Memories in displacement in the public space: The monuments of Juana Azurduy and Christopher Columbus in Argentina

Abstract

In 2013, the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, donated the statue of Juana Azurduy de Padilla to Argentina. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, president of Argentina at the time, disposed that it would be located where the monument of Christopher Columbus stood. The initiative to displace Columbus in favor of Juana generated a series of controversies that made a great impact. Ortemberg (2016) and Premazzi (2015) examine certain aspects about it. In 2017, two years after its inauguration, the statue of Juana was finally displaced.Since the 19th century, the location, aesthetics and orientation of monuments have been subject of discussion. In the new millennium, these debates have re-emerged in different ways and several governments in the Americas have commemorated new figures and/or eliminated others that had already been monumentalized. In this paper, I examine the conflicting temporalities, subjectivities and political spatialities expressed in relation to the successive movements of those two monuments in Buenos Aires from 2013 to 2017. I discuss dichotomous visions about monumentalization policies and propose that such displacements must be seen as metacultural performances created as memory devices of a complex political potentiality.Even though it may seem paradoxical, I examine what these displacement performances sought to establish regarding not only national but also "Porteño", i.e, from the city of Buenos Aires, imaginary. In particular, I unfold what was left in the order of the visible and what remained obturated and absent to show the movements, tensions and/or sedimentations (Briones 2015) which, regarding the indigenous, were expressed in these policies of statues driven movements by different power administrations and cultural hegemonies in dispute in Argentina. For this analysis, I resort to discourses and images observed in the public space, and reported in the media during the years in which these statues were placed and displaced around different areas of the city.