Performance as a counter-monumentalization movement: A look upon the project Demythologise Work that History and Put it to Rest

Abstract

Concerns about spaces, and about the bodies that occupy them, are more and more becoming an unsettling thought shared by those who live in this moment of historical uneasiness. The History tends to turn itself into Histories and, following this evolution, also the spatial representations of this official narrative of the past, tend to be rethought. If a great deal of the attention of politicians, museologists, historians, and anthropologists, tends to recur on archival issues - their just or not, appropriation, what future to give to the spoils of the great archives and museums of Europe, etc. - sociologists, artists and activists have come to re-think other kind of memory, and file, public space. 
This article proposes to look at this counter-monumentalization movement, which we see emerging as a growing phenomenon in the artistic world, through an approach to the work of Márcio Carvalho and his project Demythologise that History and Put it to Rest, which the artist has been developing in the cities of Berlin and Lisbon since 2018.