La historia en ruinas

Today we may feel more intensely under our feet the tremor of the destruction of monuments. Movements such as "Black Lives Matter", the just claims of the descendants of colonized peoples or the struggles for historical memory after the dictatorships of the 20th century have demanded symbolic reparations that often involve intervening, removing or demolishing statues of heroized characters and events. for a single version of events. However, as Mauricio Tenorio invites us to recognize here, the rise and fall of monuments is as old as history itself. The real novelty lies in the brand new monument of our era: the "selfie", the image that, thanks to the magic of social networks, aims to freeze the gesture of destruction as a monumental act that honors true justice and the definitive progress, and to offer the rubble of the present on the altars of a better, more ethical and pure future. But it is enough to put your hands in the mud of the past to be convinced, with the author, that history is nothing but a succession of infamies, and nothing in it tells us that the future has the ability to ward off its evils. Faced with the reductive and sterile gesture of destruction, Mauricio Tenorio proposes seeking refuge in irony to illuminate, with a good dose of self-criticism, the possibility of a relationship with history that allows us to reckon with what is politically uncomfortable, looking at it face to face. By rethinking our uses of historical discourse and public space, and, above all, demystifying their powers, perhaps we can offer our generation and those to come something more than ruins.