Abstract

The aim of this paper is to propose the idea of anti-monument, in order to rescue and revalue abandoned places and modern ruins and. This new perspective answers to the current need to see contemporary landscapes from a different point of view. Anti-monuments are the “new ruins”, abandoned structures that become obsolete due to its dysfunctionality over time. The change on the social and production systems and the economic crisis of our time produce the proliferation of these unique and paradoxical spaces. These places are full of meanings but awake a different kind of memory than classic monuments. The concept of the anti-monument works in the opposite way to that of the monument, deconstructing its idea. Whereas a monument brings memories of a past time, an anti-monument is rather an image of an –apocalyptic– future process. In the anti-monument, time and memory are reinterpreted according to the new reading codes of contemporary language. While the memory of the monument refers to an ideal and/or an utopia formed by the imaginary of the great events of civilization, in the anti-monument is part of the realization of reality, of mortality, of a dystopia that prefigures the collapse of social and economic systems.