The wrinkles of the city: Havana Cuba

Since 2004, the French artist JR has traveled the world flyposting colossal black and white portraits of ordinary citizens on the walls of city buildings. His most recent project, The Wrinkles of the City, where he photographed the city̕̕s oldest inhabitants, imagining their wrinkles as metaphors of urban texture and history. In May 2012, JR collaborates with American artist José Parlá on the latest iteration of The Wrinkles of the City: a huge mural installation in Havana, undertaken for the Havana Biennale, for which JR and Parlá photographed and recorded 25 senior citizens who had lived through the Cuban revolution, creating portraits which Parlá, who is of Cuban descent, interlaced with palimpsestic calligraphic writings and paintings. Parlá's markings echo the distressed surfaces of the walls he inscribes, and offer commentary on the lives of Cuba's elders; together, JR and Parlá's murals marvelously animate a city whose walls are otherwise adorned only by images of its leaders. This volume features the portraits, short biographies of their subjects and photographs of their mural collaborations painted around Havana.