Uncomfortable Monuments

Uncomfortable Monuments
re-imagining monuments, re-imagining monumentality

by Santiago Piñol Arévalo
by Yunjoo Kwak

The term ‘decolonizing’ (present tense) specified in the Oxford English Dictionary: “to release from a status of a colony, or to allow (a colony) to become self-governing or independent,” will be contextually aligned with a specific theme: re-imagining monuments. The word ‘monument’ derives from the Latin moneo, monere, which means ‘to remind,’ ‘to advise’ or ‘to warn,’ suggesting a monument allows us to see the past thus helping us visualize what is to come in the future. In this workshop, students will research monuments in the cities or spaces where they live and study. This workshop asks them to explore, analyze, and deconstruct the context of the monument through a visual process of creating a map and a guide.

This workshop will explore the notion of self within its society and the logic of cultural identity through decolonial thinking and artistic research within the contexts of colonialism and imperialism. In addition, we pay attention to the ongoing global crises, including COVID-19, environmental collapse, racism, and discrimination, as addressed by Black Lives Matter. For this reason, we emphasize the importance of decolonial thinking as a critical approach to understanding cultural expression and debate through a series of lectures, group debates, and individual and group assignments.

At its core, this interdisciplinary field explores relationships between artistic research and decolonial thinking through the visual process as action. It aims to unpack issues of how knowledge is produced, circulated, and critiqued in ways that shape our ways of thinking, creating, and navigating our everyday life. Therefore, the workshop examines critical knowledge from postcolonial, gender-queer theory, critical race, and Black studies. We will question cultural normativity and initiate decolonial thinking through artistic research as a type of investigation that links theory to artistic practice.

  • A1: Individual Assignment: Visual Self-Positioning (one week)
    • Make a visual self-positioning statement. You are free to choose a medium, whether it is a form of a short video, written text, drawing, and any other visual format.
    • A reflection upon history necessarily calls for a critical engagement with one’s position and location in the world in terms of gender, social class, race, religion, sexuality, dis/ability. Any intersections thereof are vital to the practice of understanding oneself in relation to the world, and therefore to make work that resonates truly with oneself and others. This is where one can start talking about one’s own ‘position’ as an individual in historical and socio-political structures. This process will help you to give attention to the conditions under which such a position arises and the factors that stabilize/destabilize that position, which entails critical engagement with one’s position in the present as a form of self-reflection, in the sense of pushing oneself out of one’s comfort zone.
    • To help with this assignment, please refer to the handout “Why self-positioning?”
    • Using this statement, the guide/teacher will place students into groups of four based on shared interests and topics.
  • A2: Group Assignment: Uncomfortable Monument as Re-imagination (one week)
    • This assignment is self-directed. Over a week, the student group will walk around the city, looking for monuments. Additionally, the group does online research on monuments in their city. The assignment has the following steps:
    • Make a collective cartography of monuments in your city. As a group, you can do this by taking a walk or doing online research. Or a bit of both. Once the group has collected some examples of monuments, they will develop a collective cartography of monuments to explore and analyze together. For inspiration, they might consider following the agitpop mapping workshop from the Manual of Collective Mapping (pages 17-20) by the graphic research collective Iconoclasistas.
    • The group will now select one or two monuments to work with. Although working together as a team, each student will work individually to create a guide to the monument. For this activity, students will use the Monument Lab Field Trip activity guide, a hands-on activity devised by MonumentLab for taking a closer and critical look at monuments and their histories.
    • Now devise a critical proposal for an action or response to the chosen monument. This proposal can take any form: a critical text, an online intervention, a performance, a video, an audio work, or a combination of any of these, among others.
    • For inspiration, do some research on making strategies used by movements and artists for occupying monuments around the world. As some examples, we suggest the work of Black Lives Matter, Rhodes Must Fall, Paper Monuments, Project Say Something, Ivan Argote, Doris Salcedo, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Decolonize This Place. Do not merely copy the strategies used by these artists and movements, though. Adapt them and make them your own. You will need to be able to explain what your work is about from a conceptual and material point of view.
    • Share and discuss the completed guides within your group.
  • A3: Group Assignment: Presenting the Research in a Public Exhibition (one week)
    • The groups will organize a public exhibition, event, or another public presentation format. Each group will prepare a presentation of their critical proposal and summarize their research from the previous two weeks. For the summary, they will describe their choice of monuments related to their self-positioning and how they created their collective cartography of monuments.

Literature:

Practices/artists:

Statue of Robert Milligan with Black Lives Matter sign.
Statue of Robert Milligan, West India Quay on 9 June 2020

Statue of Robert Milligan, West India Quay on 9 June 2020 by Chris McKenna licenced with CC BY 4.0

This assignment was developed by Santiago Piñol Arévalo, Yunjoo Kwak for 2nd year Bachelor students of the Critical Studies / Autonomous Practices department at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam.

We want to acknowledge Iconoclasistas (Buenos Aires) and Monument Lab (Philadelphia) with their respective Manual and Field Guide. Both of them represent a committed practice that questions the status quo of public space from critical cartographic and geographic methodologies. There is no single way to use both documents, they are meant as guides to be used and adapted critically by those who use them.

Author’s Encouragement
In 1927 the Austrian writer Robert Musil stated that there is nothing as invisible as a monument: “The extraordinary thing about monuments is that you don’t notice them. There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.” However, since May 26, 2020, worldwide, after the assassination of George Floyd in the United States, we have witnessed that Musil’s thesis is far from reality. Not only in the United States but worldwide, the resignification of monuments has played a central role in the demonstrations and the demands for social justice. With the workshop, you will discover how this invisibility works in your local context. It is a process that can carry many discoveries and surprises.

Prior Knowledge and Preparation
The workshop is designed so that no prior knowledge is needed from the participants. Instead, it works as a practical introduction to its main concepts.

As a guide/teacher, you should prepare by reading the primary bibliography and handouts of the workshop to familiarize yourself with the main subjects of the workshop: critical knowledge from postcolonial, gender-queer theory, critical race, and Black studies. Then, you need one or two weeks to prepare the readings and test the whole workshop yourself.

We have provided some references for literature, artists, and social movements that might help you prepare for the workshop. However, this list can be expanded by both the guide/teacher and students participating in the course.

Accessibility:
Assistance for Learners
You can modify this workshop for different levels of prior knowledge by developing a workshop only using steps A 2.1 and A 2.2 in the A2 assignment section.

Additional Tools

  • Public space with meetings on Zoom or Teams.
  • Zoom
  • Microsoft Teams