2021 Spring Issue - ReBuilding

Creative note: For the collage-based graphic above, designer Jocelyn Lau was inspired by the diverse textures and colors of images and materials featured in this issue.

Our offerings in Spring 2021 are on ReBuilding and relate processes of damage and restoration, loss and healing, and the never-ending making and doing of things that are fundamental to living. In light of the pandemic, and historical and socio-cultural issues that long pre-dated 2020, dynamics of ‘building and rebuilding’ are in even more urgent need of consideration. Through the articles, interviews and essays in this issue we are collectively called upon to reflect on what it is to live through and cope with these times. What will we make of the ‘new’ awareness of our mutual entanglement and co-construction of this world? How will we relate to other people and environments, and incorporate others into our projects of re-building in ways that stress co-existence? When will we see that our fates are all entwined, as Francis Nyamnjoh (this issue) says, through our “incompleteness”? The diverse authors in this issue cover a lot of ground both in terms of the intellectual issues they invoke, the regions where they site their study, and the mundane but, nevertheless, central role of materials, objects, bodies and experiences on which their arguments rely. Communities feature as essential connective tissue, and people respond to loss and damage with visceral actions of protesting, healing, creating and resisting. In their insights, these are articles that not only offer us scholarly ideas but indicate possibilities of how to live and go forth into this world.

Mural hanging in the lobby of Ohavi Zedek Synagogue, 2016. Photo by Paul Gittlesohn. Courtesy of the Lost Mural Project & Ohavi Zedek Synagogue Archives.

In Seeing the Lost Mural: How Damage and Restoration Inform Close Looking, author Eliza West invokes both the undeniable physicality of damage as well as the spiritual and heritage issues involved in projects of conservation. the The 110-year-old Lost Mural, damaged by almost 30 years behind a false wall, is a patchwork of tones – some areas carefully cleaned by art conservators, other still dirty and showing chipped and missing paint. In this state, it exists simultaneously as an example of damage and restoration, and as both a significant cultural artifact and a work of religious art. This article shows how the conservation process and the practice of close looking allow us to better understand each of these aspects of the Lost Mural. After detailing the mural’s origins and subsequent damage, it pivots to explore the power of slow, careful examination to reveal an object’s secrets. Finally, this article considers the potential visual and emotional impact of a fully restored mural and the relationship between the mural’s perceived completeness and its ability to enchant or engage the public.

The public-facing stories of the Lost Mural are only just beginning to be told. But what do we make of the changing role of monuments and memorials when they become inseparable from a nation’s history? In Civil Religion in Turkey: The Unifying and Divisive Potential of Material Symbols, Patrycja Hala Saçan provides us a theoretical and analytical framework to study monuments as manifestations of citizens’ devotion and loyalty to the nation and state. Like other religions, she notes, civil religion needs symbols that bond citizens to different notions and experiences whether non-tangible forms (political beliefs, the law, or a constitution) or tangible (flags, images, statues, and spaces). Material objects aid in developing and sustaining national bonds in Turkey where objects and spaces have long helped to form and maintain Turkish identity, and mobilize and unite people. Of specific importance to Saçan’s essay, is how material forms of devotion to the Turkish state have changed since Recep Tayyip Erdoğan came to power in 2002 and secular values have been replaced with Islam as a basis for civil religion. The author argues that these types of acts indicate that the “spirit of civil religion” still needs material objects and spaces to be efficacious.

Continuing our investigation of monuments and materiality, the third offering by Lindsay Crisp, Breaking Down Colston: Destruction and Transformation in London and Bristol, investigates articulations of material and cultural affects in the deplinthing of the Bristol memorial to Edward Colston in June 2020, and Michael Landy’s destruction of his belongings in the art event Break Down in February 2001. In Break Down, as in the deplinthing of the Colston memorial, destruction changes and expands the plane upon which objects are intelligible by bringing to our attention their material composition. The protesters’ action in Bristol and Landy’s project of systematic dismantling and granulation differ profoundly in epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic terms. However, both events confront us with the fact that matter is never entirely ‘gone.’ In parallel with the traumatic and violent histories that the statue reproduces and mediates, we are left with the question of how to respond to its material existence, both before and after its deplinthing.

Statue being taken down. Cape Town, 2015. Photo by Wandile Goozen Kasibe.

Francis Nyamnjoh gives us an idea of what such a response might entail in Cecil John Rhodes: ‘The Complete Gentleman’ of Imperial Dominance. He uses Cecil Rhodes’ monuments and statues in Southern Africa as a case for the building of inclusive, representative, accommodating and accommodated sites. It draws on Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola’s metaphorical ‘The Complete Gentleman’ and the lessons on being and becoming. These remind us that Rhodes’ legacy just like his life suffer from illusions of completeness and a denial of debt and indebtedness. Nyamnjoh concludes that the call for humility and alertness to the sensitivities and sensibilities of the various shades of the imagined dream of a ‘rainbow nation’ demands that South Africans stop learning the wrong lessons from Rhodes, namely: exclusionary articulations of being, becoming and belonging informed by unequal encounters fueled by ambitions of superiority and zero-sum games of conquest. The paper challenges the reader to reflect on how stifling frameworks of citizenship and belonging predicated upon hierarchies of humanity and mobility and driven by a burning but elusive quest for completeness can be productively transcended by humility, conviviality and a positive incompleteness.

In October 2020, Monument Lab hosted their annual town hall, “Shaping the Past.” Through conversations between memory works, artists, and interdisciplinary scholars, “Shaping the Past” asked questions surrounding the future of monuments and monumentality, setting the stage for the future(s) of public space, artistic and curatorial activism, and community-building in the wake of 2020. Lillia McEnaney’s review gives us an overview of the key speakers, issues and potential of this exciting development that promises to shape how we understand monuments, history and heritage.

Awareness of racial injustice and social inequity among non-BIPOC people has been growing in the U.S. and the world. How does this relate to long-lasting colorist practices that take place in culturally-specific and situated ways? For instance, in India, colorism is both acknowledged but also simultaneously disavowed in practice. Rebecca Peters’ Colorism, Castism, and Gentrification in Bollywood explores prejudicial attitudes towards people with darker skin tones that, like all -isms, creates a toxic environment for anyone who does not fall into the ideal category. She traces how Bollywood contributes to biased and marginalizing practices of colorism, reinforcing the oppressive attitude of discrimination based on skin color and resulting in social hierarchies, perceptions, and stigma. This is especially important given the number of Bollywood actors, directors, and producers who publicly denounced racism in America, offering solidarity to Black Americans, while staying silent about the prejudice happening in their own communities. Peters argues that India’s film industry actively reinforces and reproduces colorist attitudes; commodifies colorism; and disenfranchises women, lower castes, and indigenous people. That there is a disconnect between the progressive values publicly stated and those practiced by leaders in Bollywood.

A close up of Lily Hope at her loom with her latest Chilkat blanket design, Between Worlds (2020). Photo by Sydney Akagi.

As a powerful contrast to the damage caused by colonial and racist practices (and explored in the articles so far), the next piece features the resilience and innovation of Chilkat and Ravenstail weaver Lily Hope. In an interview by Heather McClain titled “We’re Still Here” we are introduced to Hope’s Chilkat Protector (2020) mask series and learn about her experience as an artist, living, producing, and teaching during the Covid-19 global pandemic. Chilkat and Ravenstail weavings act as a veil between worlds and they are part of the cultural health and wealth of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian peoples in Alaska. Although the number of weavers has declined due to pressures of Western colonization, the knowledge of how to harvest, prepare the materials, and the spiritual aspects and care needed for weavers to produce is still very much alive as artists continue to teach and create works that reflect the world they experience. Each piece is imbued with the knowledge that is held and shared with generations of weavers. Hope’s Chilkat Protector masks continue this legacy and also serve as records of this time of upheaval and uncertainty, speaking to the importance of lifting up and taking care of each other, both physically and spiritually.