Los Carpinteros. Handwork. Constructing the world

The Havana-based duo of Marco Antonio Castillo Valdes (born 1971) and Dagoberto Rodriguez Sanchez (born 1969) are two of the most exciting artists in Cuba today. Formed in 1991, and working since 1994 under the moniker of Los Carpinteros, which they adopted as a nod to traditional craftsmen’s guilds, the team renounces individual authorship to sabotage the disciplines of design and architecture from within. Their elegant and mordantly humorous sculptures, which attain high standards of craftsmanship assert a deadpan non-functionality: a crazily undulating wooden bookshelf, a filing cabinet with an impossibly deep drawer, or stereo speaker cones transformed into billboard hoardings. By putting functional and serious disciplines to nonfunctional and humorous ends, Los Carpinteros offer a preposterized world in which objects seem to have swapped bodies with other objects. For the first time, that world is presented in depth, in this excellent monograph..