VIRTUAL London Heritages Conference

Abstract

Route 5 is the Chilean section of the Pan-American Highway, a 3,364 km-long motorway that spans four fifths of the length of this country. On 20 October 2019, protesters took down the statue of Spanish Conquistador Francisco de Aguirre on Route 5’s roadside. A couple of days later, the art and education collective ‘Casa La Nuez’ put in its place the figure of Milanka, a Diaguita (indigenous) woman. This was the first of a long list of similar interventions on public monuments: throughout Chile, busts were torn down, painted over, and redecorated amidst the fiercest social uprising Chile has witnessed since the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. These events highlight the selective character of what is valued as national heritage. Examining the national project represented by state-listed monuments (national heritage sites) along Route 5 together with some of the challenges performed by unofficial roadside sites, the paper studies this motorway as a memoryscape, a corridor in which competing forms of memory appear visually as busts, plaques, statues, sculptures, murals, and open-space interventions. It analyses the significance of the decisions to declare some sites, and not others, as national heritage by examining visual contestations to official narratives. Moreover, it questions the discourses inscribed in national heritage and in public art in terms of not only ‘rights to the city’ but also as reclaiming rights to public memory.