One of the distinguishing features of the controversy over Tindaya is that twenty-five years after it was proposed, Chillida’s Monument to Tolerance has neither been built nor abandoned. A combination of the multiple legal challenges initiated by activists and funding difficulties has prevented its construction. But this doesn’t mean that the Monument doesn’t exist. It does in multiple ways: as a promise or a threat, in the form of architectural models, CGI simulations, technical studies, parliamentary debates, and so on. I call this mode of existence “suspension”, meaning an uncertain, in-between state.
In many ways, Tindaya Variations is a film about the strange (a)temporality of the controversy, the fact that everything has changed over these years, and yet nothing has changed.
As Akhil Gupta has argued, suspension “needs to be theorized as its own condition of being. The temporality of suspension is not between past and future, between beginning and end, but constitutes its own ontic condition just as surely as does completion”.1 In other words, the Monument’s suspended state is not a phase prior to its realisation, or following its failure, but rather “one of [its] many possible trajectories”.2
Suspension, in this sense, is a temporal condition of radical uncertainty, that is to say, characterised by a future which is both unknown and unknowable. Crucially, suspension describes an unresolved state that is nonetheless performative, which produces effects and affect. Suspension does not therefore refer to an absence of action; on the contrary, it describes a specific type of performativity connected to uncertainty. A large project such as Chillida’s Monument makes this particularly visible. It is charged with promise and aspiration, and is certainly capable of producing diverse affects and effects (from counter-exhibitions to parliamentary inquiries; from excitement to anger). The actually existing Monument can only be grasped through the multiple relations constructed around it.
1. Gupta, Akhil. ‘Suspension’. Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, 24 September 2015.
2. Gupta, Akhil. ‘The Future in Ruins: Thoughts on the Temporality of Infrastructure’. In The Promise of Infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, 62–79. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.