During the protests following the May 2020 killing of George Floyd, various monuments were removed or plans for removal were announced. Removals focused on monuments to the leaders and the military of the Confederate States of America, an unrecognised republic formed by secession of seven slave-holding states existing from 1861 to 1865. In some cases, monuments were removed by the city in an official manner, as the Confederate War Memorial in Dallas, Texas (fig. 1). In some others, monuments were toppled by protesters, as the Statue of Albert Pike in Washington D.C (fig. 2).

For human perception, it seems that the phenomenon of pregnancy is the most compelling externalization of inner mystery. It is the definition of visual proof of something invisible. To put it in the, heuristically very helpful, Peircean terms, the very evidence of ‘reproduction in spe’ is our most exemplary experience of the tight cognitive -and necessarily temporal- relationship between icon and index.

The Board of Commissioners of the National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) has recently released its official position on the site of the 1521 Easter Sunday mass. The agency adopted the final report submitted by the Mojares Panel, a group of Filipino scholars reviewing and setting forth the conclusion of the Butuan-Limasawa controversy on the location of the 1521 first Easter Sunday mass in the Philippines. 

1. Revisitar el pasado

Buenos Aires, julio de 2020. Pintores, fotógrafos, críticos, docentes y tantas personas más llevamos meses dentro de nuestras casas resguardados de una pandemia, saliendo apenas para comprar alimentos o para asistir a alguna consulta médica impostergable. Galerías, museos y centros culturales se encuentran cerrados. Las circunstancias invitan a revisitar exhibiciones del pasado. Una de ellas se recorta en la memoria.

In 2002, the art historian and theorist Hal Foster observed in his book Design and Crime, that the main purpose of the museum in the postmodern age is no longer the contemplation of the exhibits^[1]. The exhibits exist also in the form of electronic archives and can be consulted anywhere, normally without even paying.

Tell them in Lacedaimon, passer-by
that here, obedient to their word, we lie.

             Simonides of Ceos

Earth! render back from out thy breast
    A remnant of our Spartan dead!
Of the three hundred grant but three,
To make a new Thermopylae!

Lord Byron, The Isles of Greece

When the gods have been expelled from the cosmos, the world they have left becomes boring.

Respirator not included: An Introduction | ERNEST LARSEN

“I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it.”

--Samuel Goldwyn, notorious old-Hollywood film producer

Mérida, Yucatán, México.