay that among us the Baroque was an art of c ounter-conquest."H e des cribed the Baroque expression as "el fuego originario," or the c reative forc e that dismantled decadent E uropean traditions and opened art to c reative input from many different c ultural bac kgrounds.L ezama L ima's essay La curios idad barroca, whic h he pres ented at the N ational I nstitute at H avana in J anuary 1 957 and publis hed in his book of es s ays entitled La expres ión americana that s ame year, des c ribes the impac t of Baroque c ulture on L atin American modernism.H is thes es on N eo-Baroque aesthetics explore how rupture within an as s imilated E uropean artistic language was expres s ed through heteroglossic forms and poverty, means that opened onto new opportunities for artis tic invention.The spontaneous character of Old Havana's vernacular architecture that intrigued C arpentier also captivates Garaicoa.The artist's decision to include in the c o m po sitio ns o f both photographs for Sin título (Hotel San Carlos), the Mudéjar-style façade of the b uild ing next to the hotel points to the conspicuous presence of Moo rish influences in Havana's colonial architecture which contributed to the unwieldy eclecticism o f the C ub a n B a ro que style.C omplete with trefoil window arches and elaborate geometric-patterned carvings, this building, juxtaposed with the less-embellished façade of the hotel, the street lig ht, a nd the layers of sagging structures with arched porticos and awnings, hints at the multifarious ne ss of C uban vernacular architecture that resonates in the diverse architectural s tyle s b r o ug ht together in Havana's contemporary urban landscape.In photographs such as these, Garaicoa reveals Havana's architectural vista as the product of an erratic outgrowth of disparate stylistic fragments that have been modified, adapted, and cobbled together.In his images of architecture, baroque elements, as popular expressions of the Cuban people, r es id e within and beneath the ostentatious, yet crumbling, symbols of the colonial and communist authorities. 21o-Baroque theorists qualified Cuban Baroque forms as the subversive, crea tive means for breaking through the voice of authority to express multiple, marginalized p e r sp ec tive s.They developed a concept of the baroque expression in New World contexts to e nc o mp as s new models of temporality and spatiality in order to represent mode rn experience in frameworks pertinent to everyday, vernacular experience.Severo Sarduy expanded on these notions in the 1970s when he conceived the Neo-Baroque modality as a de-centering force in art and literature that served to critique modernist spatial organizations based on unity a nd centrality. 22In Sarduy's work, the Neo-Baroque expression is a form of postmodern intertextuality that cuts through unitary languages.Inspired by what he id e ntifie d in Ne w World Baroque art as modalities of cultural assimilation, transformation, and demystification, 19 M onika Kaup, "'¡ V aya P apaya!': C uban Baroque and V isual Culture in A lejo C arpentier, Ricardo Porro, and Ramón A lejandro," PMLA 1 2 4 , no. 1 (J an. 2 0 0 9):156-171. 20See A lejo C arpentier, "L a c iudad de las c olumnas," in Tientos y diferencias y otro ens ayos (Barc elona: P laza, [1 9 64] 1 987), 4 0 -48.See als o Kaup, "'¡ V aya P apaya!,'" 1 5 9 .
21 "H owever, he does not view the phenomenon of abandonment of the old and the enthus iasm provoked by the new s oc ialist form as s eparate entities…[H e analyzes] how the arc hitecture of the pas t and that of the pres ent are both s ymbols o f the imagination of other empire -builders at the expense of the C uban people."E nwezor, 1 8 .
22 Severo Sarduy, Barroco (Buenos A ires: Sudamericana, c . 1 9 74).See als o Sarduy "D ispersión (Falsas notas /H omenaje a L ezama L ima)," and "Sobre G óngora: la metáfora al c uadrado," in Es crito s obre un cuerpo:Ens ayos de critica (Buenos A ires: Sudamericana, 1 9 69).Sarduy draws influence from H is panic Baroque literature and neo-Baroque tendencies in L atin A merican pos t-Boom literature.Sarduy's novels are labeled pos tmodernist, while his c ritical writings fit into dis cussions on pos tstructuralism.Sarduy sought to destabilize authoritative meaning in literature.This, in theory, could open a space for writers and readers to dissent from the patriarchal tone that the C uban Revolutio n was taking on in the seventies. 23raicoa taps into the insurgent strategies of the Neo-Baroque, but moves beyond these authors' de-colonizing objectives. 24His ruin-gazing complicates a ste re oty pic ally b a r oq ue fascination with decay and destruction, along with a fragmented version of history and temporality, and with this he confronts Cuba's incapacity to realize its revolutionary goals for social progress by incorporating this history, through images of the r uinatio n o f its ur b a n landscape, into depictions of C uba's current reality.In this way he eclipses the utopian visions of the C uban Revolution by refusing to look directly to the future and leave his country's current state of socio-economic crisis behind.With the image of the ruin, as Walter Benjamin explained, "History merges into the setting…history is scattered like seeds over the ground." 25More precisely, the thread drawings Garaicoa adds overtop the photographs frame a history lying in rubble. 26The building's destruction is transformed in his work -it b e c om es the impetus to rebuild.Still, the architectural plans merely repeat the form of the preexisting structure, and thereby serve as a bleak reminder of this part o f the c ity tha t wa s destroyed.Garaicoa's architectural imaginaries focus on an absence that, for him, provides a possible framework for invention-yet one that must account for previous attempts at modernization and the problematic outcomes. 27raicoa explained that the juxtaposition of ruin/utopia in his art should "be understood not as a dream for the future but rather as an immediate action on reality -a lucid and conscious gesture concerning the collapsed present and the urban and po litical fabric of contemporary society." 28His work shifts between depictions of presence and absence, deca y and regeneration, making the concepts of ruin and utopia a provocative pair: bec aus e the y are intertwined, the images of decay and the architectural plans for the future always beg for more description, complicating notions of real and imaginary, as well as how the city e x ists in the past, present, and future.As a result, ruin/utopia becomes a format for thinking of the city historically, and for inspiring the imagination to explore ways of changing what e xis tsnot for envisioning what lies beyond it.
Garaicoa's imaginary of ruins therefore opens onto a revolutionary way of thinking about the present historically; in other words, of thinking of the present as part of a continuum o f social, political, and cultural change.His historical perspective reflects on C uba's positio n in 23 C arlos G araicoa quoted in I nge Ruigrok "C uba: C ultural P olicy of N on-Western C ountries," T he P ower of C ulture, J une 2 006, http://www.krachtvancultuur.nl/en/policy/cuba.html.
27 A ndreas H uyssen, "A uthentic Ruins: P roducts of M odernity," in Ruins of Modernity, 1 7 -28.H uyssen dis c usses "abs ence" as understood by G iovanni Battista Piranesi, T heodor A dorno, and A lbert Speer.Garaicoa provides this historical lens when he focuses on isolated areas of major cities in the United States that remind him of Havana's decay.In fact, he admits he is inc ap ab le o f seeing the world through any lens other than that of his lived experienc e in Ha v a na . 30Fo r example, a work he created similar to Sin título (Hotel San Carlos), entitled Sin título , L.A .(Untitled, L.A.) from 2004 is a diptych of a condemned office building in Los Angeles pictured before and after its demolition (fig.3).In reference to his earlier photographs of the Cuban hotel, Garaicoa shot the black-andwhite photographs for this diptych from a low vantage point and filled the frame with, f ir s t, the structure, and in the second image, nearly the exact same s ite where it once stood.Also, he once again included signs of waning urban life: vacant lots, debris lik e ly le f t f r om other demolition projects, and street lamps and telephone poles, anchoring electr ic al wir es that indiscriminately traverse the space around the office building.Both photos show the site to be virtually uninhabited, with the exception of a few cars passing at the lower edge of the frame.Similar to Garaicoa's representation of the San Carlos Hotel, the Lyon building shown 29 For more on this topic , s ee Santiago C olás, "T he T hird World in J ames on's Pos tmodernis m or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalis m," in "T hird World and P os t-Colonial I ssues," s pecial issue, Social Text, no.here was ultimately demolished, and the artist resurrects its image through a thread drawing.Furthermore, by exhibiting the two photographs of the L.A. site s id e -by-sid e, he makes it appear as if this building-and all of the stories contained within it -c ontinues to haunt the city block on which it once stood.
Garaicoa does not forsake the disparities of modernity and inequities o f g lo ba liza tion when using the same visual and conceptual strategies to represent Havana and Los Ang ele s in ruin/reconstruction. 31 The ideological underpinnings of the ruinous site in L.A ., ho we ver , are more ambiguous than those in his Havana diptych, and the convolution of history/present/future is more disorienting.The viewer, therefore, must interpret this work in dialogue with the artist's representations of sites in Havana.When comparing the two s e ts , the emptiness of these sites becomes apparent: closely framed and largely decontextualize d from surroundings, and with little indication of human presence, Garaicoa directs our attention to the symbolic relationships among the urban architecture, in spite of their different social, political, and economic histories.Garaicoa employs the same visual vocabulary for both diptychs, presenting both structures in a perpetual cycle of ruin/reimagination, apparently mirroring Cuba's decline in his response to L.A.'s urban la nds ca p e.With this in mind, could these diptychs serve to challenge ideological assumptions about capitalist progress and communist stagnancy that bolstered the U.S. assertion of pow er a nd authority during the Cold War and have continued, until very recently, to help justify the U.S. embargo on C uba? Perhaps Garaicoa's representation of the L.A. ruins therefore suggests an effort to expose and undermine what art historian Okwui Enwezor describes as the "opposed logics of contemporaneity," or in other words, the illusion of capitalism's presumed b e nef its in contrast to the deficiencies of Cuban communism. 32According to these images, the le g a cy of the C old War, underpinned by conflicting myths of progress, afflicts both c o untr ie s-two countries that have only recently begun to normalize diplomatic relations. 33raicoa reflects upon the ruins of his city as a starting point for e nvisio ning s o cie tal renewal.His diptychs are not entirely dy stopian; rather, in his work ruin is set against utopia, presence against absence, in ways that offer a layered conc ep tio n o f his to ry .T he concept of the ruin on which he expounds appropriates specifically baro que no tio ns a b o ut time as a layered process, thus giving history an involuted rather than evolutionary movement.This historical perspective guides viewers to think critically about the eco nomic , 31 T o nuanc e this relationship between the loc al and global, I am extrapolating from E rnesto L aclau, "U nivers alism, P articularism, and the Q uestion of I dentity," October vol.6 1 (Summer 1 9 92): 8 9 .A s Laclau s ays , "[t]he univers al emerges out of the partic ular not as s ome principle underlying and explaining it, but as an inc omplete horizon s uturing a dis located particular identity…the universal is the s ymbol of a mis s ing fullnes s , and the partic ular exists only in the c ontradictory movement of as s erting a differential identity and s imultaneously c anceling it through its s ubsumption into a nondifferential medium." 32E nwezor, 1 6 .
33 See D avid H art, I ns ide/Outs ide: Contemporary Cuban Art (Wins ton-Salem, N C : C harlotte and P hilip H anes A rt G allery, Wake Forest U niversity, 2 003).See als o William M .L eogrande and J ulie M .T homas, "C uba's Q uest for E c onomic I ndependence," Journal of Latin American Studies 3 4 , no. 2 (M ay 2 0 02): 3 25-3 6 3 .C uba's alterity to global power operations is unique, partic ularly within the varied geography of L atin A merican ec onomic activity.O ver the c ourse of the pas t two and a half dec ades, global ec onomic activity has trans formed power s truc tures and polarized natio nal ec onomies within L atin America, c ausing, in rec ent years, for example, São P aulo to emerge as major c enter of global financ e while c ountries such as Bolivia and V enezuela c ontinue to reinforc e national boundaries and identities to protect their ec onomies from liberalization.See also H . M ichael E risman and J ohn M .Kirk, ed., Redefining Cuban Foreign Policy: The I mpact of the "Special Period" (G aines ville: U niversity Press of Florida, 2 006).

Figure 1 C
Figure 1 C arlos G araicoa, El s ueño de algunas ciudades es llegar a convertirs e en otras (The Dream of Some Cities I s to Become Another), 2001.L eft, D uraflex c olor photograph, 8 0 x 6 0 cm.Right, ink and graphite on board, 100 x 7 0 cm.C opyright C arlos G araicoa.
C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://c ontemporaneity.pitt.eduV ol 5 , N o 1 "A gency in M otion" (2 0 16) | I SSN 2 155-1162 (online) | D O I 1 0.5 195/c ontemp.2016.1 30 11 J ennifer L .Roberts , "Smiths on and Stephens in Y uc után," in Mirror-Travels : Robert Smiths on and His tory (N ew H aven & L ondon: Y ale U niversity P ress, 2 004), 1 1 0-112.See als o Robert Smithson, "I nc idents of M irror-Travel in the Y uc után [1 9 69]," i n Robert Smiths on: The Collected Writings , ed.Jac k Flam (Berkeley: U niversity of C alifornia P ress, 1 9 96), 1 19-133. 12Rahul M ehrotra, "Simultaneous M odernity: N egotiations and Res is tances in U rban I ndia," in Ruins of Modernity, ed.J ulia H ell and A ndreas Schönle (D urham, N .C .: D uke U niversity Press, 2 010), 2 4 4 -249.See als o Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 6 6 : "For as an antithes is to the his torical ideal of res toration it is haunted by the idea of c atas trophe."13E nwezor c omments that, "[G araicoa's ] work is inves ted in the investigation of the different arc hitectural dis c ourses of c olonial, modern, and s oc ialist c ity-making practices.T his analysis s ubtends the late baroque buildings and enormous s quares of Spanish c olonial urban planning to the modernist experience of twentieth-century arc hitecture and the c entralized planning that represents the s ocialist inheritance of C uba's pos t-revolutionary period."See E nwezor, 1 8 .regenerating in a relentless cycle of ruin, particularly by confounding the order in whic h the viewer reads the process (did the plans for the building emerge before or after the b lig hte d structure?).By portraying sites in Old Havana in this way, he reflects more b r o ad ly o n the growth of C uban vernacular architecture as the product of simultaneous additive and fragmenting processes that reproduce miscellaneous architectural fragments o f the ur b an setting.14

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ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://c ontemporaneity.pitt.eduV ol 5 , N o 1 "A gency in M otion" (2 0 16) | I SSN 2 155-1162 (online) | D O I 1 0.5 195/c ontemp.2016.1 30improvisational forms like jazz.He believed that jazz gave form to variegated temporalitie s , which undercut the universal concept of time that buttressed power relations b etwe en the Old and New Worlds.As scholar Monica Kaup has discussed, C arpentier focused on a specifically Cuban Baroque that exemplified the dynamic pro ce ss es o b se rve d b y Le z am a Lima in his theorizing of a broader, New World Baroque. 19C arpentier's version of an improvised, adaptive art form created by colonized subjects figures in Ha v ana's unwie ldy urbanscape in his 1964 text "La ciudad de las columnas" ("City of Colum ns "), in whic h he vividly describes an unsystematic, profuse accumulation of eclectic c o lum ns tha t line the streets of the city.20

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ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://c ontemporaneity.pitt.eduV ol 5 , N o 1 "A gency in M otion" (2 0 16) | I SSN 2 155-1162 (online) | D O I 1 0.5 195/c ontemp.2016.1 30 28 G araic oa in "C arlos G araicoa by H olly Block."C ontemporaneity: H istorical P resence in V isual C ulture http://c ontemporaneity.pitt.eduV ol 5 , N o 1 "A gency in M otion" (2 0 16) | I SSN 2 155-1162 (online) | D O I 1 0.5 195/c ontemp.2016.1 30 the postmodern world: Cuba is slowly emerging from what was formerly known as the T hir d World-the underdeveloped regions of the world that today produce political voices and cultural expressions that stand outside of, and contradict, what are often p e rc eive d a s the homogenizing processes of globalization.Literary critic and Marxist political theorist Fr e d ricJameson, in considering the continued discrepancies of unev en d e velo pm ent a r ound the world, proposed that late capitalism could only come into being fully with the disappear anc e of the Third World.Within his theory, however, the Third World also p r ov ide s a his to r ica l lens, or a chance to gain a historical foothold in the drive for attaining global modernizatio n.Without this foothold we lose the capability to understand the conditions that ha v e c r ea ted real economic disparities, and therefore are unable to bring about s us ta ina ble s o c ial nd economic development on a global scale.29