Antimonumentos and other aesthetic interventions amidst generalized violence: Seeds in the “political subsoil” of central Mexico

Abstract

Mexico faces a situation of generalized violence, expressed in diverse forms of violence that facilitate and intensify the exploitation of productive and reproductive labor. The government of the “Fourth Transformation” (4T) has made insufficient efforts to deliver justice to sectors of Mexican society made most vulnerable by this situation. In this sense, the 4T does not represent a radical change in the situation of generalized violence that Mexico has experienced since 2006 with the PAN and PRI administrations. Indeed, 4T officials preside over an ongoing production of geographical forms, including “landscapes of disappearance,” that facilitate impunity. Highly visible proponents of the 4T simultaneously seek to delegitimize the justice claims of communities and collectives identified as environmentalist, feminist, Indigenous, or all of the above, which, from a position of exclusion, seek to shape what Luis Tapia would call the “political subsoil”—relations of sociality that exceed the totalizing logic of capitalist and state-territorial projects, reproduced through autonomous forms of solidarity and communication. We argue that aesthetic interventions produced from this position, including “anti-monuments,” express a spatial politics by which activists and community representatives engage in place-making in response to experiences that otherwise are insufficiently recognized by institutionalized power. We focus on the Mexico City megalopolis, in geographies where generalized violence is acutely and variably felt. We understand these aesthetic interventions as signposts that guide—without a pre-established route—a transversal struggle in defense of life.