Laura Menéndez | Inhabited Ruins: A Multimedia Look at Havana’s “Art” of Life Among Ruination

The image of Havana stands to the eyes of the traveler as a city “frozen in time.” Mansions of the Belle Epoque collide with Art Deco apartment buildings and baroque, neo baroque, and colonial homes. Beyond its architectural cacophony of styles, a whole city in ruins offers a visual palimpsest of material remains where a singular confluence of history, politics, economics, and environmental conditions merge. Far from a suspended past ready to be fetishized, however, these decadent relics of modernity are the unstable and elusive concrete form of the everyday life of multiple havaneros facing the ongoing imminent threat of collapse. Like ruins per se, their meanings and affordances are constantly mobile, even when living among them becomes a habit: this “accident in slow motion” with which Jack Cocteau defined the ruin acts as the cinematic illusion of preserving a permanent state and an unchangeable time.

This talk will address the political and aesthetical implications of the ruin as inhabited space as entextualized in Cuban writer Antionio José Ponte’s short story “Un arte de hacer ruinas” (2006), Florian Borchmeyer and Matthias Hentschler’s German documentary Havana: The New Art of Making Ruins (2006), and Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa's contemporary photographic work. Through a multimedia reading of these gazes to Havana’s life among homes in ruined sate, Menéndez will propose to superpose the cognitive and affective map that demarcates the picturesque towards the artistic affordances of the “miraculous statics” of crumbling buildings and of people continuing to inhabit them. 

Presented by Laura Menéndez, a PhD candidate in Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford

About the Series

Research Workshop in Honor of John Bender

The Working Group in Literary and Visual Culture ​is made possible by support from an anonymous donor honoring the work of former SHC Director John Bender, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.