Editors: Clara Habib (UERJ), Sandra Salles (Museu Afro Brasil), Letícia Leme (Unicamp)
Submission deadline: August 15, 2024
Expected publication: December 2024
On July 7, 2020, members of the Black Lives Matter movement toppled a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in the city of Bristol during a protest against the brutal murder of George Floyd. In moments like this, the theme of destruction reaches a wide audience, renewing fierce debates about “vandalism,” iconoclasm, and heritage preservation. While we understand the toppling of Colston’s statue as a landmark event, similar demonstrations had already gained momentum in the United States with the debate about the fate of Confederate statues, and in Latin America with protests around monuments to Columbus.
The topic of heritage destruction, however, is not limited to the contemporary world. The new debate around public monuments updates the well-known controversy that arose during the French Revolution, when revolutionaries faced the dilemma of whether to destroy what no longer represented their aspirations as a society or to preserve the artistic and cultural heritage of their nation.
Beyond the issue of monuments, we have witnessed different ways of destroying or interfering with artistic heritage. We can cite examples from young European activists who attack famous works of art in renowned museums to draw attention to their cause to the growing and cruel wave of iconoclasm directed at places of worship and religious symbols in Brazil. We must also mention the invasion that took place on January 8, 2023, at the Praça dos Três Poderes in Brasília, designed by Lúcio Costa, with its monumental buildings created by Oscar Niemeyer such as the Palácio do Planalto, the Supreme Federal Court and the National Congress. On that occasion, far-right Brazilian protesters destroyed, damaged, and looted important pieces of the national artistic heritage.
Can we consider such actions as symptoms of a new iconoclastic outbreak? The present moment urgently compels us to think about the issue of destruction, in both its contemporary manifestations and its historical dimensions. In this way, the XVII Encontro de História da Arte da Unicamp, “Sob Ataque: preservação e destruição de imagens na história da arte” [Under attack: the preservation and destruction of images in the history of art], organized by the Graduate Programme in History at Unicamp (the same programme that organizes this publication), which took place in October 2023, shed light on different aspects of the theme through presentations and debates.
With this thematic issue, we intend to continue and expand the reflections carried out at the conference. Therefore, we welcome papers that deal with actions, objects, concepts and many other issues that can be related to processes of iconoclasm in its most diverse manifestations, cultures or temporalities. We also accept articles on unintentional destructions of images; on objects that have been displaced or transformed either by the action of time or by restoration processes; on artistic and/or ideological interferences of a permanent or ephemeral nature in public monuments; among others. We suggest that iconoclasm can be understood not only for its destructive power, but also as a tool for building new narratives.
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