Current Issue
Monuments and Counter-Monuments
Spring/Summer 2021 | Volume XX, Number 3
Table of Contents
Editor’s Letter →
by June Carolyn Erlick
Counter-Monuments
Evolving Memory
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.
A Space of Art and Memory
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…
Mockuments
English + Español
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…
Monument Cemetery
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…
Joiri Minaya’s Cloaking of the Statue of Christopher Columbus
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…
Ephemeral Memorials
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…
Focus on Venezuela
The Statues of the Cult
English + Español
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…
The Eyes of Chávez
English + Español
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…
The Political Life of Statues
English + Español
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…
The Statues of Hugo Chávez
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…
El Barroso
English + Español
In Cabimas, my hometown and Venezuela’s main oil port, there’s a monument to Barroso II, an oil well that exploded in 1922, hurling a million barrels of oil into the air until it was…
Focus on Afro-Descendants
Transnational Counter-monuments
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…
Adventures in Public Sculpture by a Cruise Ship Lecturer
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…
Brazil’s Huge Past Ahead
I still recall the two lions imposingly fighting. One stands still on top of the other, with its two legs on its enemy’s chest. The other roars back, and has its claws ready to fight…
Artist Perspectives on the Politics of Andean Negrería Dances
English + Español
Aymara poet and artist Nereida Apaza Mamani arrived in London in November 2019 to work with the British Museum’s Andean textile collections. She was to be the inaugural artist in residence at…
In Search of Identities
EsCultura Queer
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…
The Self-Fashioning of Luz Jiménez
English + Español
In José Clemente Orozco’s famous mural Cortés y La Malinche (1926), her gaze is cast downwards. Her figure occupies half of the composition, yet it feels shrunk—her body pushed towards…
To Violeta
English + Español
n the 1990s when I was conducting research on the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, I used to travel with my grandmother Josefina to the small town of Montegrande where Gabriela spent…
Pandemic and Museums
English + Español
Museums navigate the challenges of satisfying the interests and curiosity of their patrons. Many crave to gawk at unusual, rare, strange, interesting or beautiful objects but…
Places of Memory
The Eye that Cries: Peru’s Unreconciled Memories
English + Español
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”…
A Monumental Battle for the Story of Texas
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…
My cry into the world
English + Español
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…
When Decolonization Meets an Immovable Monument
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…
The Ghosts of Canudos: A War Memorial
English + Español
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
Cartographies of Intimacy
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…
Book Talk
Becoming Free, Becoming Black
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…
El misterio de las causalidades
Are the coincidences in our lives just random or could they have hidden causes and deeper meanings? Argentine author Maud Daverio Cox…
For Christ and Country
In the opening scene of Robert Weis’s superb For Christ and Country, Militant Catholic Youth in Post-Revolutionary Mexico…
Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon
Here is how I would translate the experience of reading this book into an image: an old chest, half-opened, slightly scary but quite inviting. As you opened it up, maps, travelogues, legal…
Wait for Me
Forty years ago, when traveling to visit family and friends in Europe from conflict zones of Central America, I was often asked: “So, how are things going over there?” But there was…