A monumental piece of bullshit

ARCA has publicly clarified that it is not responsible for the ultras having turned the fascist monument of La Feixina into their sentimental altar. And the truth is that it is difficult to decide whether it is more extraordinary that a heritage entity considers it necessary to justify itself or that it states –as it has done in ARA Balears– that “preserving La Feixina has not contributed to it becoming the ‘ultra’ meeting point”. Perhaps the extreme part of the extreme right would continue for centuries celebrating in front of nothing. I don't see it.

In any case, obviously ARCA is not responsible for the ultra groups. That is not the problem. The problem is that the entity continues to pretend that La Feixina is an innocent piece of urban heritage, a victim of an unjust ‘politicization’, when its nature is purely political.

I insist on what I wrote in this same space just two weeks ago –excuse me: the Feixina is not a Roman bridge, nor a wine cellar, nor a modernist house with an uncomfortable coat of arms on its facade. It is a monument erected by a dictatorship to glorify its victory and its foundational myths. Franco did not inaugurate windmills. He inaugurated symbols of power. And the Feixina is a textbook example of one.

That's why it's a bit funny –or pathetic– to hear ARCA now say that the ultras “don't have a clue what they're doing” when they choose the Feixina as their meeting place. Well, precisely if there's one thing they are clear about, it's the symbolic value of spaces. The far-right may have many shortcomings, but they don't lack symbolic flair. If they gather there, it's not because they value the Balearic art-deco that ARCA defends, nor because they are moved by the textures of the concrete. They go there because they recognize what that monolith represents.

This is where ARCA's defense enters swampy territory. When it insists that “the symbology must be separated from the architecture”, what it does is attempt the impossible operation of turning a political symbol into a neutral object when, I insist again, monoliths are not neutral. They serve precisely to fix memory, power, and narrative.

Furthermore, the obsession with justifying that the monument has heritage value is already beginning to seem like a competition of excuses. That it's art-deco, that Aina Calvo also preserved it, that the Francoist symbols were removed from it. Magnificent. The great irony is that ARCA claims to depoliticize the Feixina while being forced to issue political statements to distance itself from those who use it politically. It's wonderful. The monument is so ‘depoliticized’ that it requires defensive press releases every time the far-right unfolds its liturgy there.

Perhaps the time has come to accept that there are symbols that cannot be rehabilitated because they were born exclusively to symbolize. And when decades later they still convene exactly the ideological heirs of the regime that erected them, perhaps the problem is not political manipulation. Perhaps the problem is the monument itself. And the rest is a monumental piece of nonsense.