Tanja Petrović

During my secondment in Havana, Cuba, I conduct a project which is closely related to my research interest in reconfiguration of urban public spaces and the role memory plays in this process (Petrović 2015, 2016). Starting from the assumption that urban landscape is an embodiment and result of an interaction, often a conflicting one, between memory and power, I explore public spaces in Havana in the moment when it is widely assumed that the Cuban society is undergoing profound changes. I am interested in the ways these changes reflect in the urban landscape and public spaces, and in understanding the logic behind stratification and division of Havana’s urban spaces. I explore the interplay between different heritages and ideologies that define practices of collective remembering and commemoration in the urban space. I pay particular attention to multiple temporalities inhabiting public spaces – to places where different ideologies, heritages, imaginations and ideas of society and sociality still coexist.