Capture Life: The ‘Document-Monument’ in Recent Commemorations of Hugo Chávez

Contents/Introduction

“…Yet the subsequent inscription of this event and its visual imaginary into an official ‘politics of memory’ signals an absorption of multitudinary mobilisation and its subordination to the requirements of spectacular forms of historiography that were used to lay a foundation stone for the Bolivarian Revolution that was consolidated a decade after the Caracazo with Chávez's election to office. Since then, the state‐led revisiting of the Caracazo through civic‐military parades, commemorations, photographic exhibitions, and filmic re‐enactments has sought to harness and represent historical events according to a Revolutionary telos against the neoliberal policies promoted during the final two decades of the period preceding the 1998 election of Chávez, denominated the ‘Fourth Republic’ (Vásquez ; Arroyo 2013; Blackmore ). This points to a domestic mode of what George Yúdice () terms the performativity and ‘expediency’ of culture, albeit, in his case, one that applies to the global era of neoliberalism, globalisation and the instrumentalisation of culture as a resource to aid financial development (see also García‐Canclini, : 182–183, : 87).…”