Create in Cuba: Industrial Design Exposition

HAVANA TIMES, Dec. 4.- An industrial design exposition with the works of 15 Cuban designers uses the most unusual materials to create lamps, tables, chairs, and other artifacts of interior decoration. The “Create in Cuba” show is now open to the public at the Villena Art Gallery in the Plaza de Armas of Old Havana through the end of December.

The show includes the finalist entries of a contest sponsored by the internationally recognized design magazine Design Boom(www.designboom.com) and three Cuban cultural institutions dedicated to promoting design and the plastic arts: the Caguayo Foundation, The Visual Arts Development Center and DEKUBA Design.

Using all types of materials and recyclables to create new useable objects is nothing foreign to the Cuban population, which lived a severe economic crisis in the nineties. And while this show seeks an esthetic superior to those that motivated the Cuban inventiveness of the 90s, there is still present a lot of the survival and ingenuity developed by the island’s residents to deal with shortages.

Glass bottles, pieces of wire, water pipes, buckets, bicycle parts, umbrella skeletons and plastic bottle tops are some of the materials used by the creators of the 15 pieces on display.

A total of 40 works were presented to the jury and 15 were selected as the finalists. The competition was not conceived to make awards, but instead only to select the finalists for the showing.

The evaluation of the works was in the hands of a multi-national jury made up by famous designers on the world scene: Stephen Bayley (Great Britain), Italian Birgit Lohmann, editor of DesignBoom and Cubans Gonzalo Cordoba, National Design Award 2003, and Pedro Contreras, Luis Ramirez Jimenez and Miguel Garces Noguera.