Los Carpinteros Handwork

The Havana-based duo of Marco Antonio Castillo Valdés (born 1971) and Dagoberto Rodríguez Sánchez (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..

The Cuban duo Los Carpinteros renounces individual authorship to sabotage the disciplines of design and architecture from within. This limited edition of the first comprehensive Los Carpinteros monograph—itself voted one of “Austria's Most Beautiful Books” for 2010—comes with a pair of flip flops designed by the artists. These flip flops are imprinted with a street map of Old Havana and are meant for the owner to wear while soaking up the city’s atmosphere. As the artists put it: “We wanted people who read our book to have not just the intellectual experience of what we have tried to achieve in our work—i.e. communicating the unique experience of the Contemporary Cuban Artist—but also the visceral experience of ‘feeling’ the streets of our home and by doing so thinking about what it is and was to be Cuban during the years of our artistic journey.”