Concrete Memories as Heritage of Infrastructural Violence
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Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
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Concrete Memories as Heritage of Infrastructural Violence
From 1954 to 1989, Paraguay endured the longest military dictatorship in the history of 20th century South America. Indigenous people in particular suffered immensely under General Alfredo Streossner's authoritarian regime, as they were considered a hindrance to progress and modernisation. In a push for economic growth and agricultural development, Stroessner invested heavily in the development of the country’s concrete transportation infrastructure, which included Itaipu Binacional, then the world’s biggest hydroelectric dam. On October 7, 1991, almost three years after the country’s tentative return to democracy, the only existing statue of Alfredo Stroessner was toppled outside the capital city of Asunción. This was followed by several years of debates over what to do with the almost five metre tall and over a thousand-kilogram heavy alloy metal statue, until in 1995 artist and writer Carlos Colombino was granted permission to recycle what had become an effigy of repression into a monument of resistance. Today, a dismembered and fragmented Stroessner remains himself cast between two concrete slabs held down with metal chains inside the city’s Plaza de los Desaparecidos, remembering Paraguay’s ‘disappeared’ victims of state violence. Following a material approach, this paper uses the reconfigured monument of Stroessner as a type of countermonument that challenges the notion of ‘concrete’ as both physically and symbolically cementing ideas of progress and modernity. By doing so, it will discuss authorised monuments as part of a network of concrete material memories that show the social and ecological impacts of “infrastructural violence” on communities and the environment.
Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square.
Contact name:
Sarah Howard