Monuments

Understanding the lure that Chillida’s Monument exerted over politicians and state officials requires delving into certain processes that were taking place in Spain in the 1990s. After joining the European Economic Community in 1986, the state embarked in an intense period of “modernisation”. Large infrastructures (e.g. the high-speed rail network, airports, new metro and light rail systems, and countless new highways, bridges and tunnels) became the markers of an unequivocal break with the past – that is, with the backward country Franco’s dictatorship had produced.

This was a period characterised by what artist David Bestué¹ calls the “monumentalisation of infrastructure” – a phase of technical and budgetary exuberance in which the state’s demand for works of “lasting impact” that would assert the nation’s newfound modernity was met by a group of engineers and architects more than ready to monumentalise public infrastructures, such as Santiago Calatrava or Frank Gehry. Clear and minimalist at times, more often flashy and overconfident, the public works of the time became politico-sensory statements, flagships of Spain’s new democratic, modern condition.²

Within this context, Chillida’s Monument to Tolerance represented, for the region’s politicians, the opportunity to partake in the developmental paroxysm of the time. They regularly referred to the project with expressions such as “a once in a lifetime opportunity”, “a turning point” for the island, or a work of “paramount importance” that “would raise the bar”. It is as if Chillida’s cubic void, the quintessential modernist gesture, created the necessary space for the state’s projections of modernity. The Monument represented not just a new attraction capable of attracting more (and better) tourists, but the very image of a break with the past.

1. Bestué, David. “Formas Libres: La Influencia de La Escultura En La Ingeniería Española Reciente.” El Estado Mental, no. 7 (2015): 132–38.
2. See Larkin, Brian. ‘Promising Forms: The Political Aesthetics of Infrastructure’. In The Promise of Infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, 175–202. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018; Larkin, Brian. ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure’. Annual Review of Anthropology 42, no. 1 (2013): 327–43.

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