Monumental suspension: Art, Infrastructure and Eduardo Chillida’s unbuilt Monument to Tolerance

More than twenty-five years after it was unveiled, Eduardo Chillida’s Monument to Tolerance has neither been built nor abandoned – it is, rather, suspended. The project consists in digging a vast cubic cave inside the mountain of Tindaya (Fuerteventura, Canary Islands). From the outset, it faced the opposition of environmental activists, who argued that it was incompatible with the mountain’s status as a protected site. Drawing from anthropological approaches to infrastructure and art, this article unpacks the Monument’s actual existence as an unrealized project, partly actualized through anticipatory practices such as exhibitions or economic aspirations. The article contributes to the theorization of suspension by combining a focus on the temporal multiplicity of anticipation with an attention to the materiality of unbuilt entities.