A monumental piece of shit

ARCA HAS PUBLICLY CLARIFIED that it is not responsible for the far-right extremists 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 affirms –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 far-right would continue for centuries celebrating in front of nothingness. I don't see it.

In any case, it is evident that ARCA is not responsible for the far-right 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 here in this same space just two weeks ago –excuse me: La Feixina is not a Roman bridge, nor an oil mill, nor a modernist house with an uncomfortable coat of arms on the facade. It is a monument erected by a dictatorship to glorify its victory and foundational myths. Franco did not inaugurate windmills. He inaugurated symbols of power. And La Feixina is a textbook example.

That is why it is a bit funny –or sad– to hear ARCA now say that the far-right “don’t have the slightest idea what they are doing” when they choose La Feixina as their meeting place. Come on, if there is one thing they are clear about, it is the symbolic value of spaces. The extreme right may have many shortcomings, but it does not lack symbolic flair. If they gather there, it is 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 swampy territory. When it insists that “the symbology must be separated from the architecture”, what it is doing 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 starting to seem like a competition of excuses. That it is art deco, that Aina Calvo also preserved it, that the Francoist symbols were removed from it. Magnificent. The great irony is that ARCA demands to depoliticize La Feixina while being forced to issue political statements to distance itself from those who use it politically. It is 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 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.