Carlos Garaicoa's 'El Palacio de las Tres Historias' at Fondazione Merz

Fondazione Merz in Turin hosts 'El Palacio de las Tres Historias', a solo exhibition by Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa (Havana, 1967; lives in Madrid and Havana), curated by Claudia Gioia. The show explores urban and architectural space through large installations, photographic works, and videos, focusing on Turin as a metaphor for a metamorphic city capable of exemplary reconversions of its industrial decline. Garaicoa employs deconstructed and recomposed citations in large rotating prismatic billboards, shifting urban analysis towards advertising and cinema. The series 'Talking Buildings' accompanies the animation with drawings that convert Enlightenment 'speaking architecture' into a witty relationship between form and word. The exhibition references 20th-century utopias, iconic architectures like the Pantheon and rationalist buildings, and features the installation 'Campus or the Babel of Knowledge', evoking Foucault's panopticon and Dave Eggers' 'The Circle'. The video 'Abismo' offers a poignant reinterpretation of the 20th century's deepest wound: a white screen shows red comic-style hands gesticulating to Olivier Messiaen's 'Quatuor pour la fin du temps', composed in a Nazi concentration camp. The hands are revealed to be Hitler's, stripped of context but still charged with tragic ferocity.