Founded in San José in 1994, the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo built its identity around the relationship—and tensions—between two disciplines. Daniel Soto Morúa’s study traces the institution’s development and curatorial practices from 1994 to 2019, showing both the regional influence of its model and its structural vulnerabilities.
A preserved garment reveals materials, techniques and traces of use, but it cannot tell us how an entire society dressed. Photographs, records and conservation practices place it in context—and help show which voices a collection leaves out.
Personal pages, directories, webmail, and online communities shaped a web very different from today’s. Archived captures reveal what those services offered and how they invited people to participate—provided we distinguish the date a page was preserved from the history of the service itself.
Furniture, photographs and inventories offer different clues to domestic life. Read alongside archival records and the history of a collection, they help researchers study an interior without mistaking a plausible interpretation for a complete reconstruction.
Retro design does not reproduce an era intact: it selects forms, references, and memories, then adapts them to present-day uses. Research on retro consumption also shows that nostalgia is only one of several possible motives.
On the Río de la Plata frontier, a pulpería could bring together the sale of provisions and social interaction. Material culture offers a way to study these establishments without mistaking evidence from one locality for a region-wide experience.
Furniture, photographs and inventories can help explain how a home was organized, but no object tells its whole story on its own. Collections at Madrid’s National Museum of Anthropology and Colombia’s National Museum show why sources must be read together—and why historical evidence should be distinguished from museum display.
Inventories, wills and dowry records reveal how furniture in colonial Córdoba shaped visits, marked differences in wealth and helped organize domestic spaces structured by gender hierarchies.
Electric refrigerators and gas stoves did not enter every Argentine home at once. From the 1920s to the 1970s, infrastructure, prices, credit, local production and custom shaped access to these appliances, while radio and cars helped reorganize domestic work and leisure.
The iPod was not the first portable digital music player. Its influence came from pairing a distinctive device with iTunes and an easy-to-browse music library, making the organization of songs central to listening on the move.
Personal testimony can reveal everyday experiences missing from official records, but no single voice speaks for an entire neighbourhood. Drawing on Mauricio Archila Neira and Pedro Molano, this feature explores how to compare memories with documents and material traces, notice who is left out of interviews, and share reconstructed histories with the communities they concern.
A CER.es catalogue record identifies a picture-card album titled *Historia del Circo*. The record helps identify an item, but by itself it cannot describe every variant or establish a value.
