Zlatan-statyns uppgång och fall: Om förstörelsens ikonografi

In the previous issue of ICO, published December 31, 2019, the repeated attacks on football star Zlatan Ibrahimović’s statue in Malmö were described, and to one of them especially a brief historical background was given: the sawing off of the statue’s nose. The attacks on the monument continued and culminated in January 2020, when the statue was sawn off at the ankles and toppled from its pedestal. The subsequent debate was characterized largely by both conceptual confusion and pure ignorance regarding the grounds, traditions and iconography of monument mutilation and destruction. In this article, the Zlatan statue is the starting and ending point for placing the attacks on statues in a larger cultural-historical context where different types of motives and strategies are exemplified, and where it is shown that precisely the elimination of the nose has an ancient and very specific meaning.