Abstract
Over the past years, we have seen a wave of removals and demolitions of public monuments, which intensified after the anti-racist demonstrations of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, a black man choked to death by a white police officer in Minneapolis in the United States. Looking at acts challenging monumentalism in England, the United States and Chile, we seek to reflect on how such events destabilize the prevailing conception of the existence of a common in space and time. We propose as an exercise the imaging of the emergence of a possible uncommon of history through cases that, in this essay, will be presented as ontological speculation. We will address the dissonances surrounding the debates that followed the acts of contesting monumental representations, showing that, although they occurred in the same time frame and in different places, it is impossible to draw a common line of similarities that fits each of these cases into a shared framework.
Keywords:
Monumentalization; Decolonization; Public space; Mapuche; Antiracism