Dwell Time

Dwell Time is the first memoir from Rosa Lowinger, a working art conservator who is among the few prominent Latina professionals in art and architectural conservation. It traces the story of a Cuban Jewish family marked by generations of trauma. The title refers to the span of time that elapses before a process completes, whether that is migrants held at a border, a visitor's gaze on a web page, the wait in an airport terminal, or the slow reaction between a chemical and an artwork's surface.

Lowinger grew up in Miami in a household where the losses of the Cuban revolution, along with the family members destroyed in the Holocaust, shaped nearly every aspect of daily life. She left home to get away from what she describes as the suffocating nostalgia of exile. Discovering the specialized craft of conservation led her to work in Tel Aviv, Philadelphia, Rome, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Charleston, Marfa, South Dakota and Port-au-Prince. Later she returned to Havana for professional reasons, and there she began a personal process of family repair that starts, as conservation does, by working out where the damage came from.

The book borrows its structure from Primo Levi's The Periodic Table. Each chapter is named for a material Lowinger works with in her private practice: marble, limestone, bronze, ceramics, concrete, silver, wood, mosaic, paint, aluminum, terrazzo, steel, glass and plastics. Her accounts of conservation work run alongside the story of her family, and the two strands show how mending an object and mending a relationship can resemble each other.

Alongside her professional struggles and strained relationships, Lowinger works to make sense of her identity as Cuban, Jewish, American and Latinx. Readers interested in immigrant family history, art restoration or memoirs about inherited trauma will find it a close, reflective account of how repair is possible.