VISUAL CULTURE
Olga Rodriguez Falcon: Projects
Recent Conferences
Annual conference of the Cuban Research Forum, University of Havana, Cuba, 3 July 2007
8th Conference of the Utopian Studies Society, University of Plymouth, 12 July 2007
Recent Papers
‘Utopian Anachronisms and Contemporary Nostalgia for the Lost City: Havana in Cinema and Photography’
Abstract:
Utopia, dystopia and heterotopia are the three most common terms applied to Havana during the ten years of the ‘Special Period’, that is, the decade that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the island suffered one of its most acute economic crises. Taking into account that Cuba was then considered as a social experiment still in progress within the western hemisphere, its appeal after the events of 1989 in Europe would be mainly related to this perception of the island as a relevant political rarity on its way to extinction.
In this paper I discussed the idea of the anachronistic image and its utopian character in Havana’s contemporary photographic and cinematographic representations. Using Wim Wenders’ music documentary Buena Vista Social Club (1999) as exemplary of this trend, I discussed how Havana appears to the western spectator as a city embodying the ‘ideal commonwealths’, as defined by Lewis Mumford in his 1923 text. I argued that it was not just the fact that Cuba was a self-defined socialist country that created this discourse on the utopian around its social and cultural particularities. It was also the result of Havana’s visual otherness at a moment when modern architecture and western universalism were still being contested. Finally, I explained how this visual otherness is the product of the different historical development experienced by the city after the 1959 revolution, but also a consequence of social and cultural contingencies that can be traced further back in the city’s history.