Curated
by Petra Watson.
This travelling
exhibition from the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography/National
Gallery of Canada presents colour photographs by Vancouver
artist Arni Haraldsson and Cuban artist Manuel Piña.
The work by these artists is presented as two separate but
interrelated series of photographs that engage public space,
utopias, history and memory. Arni Haraldsson’s focus
is Paris, and Manuel Piña’s, Havana.
These photographs do not set out to directly document a sense
of place but rather to uncover within the urban landscape
material traces and historical dialogues. The urban environments
portrayed in these large colour photographs serve as map and
metaphor for revolutionary and utopian ideals (the architecture
of Le Corbusier and the 1958 Cuban Revolution), and these
conditions are seen to take place as much within the shattering
of identities as in the construction of them.
Arni Haraldsson photographed the coordinates of Le Corbusier’s
Plan Voisin that required the clearing of a 600-acre, L-shaped
site in the centre of the city. Le Corbusier’s architectural
and urban planning project of 1925 proposed to transform,
as the architect described it, “the flattened-out and
jumbled centre of Paris” into a vertical city of cruciform
towers “bathed in light and air.” In 1999, Haraldsson
set up his camera on the coordinates of the Plan, as described
by Le Corbusier, titling the images with the architect’s
own description of the sites, such as: Commercial City, North-South
Coordinates: from “Gare de l’Est …” and
Residential City, East-West Coordinates: “to the circus
on the Champs Elysees …” . In place of the labyrinthine
passage-ways of old Paris, the Plan Voisin outlined an ordered,
rationalized, commercial and residential city. Four accompanying
photographs document architecture that parallels the monumentality
of Le Corbusier’s vision: office towers in the corporate
sector of La Défence, located on the outskirts of Paris,
and residential, low-cost housing in Marne-la-Vallée,
in the eastern sector.The Voisin Plan similarly endorsed a
grand, utopic vision of social change latent in the technological
and revolutionary ideals of modernism.
The series of eleven photographs titled On Monuments
continues Manuel Piña’s earlier exploration of
the hidden mechanisms behind utopian movements. Piña’s
photographs document empty squares on Avenida de los Presidentes
and other streets in Havana. At the end of Spanish colonization
and during the American domination of Cuba’s economic
and political relations, the construction of monuments established
visual, ideological foundations for a new urban economy and
society. The ‘monuments’ of the series title (or
in some cases only proposed commemorative sites) were statues
depicting pre-Revolutionary presidents and generals, known
for their corruption and pro-American allegiances. The monuments
were destroyed during the 1959 Cuban Revolution, leaving only
obscure markings, ‘footprints’ in cement, and empty
plinths. "Portraits of sites", he calls these deserted
spaces which present two histories that coexist in an uneasy
tension.
The layering of space and time in the photographs suggest
a process whereby a historical reality is produced, maintained,
and altered. As Piña states, “the history of Cuba
is the manipulation of evidence and documents.” Therefore
these desolate portraits of sites can be defined as images
which hold in balance both the raw materials of history and
an urban landscape of displaced memory.
