Public Monuments Research Articles

From Victory to Democracy: The “Democracy” in Thailand’s Victory Monument

Abstract This paper discusses the symbolic transformation of Thailand’s Victory Monument in the Thai public memory, from embodying militarism to representing the complicated concept of Thai democracy. In the beginning, the monument had an indirect connection to democracy. However, due to the spatial agency, such as protest activities occupying this structure, it has turned into one of Bangkok’s democratic spaces. By looking at the stories of contentious politics and narratives surrounding this structure, this study reveals that the development of the Victory Monument’s meanings mirrors the democratic struggles of the Thai people. It also applies prevailing discourses on Thai democracy to elucidate the connection between the monument and democratic movements. This research provides an understanding of Thailand’s democratic struggles through a different lens, promotes historical awareness, and preserves public memory by emphasizing the role of public monuments in Thai history, society, and democracy.

Seeing culture from below: Counter‐curating, counter‐ethnography, counter‐mapping

AbstractThis paper reflects on our mapping and database project britishmonumentsrelatedtoslavery.net, the first and currently most complete account of British representational public monuments related to British transatlantic slavery. It reproduces our headline findings and presents some new maps of the data. However, our main focus in this paper is on placing our project in a wider context of emergent practices and methods that inspired us. First, we note the exponential historical emergence of three connected critical, grassroots ‘counter’ practices across different institutions: of mapping, curating, and ethnography. We frame their critical commonality in their ‘counter’ approach to the nexus of what Benedict Anderson identified as three key ‘institutions of power … census, map, museum’, which have been central to conceiving and executing policy. Second, we prospectively identify some of the common structural causes that underlie this emergent assembly of instituent knowledge‐making practices from below.

Monument Contestation And The Interminable Negotiation Of Democratic Public Space

Controversies about public monuments or even iconoclastic interventions inflame passions and divide the minds: What for some is a long overdue purging of democratic public space of unworthy “heroes” or oppressive symbols, others condemn as vandalism and an attack on the cultural/political foundations of the polity. Such controversies, as they have arisen in recent years, especially in South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States, invite us to reflect on fundamental questions about democratic politics and democratic ways of life. If, in democracies, negotiations about who and what is to be publicly remembered (in veneration) are ultimately interminable because the demos is constantly in flux and with each generation novel ways of looking at history emerge, in what ways should these negotiations be conducted? From a philosophical point of view, it is less a matter of answering these questions unambiguously than of drawing inspiration from them for democratic self-understandings and a democratic culture of conflict.

Place, Memory, and the Landscape of Finnish Civil War Reconciliation

An important dimension of the newly independent Finland national narrative was constructed with the deeper historical knowledge of the civil-war monuments erected after independence in 1917. Finnish historical memory struggled to accommodate its horrific 1918 civil war in the new national heritage. The state rejected public monuments to the civil war’s vanquished “Reds”––the lost, socialist side of the war––but survivors, allies, and families of Reds fabricated a memorial landscape at the many mass graves, execution sites, and prison camps scattered throughout the country. This article examines the ways the Reds negotiated state historical narratives through the establishment of a monumental landscape that was forced to be outside urban spaces and created dissonances and counter-memories of the civil war and a measure of reconciliation between former combatants.

The Battle of the Statues in Berlin, 1859–71: Reflections on the Public Image and Standing of the German Classical Authors

ABSTRACT The article examines the process that led to the erection in 1871 of the monument to Friedrich Schiller in the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin. In the twelve years that passed between the conception of the monument and the unveiling, the project was dogged by disputes about its legitimacy and the form it should take. The undercurrent of these disputes was political, reflecting tensions between liberal and conservative opinion in the period. After tracing the history of the project, the article concludes with broader reflections on the place of public monuments in the commemorative culture of our own time.

“No woman's land?” The gendered patterning of urban street names in Romania

The gendered patterning of urban street names as part of the spatial production of broader male-centric memorial landscapes has been documented in a growing body of scholarship. Scholars from various cognate fields, such as cultural geography, gender and memory studies, and urban sociology, have unraveled the stark gender disparities favoring men inscribed into symbolic landscapes through place names, public monuments, and other memorial artefacts. This article sets out to overcome some of the limitations characterizing this strand of research – namely, the lack of statistical sophistication and the preference for case studies based on singular cities – by developing a multi-level modelling of gendered street nomenclature at the national level. The approach developed in this paper employs the complete collection of urban street names in Romania to assess the empirical adequacy of five hypotheses regarding the gendered structuring of the country's urban namescape. This analysis highlights the factors underpinning the variation of gender disparities in terms of Romania's historical regions, ethnic demographics and local ethnopolitics, city ranking within the national territorial administration and intra-urban stratification of the road network, as well as the effects brought about by postsocialist transformations.

Emplacing Eminescu: The Memorial Spatialization of Romania’s National Poet in Urban Street Nomenclature

Besides being canonized as Romania’s “national poet,” Mihai Eminescu was hailed as the “complete man of Romanian culture” and the “absolute Romanian,” among a profusion of encomiastic praises. Eminescu was immortalized in myriads of ways, from the most solemn and official (e.g. state-run rituals) to the most prosaic and banal (e.g. banknotes). In this article, I investigate the spatial dimension of Eminescu’s memory by charting the commemorative landscape defined by toponymy and public monuments honoring the national poet in Romania. Particular attention is given to Eminescu’s presence in urban street nomenclature and its regional distribution across the country. Drawing on several datasets of spatial information, I use statistical modeling techniques to examine the factors underpinning Eminescu’s memorial namescape. Employing logistic regression analyses, the article highlights an uneven geography of Eminescu’s memory and points out the variables structuring its particular spatial patterning. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .

Erecting monuments and making meanings: Analysis of the Statue of Peace using actor‐network theory

AbstractObjectiveThis article analyzes the monument‐building and meaning‐making processes in the construction of the Statues of Peace erected to commemorate the Korean “Comfort Women.” The tensions surrounding the erection of the Statues of Peace did not stop with their installation, as people then started to place different objects on the statues. This article uses actor‐network theory (ANT) to shed light on the formation that this has involved of a new representational and cultural politics.MethodsFirst, archival research was conducted to understand current issues involving both ANT and the Statues of Peace. Participant observations and semistructured interviews with NGOs were conducted.ResultsI look at the afterlife of the Statues of Peace in cases involving not only destruction or restoration but also smaller acts of support or subversion. New material quality and meanings were formed by these actions.ConclusionI show that ANT is a useful framework for understanding the representational complexity surrounding public monuments and their reception.

Casting Stones with Intent: Transnational Interventions towards Ethical and Reparative Memorialisation

In the summer of 2020, on the wave of the Black Lives Matter Movement, statues and public monuments became focal points of political struggle, perceived by many as symbolic reminders of pervading western imperial legacies. Yet, the debate over public memorialisation is far from new. Starting from the 2020 BLM protests in Britain and going back to previous campaigns, this article contextualises the toppling, effacing and removal of well-known statues of colonial agents in Britain, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand and examines artistic interventions which appropriate, challenge and shatter static historical interpretations of imperial figures and events. Our contention is that these interventions constitute diverse forms of performative and re-storied resistance reflecting transnational demands for redress and reparation.

Memories of a Glorious or Difficult Past? Portugal, Padrão dos Descobrimentos and the (Lack of a) 21st Century Reckoning

AbstractThe purpose of this paper is to analyse a particularly influential case of memory continuity in Portugal, that of Padrão dos Descobrimentos. Spaces of collective memory (such as public monuments) raise questions about what we celebrate, remember or rescue from oblivion, providing an opportunity to rethink the trauma. As such, care for public spaces is associated with ethical and cultural values. One of the difficulties with certain monuments has to do with the fact that they recall actions that today we see as traumatic acts. Thus, it is important to reflect on a critical use of memory. On August 8, 2021, Padrão dos Descobrimentos was the subject of a graffiti. One of the sides of the monument could read: “Blindly sailing for money, humanity is drowning in a scarlet sea”. A great controversy immediately arose around the meaning of this gesture, as well as the role played by a monument that, after being temporarily built in 1940 for the Portuguese World Exhibition, was, in its current version, inaugurated in 1960, on the occasion of the fifth centenary of the death of Infante D. Henrique. This episode reignited a deeper cleavage around the uses of history and memory, the Portuguese colonial past, and the role of the Padrão dos Descobrimentos as an instrument for the reproduction of nationalism. In this sense, and with the authors proposing a new theoretical frame of reference based on the thought of Arendt and Ricoeur, its critical reading becomes relevant.

Exegi monumentum: monuments of Jews in public spaces in Budapest as texts (1880–1944)

ABSTRACT The late 19th and early 20th centuries were a period when artistic endeavours, aimed at expressing a national identity, were thriving in Hungary. The Jewish minority of Budapest also found it important to be present in public spaces. A couple of years after the emancipation of Hungarian Jews, the first statues of Jewish personalities appeared on the streets of Budapest. Who were these statues dedicated to? Who were the artists commissioned, and who paid for them? What were the invisible texts beyond reading the statues as texts? What happened to the public monuments during the Second World War? This paper aims to respond to these questions as a part of a research project mapping Jewish interventions in public art in Budapest.

Spectres of ascendancy: Beckett, Yeats, and the politics of postcolonial amnesia

This essay reflects on the shifting status of “Ascendancy” as a colonial social formation and an historical and aesthetic category shaping the development of anticolonial and postcolonial thought in Irish writing and culture from the late nineteenth century to the contemporary moment of commemoration and anti-imperial reckoning. In particular, the essay considers how Ascendancy is a surprisingly useful category for thinking about Samuel Beckett and his reflections on power and empire. The essay reevaluates Beckett’s relationship with W. B. Yeats and explores the significance of their markedly different but intertwining relationships to Ascendancy. Looking at the arc of Beckett criticism within Irish studies alongside new readings of Yeats’s elegies for the Ascendancy Big House and his plays The Countess Cathleen and Purgatory, the essay explores how we might reevaluate that intellectual and cultural history amidst the recent controversies attending Ireland’s “Decade of Centenaries” and the reimagining of Ireland’s place within a global imperial history. As part of that exploration, the essay considers Beckett’s and Yeats’s legacies alongside twenty-first-century Ireland’s public monuments, commemorations, and architectural heritage while also reflecting on commissioned inquiries into the legacies of empire by the President of Ireland and Trinity College Dublin. In the midst of what President Michael D. Higgins has labeled a “feigned amnesia” around the legacies of empire in Ireland, the essay considers how Beckett’s work might be seen to have anticipated the terms of much of the current discourse.

Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments by Erin L. Thompson

<i>Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments</i> by Erin L. Thompson

Smashing Statues: Re-evaluating Iconoclasm in History

Abstract In 2020, as statues around the world were pulled down, intellectuals scrambled to make sense of the phenomenon. Veteran voices joined new experts from varied disciplines in contributing to the established field of iconoclasm studies, adding to the ongoing debates around history, memory, politics and public monuments. This seemingly global movement was fuelled by, and indeed fuelled, debates among the broader public about the meaning of statues in public life, and whether colonial statues of white men with dubious political and moral histories should remain in place or be removed from sight. The movement also met with a certain amount of backlash from conservative commentators who positioned themselves as the champions of Empire and a particular version of history in Britain, and from right-wing groups attempting to defend what they saw as an attack on white culture. The debate around statues, in other words, quickly became politically fraught. The authors ask what four recent works on iconoclasm add to an already extensive literature. What do they bring to the debates around history, memory, politics and public monuments? Two of the books (Thompson and Tunzelmann) are aimed at a broader readership, while the other two (Freedberg and Tugendhaft) are more specialised in their approach. We conclude that what is missing from these works is a global and comparative approach to the destruction of racist statues that also considers struggles against colonialism in national independence and Indigenous resistance movements throughout the modern and early modern periods.

Public Order, Public Protest and Public Monuments

Much public protest in recent years has been directed towards monuments to controversial figures who have profited from the slave trade or other exploitative activities. The most striking example in the United Kingdom has been the fate of the four individuals accused of damaging the statue to Edward Colston in Bristol as part of a Black Lives Matter demonstration. This article examines the arguments relied on by the defence at trial and in the Attorney-General's Reference which followed their acquittal. The article begins by setting protest relating to public monuments in its international and historical context.

Mapping British Public Monuments Related to Slavery

ABSTRACT This article is a product of the first complete survey of British public representational monuments in the U.K. related to transatlantic slavery, available online at https://www.britishmonumentsrelatedtoslavery.net. Identifying over 900 monuments, it brings this survey to bear on current public and policy debates about such monuments’ history, significance and meaning vis-à-vis slavery, art and heritage. Examining the monuments at scale, we identify the monuments’ patterns of production and provide data-led answers to specific questions such as what Britain’s most significant monumental legacies of slavery are; how enslaved people appear in British public monuments; and how this data might support rethinking these monuments.

‘Eminescu is everywhere:’ charting the memorial spatialization of a national icon

ABSTRACT Mihai Eminescu features prominently at the core of Romania’s pantheon of cultural heroes. Soon after his death in 1889, Eminescu was canonized as the ‘national poet.’ Drawing on several strands of scholarship, this article examines the spatial politics of Eminescu’s memorial cult in Romania. In particular, integrating four complete datasets of commemorative artefacts dedicated to Romania’s national poet (public monuments, street names, school nomenclature, and the toponymy of cultural centres), this study charts the regional spatialization of Eminescu’s memorial posterity. In accounting for the spatial differences underpinning this geography of public memory, the paper outlines two main factors: (1) Eminescu’s bio-topic presence, i.e., the memorialization of his journeys within the current day territory of Romania, and (2) the cultural politics of spatial appropriation, which implied the memorialization of Eminescu in the provinces incorporated in the Romanian Kingdom after the WWI (e.g., Transylvania) as a symbolic means of Romanianizing the landscape.

On the geographies of monuments and migration memory-making

Within the burgeoning geographical literature on public memory, a subset centres on what monuments can inform us about the complex realities of migrants whose lives often straddle between two (or more) nations, thus giving rise to trans-cultural and trans-local dynamics that exceed (and may even potentially challenge) the nation. This paper examines monuments established to presence the former-exiled-turned-migrant Moluccan community in the Netherlands to proverbially fold them into the Dutch population, and celebrate alterity in the context of pluralism. And yet, it also frames how these monuments reflect the limits and paradoxes of such an endeavour particularly by virtue of the fraught relationships – due to hitherto unresolved pasts but also tense presents – between the Moluccans and their host societies; as well as fault-lines – owing to myriad intersecting geographies astride religion, generational axes, socio-spatial variations, political affiliations or connections to original homelands – that exist among these Moluccans today, even as they may be born into (or have attained) citizenship status. More broadly, the paper puts into question the extent that public monuments, as a specific material commemorative genre, may in fact be appropriate for remembering phenomena typically associated with postcolonial mobility, diversity and flux.

Early Byzantine city walls of Hierapolis in Phrygia: demolishing and recycling the Imperial era monuments

The study concerns the city walls of Hierapolis in Phrygia (Denizli, Turkey), which were built in the second half of the 4th century AD or at the beginning of the 5th century AD, by systematically recycling architectural blocks from Imperial-era public monuments and funerary edifices. The preserved remains of the fortifications enclose the city along its northern, eastern and southern sides, leaving out large sectors of the urban area. Within the research activities of the Italian Archaeological Mission, topographical DGPS surveys of the remains were performed, and a geodatabase of the reemployed blocks was implemented with three main aims: i) the reconstruction of the building site of the city walls; ii) the identification of the demolished monuments of the Imperial-era used as “quarries” and the study of the procurement strategies of stone materials in the early-Byzantine Hierapolis; iii) the analysis of the relationship between the large building site of the fortifications and the other coeval construction sites and their impact on the socio-economic life of the city. The research allowed us to trace the development of the building site of the city walls, which, starting from the north, mainly reemployed blocks from the necropolises, North Theatre, North Agora and the shops along the plateia not-included into the early Byzantine Hierapolis. Moreover, numerous materials from the Gymnasium and other monuments located in the central part of the city but not yet identified on the ground were especially reused in the eastern and southern sectors of the walls. Lastly, the location of the recycled blocks made it possible even to reconstruct the various transportation routes linking the demolished monuments to the different sectors of the city walls. On cover:Late Roman wall, the portion immediately south of the West Gate (Porta Oea) with re-used blocks from first-century mausolea (Drawing by Francesca Bigi) and Tombstone of Regina from South Shields (Arbeia) (Tyne and WearArchives and Museums/ Bridgeman Images). E-ISSN (online version) 2611-3686 ISSN (print version) 0065-0900

The Military Cemeteries of the Great War in Croatia 1914–1941

This contribution strives to give an initial overview of various legal frameworks and the connected everyday practices concerning military cemeteries containing the remains of Croatian soldiers – for the most part members of the Austrian- -Hungarian armed forces – and to situate them within the changing political and cultural context, including memorial manifestations such as public monuments, individual war memoirs, and soldiers' frontline newspapers. As a consequence, the 1914–1941 period is further subdivided into the 1914– 1918 Habsburg period, the short 1918–1921 intermezzo, and the 1921–1941 Karađorđević period, albeit none of this was exactly uniform. Apart from literature and published sources, the research was also based on archival documents (Croatian State Archives in Zagreb, Archives of Yugoslavia in Belgrade).