"CIUDAD ARMERO": CARLOS GARAICOA ON THE COLOMBIAN TOWN THAT DISAPPEARED IN 1985

Last September, the gallery Mor Charpentier in Bogotá opened Ciudad Armero, the solo exhibition of Carlos Garaicoa (Havana, Cuba, 1967), a show built up around a city that no longer exists.

The practice of Garaicoa has long been concerned with architecture and the urban space as forms through which memory, history, and social life are organized. Armero disappeared in November 1985 following the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz, leaving behind not only the memory of a catastrophe but also the question of how to think about a place whose material presence has been erased. Rather than approaching Armero as an event to be reconstructed, Garaicoa considers it as an absence that continues to operate through images, bodies, fragments, and memory.

Carlos Garaicoa currently lives and works between Havana and Madrid. He studied painting at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana (1989–1994), following earlier studies in thermodynamics. His practice establishes a sustained dialogue between art and urban space, through which he examines the social and political structures of cities as manifested in architecture. Working with a multidisciplinary approach, Garaicoa investigates architecture, urbanism, and history as cultural and ideological constructs. Together with his wife, he founded the artist-in-residence project Artista x Artista in Havana.