Iconoclasia política: patrimonio, estética y memoria en la era de las protestas

Abstract

In the context of global protest actions on monuments and heritage buildings (graffiti, graffiti, alterations or demolitions), and under the dynamics of representations that this generates, the intention of this paper is to build a frame of reference that allows a sociological analysis of the struggle for the symbolic and factual order that heritage holds. This paper presents a literature review on the aesthetic dimension of the protests and the heritage expressions installed in it, in order to draw a line of study that enables to treat it as a phenomenon of political communication and memorial dispute. Specifically, our work proposes to analyze the interventions in two dimensions: a) as effective forms of communicative subversion that make visible the demands for social justice by historically marginalized groups; and b) as struggles for the production of memory in which the redefinition of historical truth and the struggles for the legitimacy of political power come into play. The idea of political iconoclasm from which this article is based is located within the so-called "era of protests", and focuses on the cycles of scratching and erasure on heritage, which from our perspective constitutes a palimpsest on which memory is socially drawn and blurred.