Rafael Rodriguez Gárciga
Bio: Rafael Rodríguez Gárciga (b. Cuba) is a Cuban artist working between New York City and Miami. His practice explores what he calls system-change art, in which the work is the very enactment of the emergence of new systems.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement:
THE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK GUIDING THIS PROJECT:
Creativity here is used in its ontological sense as developed by Alfred North Whitehead—the "universal of universals" that characterizes the ultimate principle of novelty and becoming. But I also draw on its etymology: a certain conception of force, of potentiality and possibility, through which the connection to the exhausted, as thought by Deleuze, is established. This tension opens onto broader questions of the possible as treated in Heidegger, Derrida, Agamben, and others, pointing to the need—and indeed the possibility—of new modes of thought, praxis, and imaginaries.
THIS EXPLORATION UNFOLDS THROUGH THREE REGISTERS:
One: Our current techno-scientific condition in its manifestation as planetary computation and how this calls for a New Beginning and a New Heading.
Two: Art both as a material exemplification of this exhaustion of creativity and a point of entry from which to reconfigure the preconditioned situation, despite—or perhaps because of—its ontological co-implication with techno-science.
Three: The limits Western thought encounters when it meets indigenous modes of knowing and being that it cannot interpret or explain with its conceptual reserves, and is thus forced to "invent" new resources, concepts, and ontologies. This is exemplified in anthropology, specifically in its contact with the Yoruba and diasporic Ifá divination, oratory, and practice. But more broadly, this speaks to the need for a level of worlding that goes beyond any simple comparative philosophy that assumes two previously full entities or a simple opposition of Western/non-Western or simple postcolonial impulse.
Rafael Rodriguez Gárciga
Art as an Exemplification of the Exhaustion of Creativity and Its Complication with Technoscience, 2026
Mixed-reality installation with headset-based digital environment and single-channel live projection
Courtesy of the artist
First Year Exhibition
Rafael Rodriguez
Interfacing Actuality, 2024–2025
3D printed thermoplastic polyurethane, aluminum wire, neodymium magnet, and virtual reality experience using Meta Quest VR headset
Courtesy of the artist