So memorializing the past is just another way of wishing about the present. The trouble is that we don’t always share the same memories. And not everyone has an equal opportunity to enshrine their group’s memory on the landscape. As the novelist Milan Kundera has said, “The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.”
