The English
word monument comes from the Latin verb monere,
which means to remind, that is
a monument is a reminder or a memorial.
The places we live in and the spaces we inhabit are all inherited
landscapes, created, curated, if you like, by people of the past,
by past communities who wanted to propagate their values
and ideologies through monuments
A monument in the modern world is a power plant propagating
the ideas and the values of past societies.
I'm standing in front
of the Acropolis Hill, in the heart of ancient Athens.
In the past, in the sixth and fifth century BCE,
the Athenians of the time monumentalized the rock
with these buildings standing behind me,
temples honoring the goddess
Athena, the patron goddess of Athens,
honoring Athens itself,
but also the Athenians themselves.
In modern Greece, monuments such as the Acropolis standing behind me are
powerplants of Greek identity.
At the same time, they operate as tools of exclusion,
of discrimination because they tend to concentrate Greeknes
Greek identity on what was classical, on what is ancient.
So if you think that a monument such as the Acropolis can unify
a community such as the Greek, modern Greece, at the same time,
it can discriminate between those who belong and those who do not.
Those who are part of Greece and Greekness
and those who are alien to it.
Since the 19th century, the Acropolis rock has been edited in a way
so as to only contain monuments belonging to the classical period.
Everything else, everything that was considered to be alien to
classical Greece has been taken down, such as Frankish monuments
or Ottoman monuments they had all been removed
because the Greeks of the time, as well as the Greeks of today,
wanted to see the Acropolis as an exclusive monument to classicality
and to a white pristine greekness in the modern world.