2026
Injerto
VENUE
Centro Hispanoamericano de Cultura
CITY
Havana, Cuba
CURATOR
Arianna Covas
INSTALLATION VIEWS
Injerto (Graft) emerges from fracture. Architectural fragments recovered from demolished buildings are repurposed through artistic practice, giving shape to a distinctive sculptural language. For Alberto Domínguez, ruins represent a resource of remarkable potential, both physical and symbolic. Their mere presence announces collapse. They embody fracture, the downfall of a system, its point of no return. They bear witness to loss and, at the same time, to the rebirth of form.
Through an exercise in fictitious archaeology, the artist opens up a new cycle for these remnants of the past. He designs abstract volumes that reconstruct absences: extending broken lines, repeating silhouettes, and synthesizing morphologies. This is a formal process that looks to the vestige and seeks to compose a syntax in close harmony with it. Inspired by contemporary restoration techniques, he brings the recovered fragments into dialogue with modern materials, in this case, metal. The resulting forms organically integrate reality and invention, while simultaneously emphasizing their contrasts.
Rather than stemming from a nostalgic desire to reactivate memories and unfinished narratives, the act of grafting is conceived here as a gesture of reconfiguration, through which what remains acquires aesthetic autonomy. Material traces, originating from structures emptied of meaning, become part of a new logic. The presumed finality of the ruin gives way to the new context that embraces it, shifting its function toward other relationships and possibilities through the sculptural object.
ARIANNA COVAS
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2024
Funcionalmente disfuncional
VENUE
Galiano Gallery
CITY
Havana, Cuba
CURATOR
Arianna Covas
INSTALLATION VIEWS
Under what motivations is a system designed that, in advance, denies itself? How is it possible that, given its dysfunctionality, it works? To what extent does its absurdity generate a new, and different, structure of meaning?
The discursive platform of Funcionalmente disfuncional (Functionally dysfunctional) is built around such questions. With this project, Alberto Domínguez (Matanzas, 1989) essentially questions the vulnerability of any system to the variation of any of its parts, as well as its propensity to generate, thereby, a new reality. Without delving deeply into the ins and outs of systems theory, these could be understood as sets of elements -material and/or conceptual- interrelated and aimed at a goal. In this sense, only the synergy of the components would guarantee the functionality of the whole. An alteration in any of its aspects would put organized reality in crisis, bringing with it not only a state of entropy, but also transformation.
This phenomenon, which shows how susceptible a structure is to contradicting itself, subverting its nature and initial purpose with the mere modification of some of its parts, becomes the leitmotiv of the proposal. The artist is interested in reflecting on this from the interpretation of the furniture system from the realm of art.
Inspired by the processes of conceptualization and materialization inherent to the production of furniture, Domínguez creates his object works; sort of prototypes that suggest an almost impossible or difficult usefulness. Although the sculptures are conceived taking the furniture as a reference, their morphological properties -expressed in incoherent materialities, textures and compositions- disrupt core variables of said utilitarian object, such as ergonomics, stability, resistance and comfort.
This operation, consisting of resorting to the discipline of design, but perverting in its fundamental purpose -use value-, results in rather anarchic, ambiguous objects, located in a border space between art and design. The dysfunctionality that they appear contradicts their nature as furniture. However, it functions as an active variable in symbolic production -more typical of artistic creation than of applied creation-, which motivates many metaphorical relationships.
Faced with this transvestism of the utilitarian object into an artistic object, or vice versa, the reaction as a receiver -a kind of frustated user- is, to say the least, disturbing. The creator´s proposals dehumanize the furniture, distancing it from its main task: responding to a human need. This alienation, easily extrapolated to different areas of contemporary life, physically and cognitively dislodges the subject, who, ultimately, ends up suffering from the dysfunctionality of the systems.
ARIANNA COVAS
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© Alberto Domínguez Castillo
All images © the artist