Havana: Memoirs of Material Culture

Abstract

This article engages the ‘fashioning’ of cultural memory. It is a travelogue through the city of Havana, and looks in particular at the curatorial design of its museums. In this Cuban city where time is frozen in architecture, and peels off buildings, where all that is solid rots and melts in the air, memory is ‘suited’ to ruinous fabrics. In the Museum of the Revolution, torn shirts and worn-out skirts speak of the country’s struggle. A model modernist apartment makes room for novel times. Similarly, the Museum of Decorative Arts displays objects of material culture to give space to a history that includes private life. In its (with) drawing room, historic conjunctions are tailored to the making of female space. In Havana, memory is not erected as monument but fashioned as material document. In a city of fantastic 20th-century architecture, and moving urban culture, history is written as interior design.