In the life of the city and community, statues and monuments mark the public space as signs and symbols. These are archetypal reminder stones, objectifications of memory and past values, which reproduce our aspirations in artistic language. Historical and public monuments (from lat monument, remind, attract attention, signify) express historical, ideological and artistic belonging. They affirm and glorify multiple cultural and social lines and identities, often coexisting tensely, competitively, but at the same time cordially, in multicultural, interethnic and interreligious communities, as above all the communities of the historical space of Transylvania.

Some monuments are also places of memory. Those that the French historian Pierre Nora defined as “closely connected with life and death, time and eternity; in the spiral of collective and individual, prosaic and sacred, immutable and mobile.

Regardless of how stable they appear, monuments sometimes undergo a certain mobility, vertically or horizontally, revealing social and cultural unrest. Some walk, in a perpetuum mobile on the scale of history, like the statue of Lupoaic in Cluj. Others rise or fall from the plinth. Especially in times of crisis, monuments are negated or exaggerated, moved or destroyed, dismantled or desecrated with iconoclastic zeal. Statues are exiled or returned from exile, restored and rededicated in public space. As the Baroque statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Patroness, is to be restored and moved to its original location, in a new architectural concept of urban planning in Cluj.

Elitist or proletultist, the statues have a regal aura. You can’t touch them anyway, any untimely intervention can have the connotation of debunking or blasphemy. About sacrilege or profanation. Moreover, some statues still implicitly fulfill the original role of tombstones. Symbolic graves. Especially for historical figures who had no graves either on the territory of the country or in the heart of the communities whose ideals served them. As in the case of the great statesman Iuliu Maniu, who was recently honored in Cluj, Badacin and Bucharest. Or luminaries of the Ardelan school, also without a grave in the country. Or the beautiful statues of the Hungarian poet Petefi Sándor, scattered around Transylvanian cities.

Immovable and immortal in their desire to capture the time and memory of communities, statues and their meaning are nevertheless deeply moving. Now the mobility of monuments, although sometimes explainable in terms of design, is never politically indifferent or innocent, freed from symbolism and deep public sensibility.

Given the high stakes of identity, monuments are the object of memory politics. The policy of joint management of the fortress, both in the ideological and etymological sense, poly-At times inspired, cautious, competent, at times intrusive, violent, dismissive or destructive, the politics of memory requires balance, insight and a good measure between memory and forgetting, between excess and deficit of meaning.

Historically speaking, dramatic changes in political regimes cause equally dramatic changes in the regime of memory. The transition from one regime to another also involves social reorganization of historical and cultural memory. They are aimed at renaming streets, interfering with memorial signs, changing the memorial landscape, using and abusing memory and forgetting. More than once, during revolutions or popular uprisings, statues were thrown into the maelstrom of struggle or political oblivion. Comandatio or damnatio memoriae. The commandment or curse of memory at any time and in any space, locally and globally. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro