Castle of Innocence

Castle of Innocence examines the power dynamics present in the construction of historical narratives and collective memory through the imaginative space of the Children's Museum of Costa Rica.

“Castle of Innocence” examines the Children’s Museum of Costa Rica as a contested site of memory, power, and identity. Erected on the foundations of the country’s former central prison—a place of confinement, violence, and state control—the building now operates as an imaginative educational space, concealing its traumatic past beneath layers of playful artifice. The project critically engages with this layered history, interrogating how institutions construct and manipulate collective memory through architecture, display, and narrative.

Within the staged environments of the museum, fact and fiction collide, revealing the mechanisms through which dominant knowledge systems are produced and disseminated. By integrating child-like interventions into archival photographs from the prison era and juxtaposing these with present-day documentation of the museum’s objects and constructed spaces, the work challenges photography’s claim to truth, underscoring its potential to reinforce or subvert power.

Set entirely in San José, Costa Rica, the project is grounded in the history of the Penitenciaría Central and its 1994 conversion into the Museo de los Niños. It engages with global debates on how spaces of trauma are sanitized and repurposed, and how national identity is staged for public consumption.

Rejecting the dominant linear ways in which histories are told, the project reveals echoes and continuities between the two spaces and their functions for individuals.Through this comparison, it interrogates the fragile boundaries between protection and control, memory and erasure, education and indoctrination.