monumentos

This project gathers 35 colour photographs, two groups of postcards and a 45 minute video.

The photographs were made between 2005 and 2012 along the Pacific Coast and in the central and southeast Andes of Peru as a record of the wave of new monuments that have been built throughout the country in the last two decades.

Contradicting the Western tradition of use of public spaces and construction of monuments and memorials, which nation-states use to solidify images that form part of their basic symbolic lexicon, in Peru, the absence of the state has left squares and other public spaces to the free will and imagination of their inhabitants and local authorities. This reversal has yielded a massive and diverse production of new monumentalia, that works to fill in a historical gap in the national narrative.

The postcards of monuments from around the world serve as an equalizer that seeks to deactivate a potential exoticising reading of the Peruvian monuments. They thus level the way for other interpretations.

The silent 45 minute video, made from edited clips downloaded from YouTube, shows monuments being destroyed and vandalized around the world - a reminder of the violent and performatic way in which the life of monuments is ended, having usually lived quiet and even invisible existences.