Abstract
More than 25 years after it was unveiled, Eduardo Chillida’sMonument to Tolerancehas been neither built nor abandoned—it is, rather, suspended. From the outset, the project, which consists in digging a vast cubic cave inside the mountain of Tindaya (Fuerteventura, Canary Islands), has faced the opposition of environmental activists, who argue that it is incompatible with the mountain’s status as a protected site. Drawing from anthropological approaches to infrastructure and art, this article unpacks the Monument’s actual existence as an unrealized project that has been partly actualized through anticipatory practices such as exhibitions and economic aspirations. The article contributes to the theorization of suspension by combining a focus on the temporal multiplicity of anticipation with an attention to the materiality of unbuilt entities.
Highlights
More than 25 years after it was unveiled, Eduardo Chillida’s Monument to Tolerance has been neither built nor abandoned—it is, rather, suspended
I focus on how the idea of the autonomy of art was instrumental in extricating the suspended Monument from the controversy that surrounded it and contrast this official account with the insights derived from ‘social aesthetics’—an approach that unpicks “the social and political conditions bearing on aesthetic experiences, objects, and practices” and directs our “attention to the social relations and social dynamics immanent in [artistic] works and practices as aesthetic events” (Born et al 2017: 9)
Unless one already knows, it is not clear whether the Monument has been built or not. It is precisely this combination of asynchronous design and optimism that generates an aesthetics of suspension—a form of presentation that brackets off time and allows both Chillida’s transcendental understanding of the Monument and the state’s projection of formidable futures onto it to remain unchecked
Summary
More than 25 years after it was unveiled, Eduardo Chillida’s Monument to Tolerance has been neither built nor abandoned—it is, rather, suspended. The case became the first in a long series of corruption trials involving the purchase of the mining rights, personal connections between Cabo Verde and the regional government, and PMMT’s own management.6 Later, activists took the government to court on two further accounts: the delimitation of Tindaya’s archeological site, which limited the protection to the mountaintop, thereby allowing the construction of the Monument, and the decision to declare Chillida’s Monument compatible with the conservation of the mountain’s natural environment.
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