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The Memoir of Amnesia project seeks to understand how cultural policies and historical heritage define what are works of public art and establish their relationships with urban memory. In order to do so, it approaches memory through the prism of forgetting, focusing on the change of monuments of place and the "extermination" of monuments in deposits, two recurrent questions of the urban history of São Paulo.
This approach was based on two actions: through an artistic intervention, which consisted of the transfer of monuments from a warehouse of the Municipal Secretary of Culture (SMC), located in the neighborhood of Canindé, to the Historical Archive of São Paulo; and with a mapping of the monuments that changed of place in the city of São Paulo. As a general rule, three motivations explain the change of monuments of place in São Paulo: urban works, budgetary issues, and ideological or moral arguments. In spite of the controversies involved that have sometimes gained the pages of the newspapers, over the years, however, it is increasingly difficult to visualize these monuments in the urban space. And this phenomenon is common to all nomadic monuments. The survey conducted over a year to map the more than 60 monuments that changed places in São Paulo evidenced processes of invisibility as drastic as those of their hiding places in deposits. An invisibility that, first of all, is ideological and political and conditions the erasure of its traces in space and history. After all, the history of art is fed back by the relationship between what is readable and what is visible. What is devoid of discourse about itself leaves the field of knowledge and disappears from history, becoming invisible (DIDI-HUBERMAN, 2013). |
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