Toppling Things as Memorial Contestation

Spectacle and Affect of Monument Removal
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-90-04-71263-8
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 35, 358 Seiten, Format (B × H): 162 mm x 241 mm, Gewicht: 699 g

Reihe: Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race

Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, monuments became a focal point: protestors toppled or spray-painted them, even danced on them. These politically, visually, and emotionally potent events may have looked instantaneous, yet frequently sprang from years of activism, as well as protracted political and academic debate. Toppling Things challenges stereotypical notions monument topplings as riotous, spontaneous, or irrational. Bringing together the ideas and emotions, the uncertainty and convictions, of artists, activists, and academics, the volume rejects a neatly tied-up, distant narrative. As it sheds light on the global, personal, immediate, and historical processes around the fall of a monument, the volume engages directly with the complexity of toppling activism and monument removal as a form of lived experience.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Macsotay, Tomas

El-Mecky, Nausikaä

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Thamyris Mission Statement

Notes on Contributors

List of Figures

Introduction

Tomas Macsotay and Nausikaä El-Mecky

PART 1: Overhauling: an Anatomy of Memorial Contestations

1 Local Origins of a Global Series: the 1990s Wave of Anti-colonial Iconoclasm

Nikolas Orr

2 Commemoration and (Re)Conciliation: Memorial Culture under Apologetic Settler Colonialism in Canada

Seraphine Appel

3 Contemporary Iconoclasm and Affect

Ernst van Alphen

4 Traumatic Monuments: Decolonial Iconoclasms and “Southern” Memories

Rhea Dehn Tutosaus and Miriam Oesterreich

5 To Remove, or Not To Remove, That Is the Question: the Troubled Legacy of Chiang Kai-shek Statues and Memorials in Democratized Taiwan

Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang

PART 2: Facing: Making a Difference in Memorial Activism

6 A Space of Freedom: Richmond’s Robert E. Lee Memorial and the Future of America

David Ehrenpreis

7 Conversations on Black Lives Matter

Tami Sawyer with Stacy Boldrick; Keith Magee with Richard Clay

8 Activist Statement: Down with J. P. Coen

Romy Rondeltap

9 Colonial Reckoning: Reexamining the Slave Past in Catalonia

Gerard Llorens Decesaris and Adrià Enríquez Àlvaro

PART 3: Waking: Imaginings of a Post-Monument

10 Dissolution of the Monuments

Paul Grace

11 The Agency of the Void: When a Monument Falls, Absence Transforms into Powerful Presence

Nausikaä El-Mecky

12 Toppling Things: Artistic Approaches and Media Strategies in Dealing with Monuments—Alexandra Pirici, Morehshin Allahyari, Julius von Bismarck & Julian Charrière

Ursula Ströbele

13 Taking a Knee: Permanence, Ritual and the Respect Insurrection

Tomas Macsotay

14 Artist/Activist Statement: In Search of an Aesthetic of Care: Recording BLM Protests and Documenting One’s Life in a Time of Reckoning

Ruth Somalo

PART 4: Prolonged Engagements: Artistic Testimonies

15 Flesh & Stone: Archives, Bodies and “Deep Time” in Ada Pinkston’s LandMarked

Cory Wayman

16 Empty Pedestals or The Aesthetics of Truth

Ada Pinkston

17 Artist Statement: On Disgraced Monuments, their Resignification and the Recovery of Emptied Sites

Krzysztof Wodiczko

18 Epilogue: 2020 Revisited

Tomas Macsotay and Nausikaä El-Mecky

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Tomas Macsotay is a Senior Lecturer at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, holding a PhD on eighteenth-century sculpture (Amsterdam, 2008). His six books and edited collections include, The Hurt(ful) Body. Performing and Beholding Pain (2017) and Recepción de Richard Wagner y Vanguardia en las Artes Españolas (2024).

Nausikaa¨ El-Mecky is tenure-track professor in Art History & Visual Culture at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Since her PhD (Cambridge 2013) she has been developing her self-defined field of “dangerous images,” e.g., in the monograph The Creation of Dangerous Images in Iconoclasm, (Routledge, forthcoming).