‘In his interpretation of Angelus Novus, a painting made by Paul Klee in 1920 and bought by Walter Benjamin one year later, the German thinker identifies progress with a storm that projects history ever onwards. Incapable of folding its wings, history behaves like an angel that would like to stop for a second to revive all the rubble that progress leaves behind, but the storm is too strong and all he can do is to take a quick glance at it. The storm makes the angel follow a linear path which implacably makes its way through the discarded materials of history, whose presence he can only perceive tangentially, as if they were a ghostly entity seeking to communicate from the past.

For Benjamin, the task of the materialist historian is to contact this rubble, taking it back to the territory from which it was expelled by the dominant forces of progress.’