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Los Carpinteros
Comodato, 2018

Still: Courtesy the artists | KOW, Berlin

Los Carpinteros

Collection

Single-channel video installation, color, sound
22 min 36 sec

Los Carpinteros are a Cuban artist collective formed in Havana in 1992. Their work explores the social and political consequences of the Cuban revolution, often through investigations of architecture, sculpture, drawing, and design. Their name (The Carpenters) suggests their preference for modes of practice related to traditional forms of craftsmanship, not only in terms of skill and method, but also the forms of anonymous or collaborative production associated with forms of making which occur outside the mainstream contemporary art market. In 2013 they began working with video, exhibiting their first film, Conga Irreversible, as part of their exhibition Irreversible at Sean Kelley gallery in New York.

Comodato is a film made in 2018, set in an array of domestic interiors. By stitching together footage of rooms from different houses it takes viewers on a journey through what appears to be a single building, moving seamlessly through spaces conveying varied socio-economic status. The discrepancy in wealth becomes more and more noticeable as the film progresses, thereby refuting the myth of Cuban society as one without class distinction. Comodato was originally exhibited alongside the collective’s film, Rectràctil (2018), and an earlier work, Pellejo (2013), both are also part of TBA21 Collection, which – in “a similar stretch of physically impossible filmic continuity” – examines the passing of time through its dual depiction of sex between a single couple, once as young adults and again years later in their old age.[1] In 2019, Comodato and Rectràctil were re-exhibited alongside a series of LED portraits of aged revolutionary figures in Los Carpinteros’ exhibition, Cuba Va! at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC. Responding to the abundance of monuments which populate that city, there the works were reconceived by the group as individual monuments to “inequality,” to “a loss of freedom of expression,” and to “anti-heroes.”[2]
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[1] Alexander Koch, “El Otro, El Mismo / The Other, The Same.” Los Carpinteros exhibition at KOW Gallery, Berlin, 2018. [Press Release] Available at https://www.kow-berlin.com/site/assets/files/3945/los_carpinteros_2018_kow.pdf
[2] Los Carpinteros in conversation with Vesela Sretonović. 11 December 2019. Available at http://blog.phillipscollection.org/2019/12/11/conversation-los-carpinteros-part-ii/

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