The non-monuments: Popular artifacts

Abstract

The article pursues two main aims: first, to construct a definition of what I call a ‘non-monument’, based on a dialogue with the field of commemorative monumentality and deconstructive anti-monumentality; second, to describe possible variants of these popular artifacts as well as potential criteria that allow their classification. Inspired by the reflection on American aesthetics proposed by Rodolfo Kusch and in dialogue with semiotic categories developed by Juan Magariños de Morentín, I take the assumption that non-monuments, despite proposing a deconstruction of the commemorative as anti-monuments do, they do so from a different perspective: they put into practice those discourses located in a specific territory that belong to the doxa, to the people, to the forms of popular saying (Magariños 2010). In this sense, they are non-monuments because a) they do not continue neither deny the commemorative monumentality nor the different forms of anti-monumentality and counter-monumentality; b) they do not recover official, social, historical or underground memories; c) they do not propose the same themes as the commemorative sites for the construction of collective identities; and d) despite all this, they are singular artifacts that propose to articulate the habituality of the discourses in order to put popular culture into action.In this way, from the development of this definition, in a second moment, different non-monumental proposals are described, as popular artifact projects for the Viedma-Carmen de Patagones comarca, province of Río Negro and province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Projects that are born from an archaeological work with popular discourses for their implementation.