Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023.
BA Fine Arts.
This thesis explores the intersections of tourism, memory and visual culture through a decolonial lens, using personal photographs and lived experience as the primary site of inquiry. Centered on the context of Cuba, the work interrogates the postcard as both a material object and a colonial modern artifact, tracing how the tourist, particularly the white, gaze commodifies La Habana's histories, spaces and bodies. The project unfolds through the author’s own diasporic return to Cuba, structured around a series of photographs taken at the age of eight. These images, constituent of a family archive, anchor the narrative and serve as points of entry into the layered relationships between personal memory and colonial visual regimes. Throughout the book, the research brings forth the archival materials that inform the knowledge the author stands upon. The materials that shape memory, and memory itself as knowledge. Drawing on the flat, affective style of Annie Ernaux’s écriture plate, the thesis adopts a third person narrative voice to perform close readings of these childhood images, allowing the memory of a child to guide the inquiry. Rather than reproduce the vistas of La Habana Vieja, which Rolando Vázquez critiques as visual regimes that sustain the colonial difference, the work turns inward, toward domestic interiors and overlooked everyday scenes as potential sites of resistance. Ultimately, the thesis proposes a situated decolonial aesthetic practice grounded in embodied memory, affective inheritance and visual testimony.
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