El culto a la memoria

Memory is the human capacity to evoke, reconstruct and reproduce the past. Memory remains intimately linked to identity: it allows us to know who "we" are, but also who "the others" are. The memory of power has erected emphatic monuments, some still proudly present in public squares, while many others have been forgotten or even demolished when their contents and forms were repudiated. The power of memory has been used by totalitarian regimes of all times and places that have understood that the most tenacious and systematic way to annihilate a culture is precisely to completely erase its memories. This book reflects on the cult of memory, the ethics and aesthetics of memory. The transformations that have occurred in the universal consciousness will lead us to verify the changes experienced in the art of remembrance that have caused a total inversion of categories: in front of the monument, today the counter-monument is proposed; versus the heroic, the antiheroic; In contrast to the celebration of victory and glory, trauma and oppression are invoked; In contrast to the glorification of heroes, recognition of the victims rises. These substantial changes in the culture of memory are especially detected in societies that transition from dictatorships to democratic systems or in places subjected to armed conflicts, wars or violations of human rights. But it is a process that also affects the old continents immersed in the languid yawn of their consolidated democracies. Thus we can see how memory is a living, changing and fugitive substance that often provokes mixed reactions that range from the identification and exaltation of memory to its oblivion or even its iconoclastic destruction.