"Every monument is undemocratic by definition, a way of saying: 'It's mine'"

BarcelonaWhat do we do with monuments, especially unjust ones? This was the question being asked this Tuesday in the last session of the season of the Pedralbes Dialogues, organized at the Pedralbes Monastery with the collaboration of ARA, moderated by Antoni Bassas, and under the intellectual direction of the philosopher Daniel Gamper. To answer the question, a historian with a torrential discourse and forceful affirmations, Daniel Rico, professor of art history at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and author of an essay on the subject: ¿Quién teme a Francisco Franco? (Anagrama, 2024). For Rico, the issue is not simple: "Hiding monuments in a warehouse or leaving them as they are without doing anything are, in fact, two extreme expressions of the same problem: not wanting to settle accounts with the past. Removing them means getting rid of the past; and doing nothing is turning your back on it. But if you have a trauma, what you need to do is analyze it and confront it."

Earlier, Rico framed the debate within the struggle between heritage culture and historical (or democratic) memory. The latter, according to the historian, is "the way democratic countries relate to the past" and "has nothing to do with history, which strives to be objective, which does not mean neutral." For Rico, memory has not replaced history, but rather the "national memory that organic historians created in service of power." And he recalled that the culture of memory was consolidated in Germany in the eighties. "Confronting one's own history is a difficult exercise for countries that come from the heroic culture of nation-states. The Germans took thirty years, and we have taken the same with Francoism. When a country has a great trauma, those who lived through it don't talk about it, but neither do the children, because they want to kill their parents. So it's always the grandchildren who end up doing it."

The historian criticizes Pedro Sánchez's historical memory law because "it does not prosecute a Francoist demonstration with pre-constitutional symbols, but it does prosecute a shield from the Salamanca archive" and lashes out at Ada Colau's municipal government's policy of removing monuments, but also at Jaume Collboni's project to erect a monument to Ildefons Cerdà. "It makes no sense to continue erecting monuments – he states –. Cerdà deserves to be studied and known, but every monument is anti-democratic by definition, a way of saying: 'It's mine'. Cerdà was rather left-wing; if not, Collboni would not have proposed him".

Although he does not like the expression, Rico is in favor of re-signifying monuments, and cites as an example the intervention carried out in Italy on the Casa del Fascio in Bolzano, the sculptural relief of fascist exaltation on which a historian and an artist projected Hannah Arendt's famous phrase: "No one has the right to obey". "It discredits it and at the same time generates debate – celebrates the historian –. It is a reversible intervention and respectful of the historical document". Antoni Bassas's journalistic instinct manifested itself in the form of a question: "And with the monument to Columbus, what would you do?" Rico joked – or not – about the option of putting a conical hat on him, but then reflected on the importance of Columbus for Spanish nationalism: "In Spain, monuments to Columbus are more important than monuments to Franco, because Columbus is still a figure that sustains the Spanish national narrative, and which remains alive on Hispanic Day".