Dimensões do design de móveis de Clara Porset na Cuba pós-revolucionária

Abstract

Clara Porset (1895-1981) was a cuban furniture designer whose academic background in design, arts and architecture took place in Europe and the United States. Her practice, however, occurred mostly in Mexico, where she spent most of her life, and Cuba, including furniture projects for schools and other institutions in post-revolutionary Cuba, on request of Che Guevara, then Minister of Industry. In order to investigate her furniture production during this period, some dimensions must be considered: her professional partnership with her husband, muralist painter with indigenous origin Xavier Guerrero; the mobilization of a narrative about latin-american industrial design based on the couple's experiences on travels around the interior of Mexico, in addition to their relationship with avant-garde intellectuals, designers and artists in 1930s and 1940s; the reinterpretation of memories around this period from political issues and the context of 1960s; and issues related to modernism in the cuban context. This paper is part of an ongoing investigation about Clara Porset’s furniture design made for the cuban revolutionary government. In this scenario, considering industrial design production in latin-american territory, more specifically in socialist Cuba, there is a need to call upon to parameters other than just those defined by the historiography or the sociology of european art, to be defined in subsequent studies.