We thought they were mute and asleep; now they are waking up and starting to talk. In the torpid summer of 2020, dozens of statues of great men around the world had paint splashed on them, were sprayed with graffiti, had limbs amputated or were destroyed. The historian Jacqueline Lalouette investigates.
In his monumental history of ruins, Alain Schnapp gives an account of the multiple ways to resist oblivion, both material and immaterial. Ruins are not so much objects as processes implemented by societies in order to contemplate their place in history.
