Monumental Cares: Activist Ethics and Representation in Public Space, May 13, 2022
A discussion with Elke Krasny (Vienna), Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch (Vienna), and Mechtild Widrich (Chicago).
If monuments are public expressions of what societies care to remember, they also have to be understood as evidence to what societies choose to forget. Deadly colonial imperialism and patriarchal power glorified in stone or metal are the memory infrastructure of our cities. Can public space be freed from the violence of monuments? Can a democratic public space become the site for representing monumental worries? We argue for an activist ethics of im/permanent material articulations, spatial and visual solidarity, shared concerns, and planetary care.
