Los Carpinteros
La Habana, Cuba
The Cuban collective, formed by Marco Castillo (1971) and Dagoberto Rodriguez (1969), develops an installation language that assigns a hybrid condition to the nature of their work. The group works, thus, through distortions, deviations, or minimal interventions of objects, adding senses that displace their use or location and, therefore, tend to trigger a fictional imagery: a small plane attacked by arrows, an explosion stopped in space, monumentally-scaled LEGO sculptures, a portable city made of tents. All of their pieces are based on evocation and have the capacity to introduce a quota of strangeness into the ordinary, in order to disrupt the automatisms of the gaze, to embed the extraordinary in the heart of the mundane.
The pathways that led to Los Carpinteros' estrangement are shaped by a collaborative work dynamic that they have been developing for decades. A mixture of architectural imagination with the art of sculpture, design and drawing. Their works arise from a raw idea, whose morphology is then projected, drawn, and planned, before finding its place: first in the group's workshop, located in Los Angeles where they work until today, and then in any of the numerous galleries around the world where their work has been deployed.
The power of their work lies in simultaneously emphasizing very local references, linked to the Cuban experience around the precariousness of post-revolutionary life on the island and, at the same time, broadening the field of their interlocutors, in such a way that any observer can identify characteristics of contemporary life in their works: the nomadic character of populations in large, urban centers; the tensions between public discourse and private life; the conflicting world of consumer societies, their control, and their disciplining. And, above all, the great link between the staged scenes and their viewers is the sense of humor that tinges them: a subtle wit that allows us to see the shipwreck of utopias in a fatally ironic way and the hidden features of the processes of modernization that people surrender to, as though under the rule of forces that transcend them.
