6 . What role do memorials play in urban space today ? Are they useful for transmitting memories beyond the generation that raised them or , as Robert Musil said , are they condemned to invisibility ?
AH : Memorials and monuments in urban space don ’ t so much transmit memories as they point to memory clusters , conjure up past events , both triumphs and catastrophes , that still resonate in living memory in the public sphere . Since the 1990s , we have seen the rise of the counter-monument or countermemorial that shunned traditional monumental form and commemorated not those who died for the glory of the nation , but those who were persecuted and murdered in search of political power , racial supremacy or nationalist phantasms of purity . But there is no reason why the counter-monument one day could not become as invisible as the traditional kings on horses or queens on thrones Musil had in mind . fascism , slavery or colonialism should be taken down . Otherwise , I favour strategies of redressing and refunctioning monuments in order to provide lessons of learning about the past . Certain monuments , as Paolo Vignolo has argued , can be turned into ‘ mockuments ,’ a counter-monumental practice , which colours a copy of the Statue of Liberty black , dresses a European queen up as an Andean women or pokes carnivalesque fun at the heroes of Latin American independence struggles . They make a traditional monument productive for learning a history lesson by provoking its viewers to laugh and think differently about the figure on the pedestal and by undermining monumentalization itself . At the same time , neither destroying nor mocking monuments will ever be enough to deal with the legacies of colonialism and slavery . The debate about memorials and monuments may lead to difficult and urgent questions of restitution and repair and ultimately to demands for a different politics .
7 . What do you think of the iconoclasm that has affected different monuments dedicated to slavers and people from colonial history in various countries around the world in recent years ?
AH : What is most interesting in the current iconoclasm directed against monuments to slavers and other figures representing colonial rule or , in the U . S , the confederacy , is that these are traditional heroic monuments rather than critical countermonuments . They have probably been always more visible to people of color and former colonial subjects than to white citizens . The current iconoclasm is a sign of a healthy and robust debate about the injustices of the colonial past , which have recently been picking up in the U . S . as well as in Europe . Toppling a monument can be great fun , an urban celebration , a purging of a festering past , but eliminating it also makes it invisible , potentially eradicating a history from which one might still learn . I do think that celebratory monuments to
8 . In the face of citizen protests , one of the most common responses by administrations is to opt for removing conflictive monuments from public space . These actions have , in turn , led to a trail of ruins , pedestals or empty , innocuous sites appearing in their place . What labour of memory is involved ?
AH : As I suggested , eliminating a monument involves no real labor of memory . Removing a monument , say , to a museum may permit it to maintain its educational value . In itself , the monument is not a very subtle medium . It becomes successful only in relation to live memory debates in the public sphere . Thus one could say that the monuments to the confederacy in the United States , after slumbering for decades in blind oblivion , have become nationally successful in recent years to the extent that they trigger protest against the lingering racism in the United States . Their ‘ success ’ can be measured by the intensity of the demands to demolish them , which is in turn fed by the Black
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Observing Memories Issue 6