Bicentenarians

Fernando Carrión Mena.
Quito. Ecuador

It is hard to understand a freedom process as a watershed that took place on a particular day in a particular place.

Between 2009 and 2011 a series of commemorative celebrations have been and continue to be held to mark the bicentenary of the region at a time when the state has entered in to crisis due to the double interrelated movement of globalization and localization and the urban environment has transformed its industrial revolution born concept of border city, to a network city, also related to globalization.

Today the city is the general driving territory of the state, and the national governments have driven forwards the process of bicentenary commemoration. The bicentenaries themselves manifest at a time in which local governments have become a lot stronger thanks to decentralization policies, and a substantial group of countries with nationalist and integrationist positions has been formed who view this event as a way of rethinking the relationships amongst the countries themselves and other regions. The freedom process itself also follows a path of localization and internationalization: a sequence of multiple dates and places, sometimes clashing, which form part of a continental movement.

In reality this is a time and space itinerary of the freedom process, but also an expression of the dispute between multiple commemorations that today results in the existence of a plurality of bicentenaries. Much of this is related to the way that social groups process things, the way in which they modify attachments to territorial power and the way in which they conceive the cause of the disputes. It is hard to understand a freedom process as a watershed that took place on a particular day in a particular place. It is even harder to define this as the first date because these processes take many years to incubate and manifest.

Today it seems as though every country and city is in a sports competition attempting to discover who was the first to produce the flame of freedom rather than looking at the historical background to the process; in this way the content of history is emptied. However, the impression held up to now is that of a commemorative process which is void of all content, as long as this projection platform is not present; this means that spectacle and contingent elements start to gain precedence over transcendental elements. It seems that the proposal is not taking off, perhaps because the project itself does not exist, because it looks more to the past than to the future, or, to its detriment, more to the present, where spectacle and leisure activities are more important in terms of influencing the masses towards legitimizing the authorities.

We can say that the logic of mass spectacle was of greater importance than the monument, which was part of the centenary commemoration. History built the architectural monuments as oracles through which the state legitimated its discourse, its identity and symbols that came out of nationalism, and yet these now have a policy of conservation that is used for self reinvention. Today we move from monument to an innocuous meta-narrative where the Bicentenary is cast aside, encased in non-transcendental debates located in reduced spaces or in the construction of anniversary projects that carry the Bicentenary slogan.