‘It has value because it is not monetary.’ The heritagisation of the social response to the attack on La Rambla

Abstract

On 17 August 2017, the city of Barcelona was rocked by a terrorist attack on La Rambla. The following day, people gathered on the promenade and left an array of objects such as candles, cuddly toys, flowers or letters, creating a total of 150 shrines. Later on, the city council announced that these objects would be collected and would become part of the Museum of the History of Barcelona and the Municipal Contemporary Archive. In this paper, I will first analyse the spontaneous shrine as a materialisation of the social response of the population. Secondly, I will focus on the heritagisation process of the objects collected from these shrines in order to determine their features and how the musealisation of local history operates.