This article invites parallel reflection on both the commemorative intentions of the governments ordering monuments and on the memorial practices that these monuments generate in different actors. Collecting for the first time case studies on public monuments built since the early 2000s, this special report is based on an approach specific to the social sciences that situates these monuments in their social, political, and physical space and repositions their uses in a long history: in this sense, it could be said that the analyses performed give life to the stone. Here, the notion of public monument covers a wide spectrum of official commissions installed in public spaces, from statues to sculptures, including steles, religious buildings, towers, and even memorials. These open-air edifices are always included in projects to redesign urban centers that, because they are imposed “from the top down” (state, church), seek to establish a hegemonic concept of the community, its identity, its relationship to the world, to history, or even to the divine. These new monuments, however, as tools to legitimize power, often implicitly rekindle the memory of former buildings, statues, and objects that have been knocked down, destroyed, or abandoned. Their immobility and their purported permanence—what the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld (Herzfeld 2001, 20) calls “the temporal, symbolic, and ideological fixity implied by the very idea of monument”—are in contrast with the dynamics they bring about through their integration in the daily life of individuals, the potential hostile reactions to which they give rise, or the various narratives that come with them.
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