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 and 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 winepress, 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 amusing –or pathetic– to hear ARCA now say that the ultra-rightists “don't have a clue what they're doing” when they choose the Feixina as a meeting place. Come on, precisely if they are clear about one thing, it is the symbolic value of spaces. The extreme right may have many shortcomings, but it doesn't lack symbolic flair. If they gather there, it's not because they value the Balearic art-deco that ARCA defends or because they are moved by the textures of concrete. They go there because they recognize what that monolith represents.

This is where ARCA's defense enters into swampy territory. When it insists that “the symbology must be separated from the architecture”, it is attempting the impossible operation of turning a political symbol into a neutral object when, I insist once 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 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 extreme 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.