Carlos Garaicoa transforms Rocca Maggiore in Assisi into political reflection space

Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa (Havana, 1967) has created a site-specific installation at the Rocca Maggiore, the medieval fortress built by Cardinal Albornoz in Assisi. The exhibition transforms the fortress's rooms into spaces for historical and political reflection. The first room features parabolic mirrors and rearview mirrors suspended on wrought iron rods, fragmenting visitors' reflections and evoking urban traffic with inscribed phrases. The second installation, "Oratorio," uses colored curtains and monastic melodies by Puebla and Marty to create a dual space between earth and sky, suggesting the adjacency of prayer to spatial memory. The show concludes with two contrasting city models: "No Way Out" (2002), a rigid cluster of mirrored buildings with artificial light, placed on the ground to emphasize its utopian fragility, and "Ahora juguemos a desaparecer I" (2002), a formless collection of wax monuments and cathedral stumps that burn continuously, symbolizing the disintegration of Western architecture under time's dominion.