Monument Lab Town Hall: Shaping the Past

On October 8th and 9th, 2020, public art and history studio Monument Lab hosted their annual town hall, “Shaping the Past.” A project developed and produced in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut and the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (German Federal Agency for Civic Education/bpb), “Shaping the Past” investigated the fundamental question of how we represent and transform the ongoing legacies and effects of history and historical consciousness. In conversations made even more urgent by the then-looming U.S. election and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the program brought together scholars, artists, curators, and activists to explore innovate ways of approaching the continuing effects of settler colonialism as enacted through physical and temporal monuments. The program explored material approaches to justice, art-making, and historical trauma to envision both incremental and radical cultural, political, and societal change.

Monument Lab Town Hall Event Banner, 2020, screenshot courtesy of the author.

The program began with a land acknowledgement from Paul Farber (Director, Monument Lab). Occupying “stolen lands, built and worked by stolen hands,” Monument Lab is based in so-called Philadelphia, on Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Unami Lenape. Even though the Town Hall was hosted in a virtual space, Farber’s acknowledgement was uniquely provocative and effective, and it did not feel like a performance of liberalism (as land acknowledgements often do). It instead set a tone—and an expectation for—meaningful action. Farber directly confronted broken treaties, land theft, and slavery, and encouraged viewers to think about the land they occupy.

After these introductions, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow (Artist) screened her opening performance Junkanooacome, curated by Arielle Julia Brown (Founder and Director, Black Spatial Relics). Lyn-Kee-Chow importantly framed the work as “resistance through performance,” or the “performance of freedom.” The piece set the stage for the subsequent days’ programs: how can we be in “conversation and embodiment with yesterday’s monuments and today’s heroes?” How can we “create our own archetypes of power”?

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The first—and perhaps the most impactful—panel of the Town Hall, “Curating Memory and Justice” brought Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (Founder and Artistic Director, SAVVY Contemporary) and Jasmine Wahi (Holly Block Social Justice Curator, Bronx Museum) together in a conversation moderated by Patricia Eunji Kim (Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow and Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow, New York University; Assistant Curator, Monument Lab). With Farber’s land acknowledgement fresh in participants’ minds, the panelists’ conversation centered around questions of decolonization, decannonization, and responsibility—what responsibilities to curators hold, and to whom?

Wahi argued that the role of the curator is to be a facilitator, to bring a multivocal approach into the museum space and to “create a chorus rather than a solo performance.” For both Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Wahi, the era of the “superstar curator” is over, and it is now time for museum professionals (including Board members) to be reflexive in how the ideas of decolonization impact the role and idea of the curator as ‘the authority.’ In this, Ndikung noted the importance of “thinking of vantage points beyond the West [and] thinking about from different bodies,” through which we can invest in the power of storytelling, narration, and accessibility. Building off this, Wahi emphasized the importance of creating a place where people can see themselves, in which monuments and museums are the sum of many parts and many voices. The brilliant conversation ended with Ndikung asking, “what if the monument is the body?,” evoking The New York Times opinion piece from Caroline Randall Williams.

Both days of the Town Hall were broken up by short video presentations from the 2020 Monument Lab Transnational Fellows. Provocative presentations from fellows ranged from projects based in Berlin to Baltimore, asking questions that permeated all aspects of the program: What places are sacred to you? What would a crowdsourced monument look like? And how can we reconfigure public space in a way that does not facilitate white supremacy?

In the second panel of the first day, Michelle Angela Ortiz (Artist) moderated a conversation between Paul Ramírez Jonas (Artist; Professor, Hunter College) and Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara, Lakota, and European Artist), asking what the role of the artist is in the current moment. In a conversation again centering around responsibility—speaking back to the morning’s session— Jonas and Luger focused on their community-specific pieces and practices. Here, Luger discussed his exceptionally provocative piece Belonging. A memorial to the Buffalo Nation, Belonging confronts the historical legacies of buffalo genocide, and the debts that the so-called United States owes to both buffalo herds and to Indigenous communities (Hubbard 2015; see an interview between the author and Luger, in which they discuss this piece in more detail, here). And Jonas spoke about his own community-based and site-specific work, through which he aims to foster community engagement through promise-making and public art. Both spoke about their own positionalities, and Jonas explained that his work, which he hopes people see as a “visual platform for stories to be amplified,” is fundamentally about “love for our communities.”

In this conversation, a theme for the Town Hall emerged: there was a subtle but profound emphasis on human connection and well-being that is often quite absent from academic programs and conferences. For example, here, Ortiz asked Jonas and Luger how they are “taking care of [their] spirit at this moment.” To this, Luger explained that he has “been reminded that we need to make sure our immediate community is strong and solid before we reach out outside of that. Otherwise, what is the point?” 

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Day two began with “Memory, Trauma, and Transformation.” Daniela Schiller (Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine) and Mabel Wilson (Professor of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University) were brought into conversation by moderator Sue Mobley (Senior Research Scholar, Monument Lab). This panel was unique within the Town Hall, as it brought an architect in conversation with a neuroscientist, resulting in a profoundly trans-disciplinary conversation. Like several other panels, themes of agency, power, temporality were omnipresent, but this conversation brought Shiller’s perspective of memory retrieval as a biological process into the fold. Schiller clearly and effectively explained the ways in which memory is inherently vulnerable and connected to the environment. Memories biologically work to “understand the present and predict the future;” they are not “who we are, they are something that we interact with and observe. […] Memory is a creative process.” With this framing, Wilson discussed intergenerational trauma and the fundamental importance of empathy. Importantly, Wilson and Schiller used the framing of “re-membering” to think through the ways in which memories are formed, mediated, shared, and reconciled.

Though the added neuroscience perspective was indeed provocative, one cannot help wonder what(or whose) understanding of the body (or bodies) this conversation is based on, and why we are encouraged to think that neuroscience gives ‘legitimacy’ to larger social, political, and cultural processes. And perhaps if we are to introduce neuroscience into these conversations, are there other methods of studying the body—and embodiment—that would enrich our understandings. Indeed, the introduction of neuroscience may have been more productive if the program itself was longer, and if it allowed for a deeper investigation into the field’s own biases and interactions with the social sciences. 

The second day of presentations from the Transnational Fellows again used the lenses of anti-racism, decolonization, and class consciousness to mobilize public memory through artistic projects. Overall, these presentations worked to illuminate the brilliant and wide-reaching community of artists whose practices are dedicated to memory work. This sense of community is made even more tangible when put into context with the Town Hall’s focus on transnational conversations, as well as the ongoing intellectual and physical isolation that we are all currently experiencing in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. 

In the program’s final conversation, moderated by Ken Lum (Curatorial Advisor and Co-Founder, Monument Lab), Seph Rodney (Senior Editor at Hyperallergic) and Mirjam Zadoff (Director, Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism) focused on ideas of embodiment, empathy, democracy, and engagement. This panel, “Confronting Art and History,” like several others, began with a personal “check-in,” again beginning the conversation by asking how panelists are maintaining themselves at the current moment. Here, returning to larger themes of the body previously discussed by Schiller, Rodney emphasized the importance of being embodied—being intentionally in one’s body, using running as an example—which Zadoff echoed. How does the physical processes of running or walking impact how one experiences their surroundings, and their role within them? From here, the conversation moved towards embodiments within museums and other art spaces. Indeed, for Zadoff, the fundamental questions are “what kinds of spaces we are envisioning for the future,” and how can we “introduce the idea of multivocal democracy into the memory-making process?” This idea of democracy—put into conversation with intergenerational issues such as German colonialism and the George Floyd protests—fostered dialogue surrounding the role of visitor engagement and collective memory in art spaces. Bringing these two desperate topics into conversation felt slightly disjointed, but overall exemplified the far-reaching relevance of memory work. And ending on a tangible note, Rodney moved towards questions of funding, consumerism, and the structures of museums, asking how we can fundamentally shift the financial structure of the institution to foster meaningful change.

Can we make museums into democracy labs?

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The Monuments Lab Town Hall was an incredibly productive, inspiring, and useful event. Despite the inability to have in-person conversations, the Monument Lab team brought together a unique collection of voices to contemplate the future of monuments and monumentality, made even more urgent due to ongoing tragedies of the current sociopolitical moment.

As previously noted, the coronavirus pandemic subtly ran throughout the program—conversations were refreshingly personal. In an academic context, where scholars are often dehumanized and reduced to their research output, these panel discussions were peppered with simple personal check-ins—a subtle yet radical shift away from traditional conference proceedings.

Despite its successes, there was a distinct lack of perspectives from anthropology, archaeology, museum studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and cultural heritage studies—panelists largely came from either contemporary art or art historical perspectives. Indeed, additional perspectives from Indigenous scholars—particularly from Lenape cultural workers, whose land Monument Lab occupies—would have been a useful and needed addition. How can we theorize about and plan for the re-making of public space without foregrounding the voices of those whose lands we are guests upon?   

Monument Lab’s “Shaping the Past” initiative is not ending with the Town Hall. With exhibition of the same name scheduled for 2021 and a multilingual book edited by Farber and Eunji Kim on the docket, it is clear that Monument Lab is positioning itself to be a global hub for scholarly and artistic innovation in the future of monuments and public space.

References

Hubbard, Tasha. “Buffalo Genocide in Nineteenth Century North America: ‘Kill, Skin, and

Sell.’” In Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, edited by Alexander Laban

Hinton, Andrew Wollford, and John Benvenuto, 292-305. Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 2014.

Monument Lab. “Monument Lab Town Hall: Shaping the Past – Day 01.”  YouTube Video.

October 8, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Uq6PstCGI

Monument Lab. “Monument Lab Town Hall: Shaping the Past – Day 02.” YouTube Video.

October 9, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6f4ivV-6zY

Museum of Indian Arts and Culture. “Meet the Artist: Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa,

Arikara, Lakota, and European, 2020 Artist and Scholar Dialogue Series.” YouTube Video. December 15, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLICccc-mKA&list=PLpByf0zT8uFuvS4QBK1GYQxDpo2m2fYri&index=6&t=1445s. 

Williams, Caroline Randall. “You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body is a Confederate

Monument.” The New York Times. June 16, 2020.