Revolt and Destruction. The Public and Monument Landscape in Latin American Cities

Abstract

Thinking about the violenceViolence and destruction of the cityCities and its historic centers after social uprisings requires placing oneself at the crossroads between the historical construction of these public spacesPublic space and the practice of vita activa (Arendt in La condición humana. Paidós Ibérica, Madrid 2005). In other words, making us think about and discuss the urban condition (Mongin in La Condición Urbana. La ciudad a la hora de la mundialización. Serie Espacios del Saber Nº 58. Editorial Paidós, Buenos Aires 2006). The premise of this article states that the destruction, the rubble, as well as the bodies in motion during revolts are a material expression of the social bond that binds us and unties us from the memory of past time; but this is also, the material expression of struggle, dispute, and will that hides in our present-day citiesCities. It is at this crossroads, between the past and the present, where new paths for urban transformationUrban transformation projects are built. Given that since the revolts the historic center has, for the most part, been undergoing a harsh transformation from its original vocation. The reactualization of its public calling demands to be rethought and redesigned in light of what has happened here. Hence the importance of reading historical and cultural cues, the actions, and expressions of the destruction and de-monumentalization of public spacesPublic space in our Latin American citiesCities. A first working hypothesis developed throughout this chapter puts forward that, even though destruction and debris may dominate in protestProtest, they also merge as expressive signs of subjectivities and desires for vita activa. These deep impressions contained in the revolts lead to rethinking the nature and quality of public spacesPublic space as places of dispute, resistance, and debate. In this same way, a second working hypothesis shows that revolt processes and being present are processes that may reverse agoraphobia (Agoraphobia: a concept that refers to the fear and anxiety of being in open places, the fear of crowds or being alone in public spaces.) and are progressive in an opposing direction to urbicideUrbicide, paving a way for new public spacesPublic space and historical centers where decolonial processes (Decolonial processes: the Latin American epistemic, theoretical and methodological proposals to understand the relations of power and dominance in space-time, as well as to overcome the historical-colonial matrix of power and the liberation of subaltern subjects from that matrix.) and the celebration of the urban condition may prevail. In terms of the ethnographic work, the protestsProtest that took place in the historic centers of Latin American citiesCities were analyzed: acts of demonumentalization; performances and barricades; and finally, the fate of the insurgent monumentsMonuments. The chapter has two central conclusions. Firstly, the common space of the different. After the revolt and the landscapes of disorder that are left behind, all that remains is to protect and secure those common spaces, spaces of the vita activa of “us” and of the “others”, from identification principles and also distinction and difference principles. Because public spacePublic space is not necessarily the place where the inhabitants of a cityCities exercise their equality, but perhaps where they exercise their enormous differences. Secondly, public squares that safeguard the urban condition. Overwhelmed by urban aestheticsAesthetics, the cityCities becomes a blackboard whose complex text will have to be unraveled and questioned in order for it to be interpreted and (re)thought. The form, shattered, twisted, fragile and displaced from its original site, then appears as a new way of structuring the social and its intelligibility within the framework of overwhelmed democraciesDemocracy. Transforming the minefields of the “patrimonial heritageHeritage” in our citiesCities requires being open to the possibilities of intercultural coexistence that, instead of neutralizing our affective or moral disagreements and our ontological, ideological, and epistemological conflicts, allows us to explore everything that is in dispute or friction. In short, in the words of the anthropologist Claudia (Briones in Antropología Contemporánea. Intersecciones, encuentros y reflexiones desde el Sur Sur. Ed. Universidad Católica de Temuco, Temuco, pp 83–103 2020), lose the fear of living in friction to find ways of being together while being different.