Feminimonuments: Feminist Transformations of ‘Difficult Monuments’ during the recent Chilean Social Upheaval
Only 4.7% of Santiago’s monuments represent women, a grim statistic that is echoed in cities around the world. Yet in the heat of the chilean social upheaval (2019-20), protesters and women’s groups took the problem of female representation into their own hands. Guided by an intersectional lens, this presentation analyzes monuments of ‘difficult heritage’ in two Chilean cities, Santiago and Valparaíso, to understand how they were transformed physically and symbolically into sites of feminist solidarity. The stakes are high, together these monuments speak about European colonization, the nation-state, the ongoing conflict with indigenous populations, past and present violence against women, as well as the oversight of feminine historical agency. Each case represents a typology of monument-appropriation, and its analysis will help to unravel a counter-archive of possibilities for female representation in public space.
Valentina Rozas-Krause is an architect and architectural historian whose research interests lie in the intersection of public art, the built environment, and global cultural practices across the Americas and Europe. She is Assistant Professor in Latin American and Global Architectural History at the University of Michigan, and was the 2024-2025 Keith Haring Chair in Art and Activism at Bard College. She was also the 2023-24 Frieda L. Miller Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her most recent publications include the collective volume Breaking the Bronze Ceiling: Women, Memory and Public Space (Fordham, 2024), the article “Our Auschwitz is the ESMA: Preservation and the Holocaust in Argentina” in Future Anterior (2024), and Decolonization, a special issue of journal ARQ (2022). She serves as an elected board member for the Society of Architectural Historians (2023-25), and as a founding member of Rumbo Colectivo, a Chilean political foundation, through which she engages in public scholarship across media, including a monthly participation in Ciudad Pauta, a Chilean nation-wide radio show, in which she talks about public space, heritage, migration, public housing, monuments, and more.
The Keith Haring Chair in Art and Activism is made possible through a grant from the Keith Haring Foundation. The Keith Haring Chair is a cross-disciplinary, annual, visiting faculty appointment for a scholar, activist, or artist to teach and conduct research at both the Center for Curatorial Studies and the Human Rights Project at Bard College. The Keith Haring Chair in Art and Activism was established to allow a distinguished leader in the field to investigate the role of art as a catalyst for social change, linking the two programs and presenting original research in an annual lecture.
For more information on The Keith Haring Foundation – www.haring.com.
For more information on the Human Rights Project at Bard College – http://hrp.bard.edu.
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