Pain is Universal but so is Hope (White)

About the Photographer

Castillo, Liset

Cuban, b. 1974

Through intricate sand castles, Liset Castillo builds a utopian microcosm where different world civilizations converge and ultimately collapse. Playing with architectural monuments such as the Taj Mahal, the Colosseum, the Vatican, the Great Wall of China, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York, Rio’s monumental Christ the Redeemer, and the Empire State Building, her timeless city is both grand and unrealizable. Using projections, drawings, her hands, and a trowel, among other tools, Castillo builds, photographs, destroys, and re-photographs sand sculptures in her backyard Brooklyn studio. The resulting images convey dilapidated cities surrounded by rubble and craggy terrain, implying that history inevitably collapses in on itself. Castillo is a graduate of the Institute Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba (1998). She lives and works in Amsterdam and Brooklyn.