On How My Brazilian Library Feeds from Fragments of a Concrete Reality
An ominous note is even more clearly sounded in a 2008 sculpture, On How My Brazilian Library Feeds from Fragments of a Concrete Reality. Books and journals about Brazilian architecture and culture are interspersed with polished concrete blocks in stacks like tower blocks. Walk around to the rear of the stacks, look closely and you see that the blocks are studded with embedded bullets: a subtle but very effective image. Books, blocks and bullets are presented as a continuum. Perhaps Garaicoa is alluding to the way utopian schemes grounded in theory tend to translate into dystopian realities. The implication is there but so too is a level of ambiguity that allows the sculpture some breathing space, letting us consider it as an object in itself, open to various interpretations, rather than as an illustration of an idea.
Garaicoa is exceptionally good and inventive at constructing elaborate architectural models from unconventional materials, including wax, crystal, cardboard, and he seems to have a particular liking for books. My personal Library Grows up Together with My Political Principles is a city built from books, architectural books of course, but really well done in a way that would appeal to any child.