The memorial as a counterpoint to the monument

Abstract

Awareness of violence as the driving force of history has come to transform artistic practices. Among these transformations, sculpture has put its disciplinary foundation in crisis, which is the monument and the commemorative will. And not only as an intradisciplinary reflection, restricted to the world of the arts, but also in response to recent social movements that have given good account of a distancing from the monument as an Enlightenment device whose object is the materialization of an official history. Thus, the memorial is constituted as a path that contrasts with the classic monument, establishing a way of building a different link not only with history, incorporating the stories of the brutality with which human rights have been violated, but also with the community, which has expressed the need for representation of those absent bodies, massacred and disappeared due to political violence.