In 1993, the Governments of Fuerteventura and the Canary Islands set out to address the mountain’s problematic duplicity as a protected site and a mining resource. They commissioned a Special Protection Plan. The team working on it develped the idea of a “Cultural Resort” – an integrated approach built around the mountain’s multiple “values” (ethnographic, archeological, cultural, historical, geological, etc.).1
In order to achieve this vision, it was paramount to stop the quarrying activity. They proposed that the mining rights be compulsory purchased, but the government found the strategy too expensive and encouraged the team to find cheaper alternatives. At that point, the idea of an artistic intervention in the quarries started to take shape. The idea was to invite an artist who could reimagine the rock extraction in a way that was both respectful with the landscape and that honoured the companies’ rights so that the mining could be brought to an end. That person ended up being Eduardo Chillida.
Once he saw the mountain, Chillida abandoned the idea of a restorative intervention in the quarries, and proposed something altogether different. Digging a huge cubic cave inside the mountain, connected to the outside by an entry tunnel and two vertical shafts. Chillida’s proposal radically changed the scenario. Politicians, for one, were deeply seduced by the idea of having “a Chillida”. So much so that they declared the project of “regional interest”, found monies to purchase the mining rights, and abandoned the idea of a Special Protection Plan to concentrate instead in the promotion and planning of the Monument.
This turn of events, however, galvanised environmental and pro-heritage activists, who grouped under the umbrella of the Coordinadora Montaña Tindaya in 1996. Since then, they have argued that the Monument is incompatible with the mountain’s protected status, and have used a range of tactics, from legal cases to direct action, to oppose the construction of the Monument.
1. Proyectos de Rehabilitación Ambiental de Canarias. See https://jmaceytuno.com/
Understanding the lure that Chillida’s Monument exerted over politicians and state officials requires delving into certain processes that were taking place in Spain in the 1990s. After joining the European Economic Community in 1986, the state embarked in an intense period of “modernisation”. Large infrastructures (e.g. the high-speed rail network, airports, new metro and light rail systems, and countless new highways, bridges and tunnels) became the markers of an unequivocal break with the past – that is, with the backward country Franco’s dictatorship had produced.
This was a period characterised by what artist David Bestué1 calls the “monumentalisation of infrastructure” – a phase of technical and budgetary exuberance in which the state’s demand for works of “lasting impact” that would assert the nation’s newfound modernity was met by a group of engineers and architects more than ready to monumentalise public infrastructures, such as Santiago Calatrava or Frank Gehry. Clear and minimalist at times, more often flashy and overconfident, the public works of the time became politico-sensory statements, flagships of Spain’s new democratic, modern condition.2
Within this context, Chillida’s Monument to Tolerance represented, for the region’s politicians, the opportunity to partake in the developmental paroxysm of the time. They regularly referred to the project with expressions such as “a once in a lifetime opportunity”, “a turning point” for the island, or a work of “paramount importance” that “would raise the bar”. It is as if Chillida’s cubic void, the quintessential modernist gesture, created the necessary space for the state’s projections of modernity. The Monument represented not just a new attraction capable of attracting more (and better) tourists, but the very image of a break with the past.
1. Bestué, David. “Formas Libres: La Influencia de La Escultura En La Ingeniería Española Reciente.” El Estado Mental, no. 7 (2015): 132–38.
2. See Larkin, Brian. ‘Promising Forms: The Political Aesthetics of Infrastructure’. In The Promise of Infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, 175–202. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018; Larkin, Brian. ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure’. Annual Review of Anthropology 42, no. 1 (2013): 327–43.