Contributions to a Biography of the Chilean Monument to the Writers of Independence

Abstract

This work intends to be a contribution to the biography of the Monument to the Writers of Independence through a cartography of its appearances in ‘intentional’ and ‘unintentional’ registers. Our objective is not to propose a definitive biography of the monument, but to make relevant the political assemblages in which it was present and which haven’t been compiled in a same story.
We begin by challenging the literature that situates the beginning of heritage conservation in Chile by focusing on legal measures, beginning in the year 1925, while ignoring earlier conservation practices. The monument’s trajectory previous to 1925 accounts for practices that complicate said legal-centered periodization. We present the trajectory of the monument through two approaches: as chroniclers, narrating its life in timeline terms, and as historians, analyzing key milestones of its development by questioning their causes. Finally, we examine constitutive elements of our narrative to speculate on the reasons for its decade in ruins.
This approach reveals how the monument operates across different registers of reality and demonstrates that conservation history contains layers of projects, efforts, and abandonments that contextualize the formal beginning of its legal protection.