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In Lima, Peru, in the midst of Campo de Marte, a public park named after the god of war, a Zen space for reflection is guarded by a cast iron fence. El Ojo que Llora (“The Eye that Cries”…
Cuba may be the only country on the planet that sports statues of John Lennon and Vladimir Lenin. Uruguay may be the first in planning a full-fledged monument to the victims of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In 2016, I visited the Alamo, as part of my first real return to Texas in many years. I had mapped out a road trip with my brother Edmund Roberts. Though Edmund has long known of…
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It was September 20, 2019. “One hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred….” That was how we felt and that was how we counted in the face of the irremediable absences provoked…
It was early October 2013, well before the present wave of toppling statues in the name of decolonization gained momentum in the United States and the United Kingdom…
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Just like in the Argentine pampas or in the plains of Venezuela, the space in the Brazilian sertão, in the country’s Northeast region, has no limits. The hard brown land seems to stretch out in all directions, undulating endlessly, and the feeling it provokes is inevitably one of melancholy
At the beginning of Argentina’s draconian military dictatorship, the local parochial church in my neighborhood in Lomas de Zamora, a suburb nine miles south of Buenos Aires…
The surest engagement with memory of atrocities throughout Latin America and the Caribbean may actually lie in its perpetual irresolution, that only an unfinished memorial process can guarantee the life of memory. For it may be the finished monument that completes memory itself, puts a cap on memory-work and draws a bottom line underneath an era that will forever haunt.
Fragmentos: Espacio de Arte y Memoria is a stunningly beautiful counter-monument dedicated to the memory of the Colombian civil war and the suffering of all its victims. It was created in…
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On June 12, 2014, a ten-foot white fiberglass replica of the Statue of Liberty makes its entry into Libertad, a small town on Colombia’s Atlantic coast, after a journey through half the country moored…
Where do monuments go to die? The question may appear incongruous given the urges that have motivated the making of monuments since the beginnings of human time. Monuments are…
Miami protesters sprayed trails of red paint on two monuments in Bayfront Park after the May 25,, 2020, murder of George Floyd. On the statue of Christopher Columbus, they…
The emotional challenges of Covid-19 have been immense, especially when it comes to memorializing the dead—both our own loved ones and the nameless others lost in an enormous…
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I began writing these lines in Baltimore while visiting with my in-laws. I have always admired their sustained faith in the printing press, as they have multiple newspapers by the dining table…
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In France, working on my doctoral thesis on architecture and the city, I found that my research brought me closer to my homeland after six years of investigation into the Venezuelan context…
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The pedestal, devoid of the monument that once crowned it, tells us of a kingdom that no longer exists; the fallen bust at its base immersed in the sand is of a ruler that no one remembers anymore…
It has been eight years since the death of Hugo Chávez. Given the public knowledge of the former Venezuelan president’s battle with cancer and the speculation stirred up by his absence in the political scene in the months prior to his death, the announcement of his passing…
The year was 1690. In the city of Havana, Cuba, a 20-year old enslaved woman named Juana asked the man who held her in slavery, one Juan Junco González, to grant her…
Long before some monuments to enslavers began to tumble down recently, monuments were being erected in Latin America and the Caribbean not to forget the transatlantic slave…
I have the great fortune to lead a double life as a lecturer in History of Art and Design. For most of the year I teach my subject at Liverpool John Moores University in the United…
