Toppling coloniality: interventions on tainted monuments toward an open future

The article examines how monuments tied to colonial histories can operate as instruments of the ‘colonization of the mind’, and how interventions on them can become anti-colonial practices. Drawing on decolonial theory and recent scholarship on tainted monuments, it argues that commemorations do not merely depict the past; as objects that dwell in the temporality of coloniality, they authorize present hierarchies and future-oriented commitments, often through seemingly neutral artistic forms. The paper maps distinct intervention repertoires based on Latin American cases mainly from 2020–2023, and identifies differences in approaches related to agency, temporality, and visibility. It proposes six criteria for interventions with anti-colonial force: broad participation, institutional avowal, bottom-up deliberation, multi-dimensional attention to affect and intimate attachments, enduring and dynamic visibility, and explicit display of temporal continuities between colonial violence and contemporary oppressive structures. The paper concludes that keeping intervened monuments visible – preserving their documentary condition while deactivating their monumental power – can function as an open, everyday visual debate about the past and the futures it enables.