The Tools We Need to Understand Our World

One of the ideas that struck me most while reading Orwell is that dictatorship does not only control the present, it eliminates the past. If history can be rewritten, then truth itself becomes something that can be manipulated. And if we do not know where we come from, how can we understand where we are going?

Nowadays, we are surrounded by a constant flow of information, but without a knowledge of history we risk accepting any version of reality without having the tools to question it. As the historian Alessandro Barbero often says, history is “the catalogue of everything we have done, both the beautiful and the terrible.” It is a simple but powerful idea: knowing the past means knowing ourselves, a catalogue of lives, including achievements and mistakes.

This is why I believe visual art also plays a fundamental role. A painting, a photograph, or a contemporary installation can preserve the memory of an era with an intensity that sometimes goes beyond words. Art records events, expresses emotions, reveals injustices, and allows people to see reality from different perspectives. In this sense, it becomes a form of collective memory, just like history.

Thus, where can we preserve and strengthen these tools of memory today? Perhaps the answer lies in the places where knowledge, creativity, and dialogue are still protected: schools, libraries, museums, archives, and cultural institutions. These are not simply spaces that collect information; they are places where we learn how to interpret the world.

At the same time, memory also exists in the digital space. Online archives, social media, and virtual exhibitions give us access to an enormous amount of information, at the same time they also require greater awareness. And we need the ability to question it, compare different perspectives, and understand its meaning.

A society that loses its memory also loses its ability to think critically. Protecting history and art does not mean living in the past, it means using the tools to understand the present and imagine a more conscious future.

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