Contested Urban Spaces: Monuments, Traces, and Decentered Memories (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies) 3030875040, 9783030875046

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Part I: Approaching Contested Urban Memoryscapes
Chapter 1: Introduction: Contested Memory in Urban Space
Contribution to Memory Studies: Urban Space, Inequality, and Decentered Remembrance
Decentered and Decentering Memory in the City
Book Structure and Chapter Overview
References
Chapter 2: (In)visible Monuments. What Makes Monuments Controversial?
Toppling Monuments—Change in Political Circumstances
Counter-monuments—Changes in Public and Aesthetic Sensibility
A New Form of Visibility—Karl Lueger’s Monument in Vienna
Migration Monuments
Migration and Nation-building in the United States, Argentina, and Brazil
Migration as Rupture
The First “Flight and Migration Monument” in Germany
The (anti-)colonial Monument in Bremen
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: Australian Welcome Walls and Other Sites of Networked Migrant Memory
Australian Migration History
Welcome Walls
User-Pays Commemoration
Remembering Hyphenated Australians
What About the Not-Yet-Hyphenated?
Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: Negotiating Binaries in Curatorial Practice: Modality, Temporality, and Materiality in Cape Town’s Community-led Urban History Museums
Introduction
Museums as Part of the South African Memoryscape
The Modality of Memory: Remembering-forgetting
The Temporality of Memory: Past-present
The Materiality of Memory: Absence-presence
Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: Contesting Sensory Memories: Smithfield Market in London
Introduction: Memory and the Senses
The Site
Interdisciplinary Approach
Sensory Histories and Memories of Smithfield
Conclusion: Beyond Sensory Nostalgia
References
Part II: Decentered Memories
Chapter 6: Across the Atlantic. Silences and Memories of Nazism in Remote Lands (Eldorado, Misiones)
The Place, the Photo
The History
At a Distance, Silences and Half Words
The Recognition of Nazism in Town, Past and Present
Jews in Town. Words Unspoken. Hints and Silences
The Photo in the Museum, Now
The Personal Dimension in Academic and Political Life
Some Closing Remarks
References
Chapter 7: [De]colonial Memory Practices in Germany’s Public Space
German Colonialism and the Coalition Agreement
A New Humboldt Forum on Old Foundations?
Bismarck Goes 2021
“Soft” Colonial Topographies
Who Belongs?
Monopolization, Competition, and Relativization
Prevalent Racist Knowledge in Society
Colonial Myths
Monuments from Pre-Democratic Times
Preventing Atrocities
References
Chapter 8: Splinters Between Memory and Globalization: Cosmic Generator Installation by Mika Rottenberg in Münster at Skulptur Projekte 2017
Introduction
The Asian Shop: Aspects of a Non-Lieu and Traces
The Video: The Narrative Node as Kaleidoscope
Female Service Staff in Their Workplaces
“Subversive Affirmation” and “Entropy and the New Monuments”
Conclusion: “Hidden Labor… bringing the front to the back and the back to the front”
References
Part III: Fallen Monuments
Chapter 9: The Empty Pedestal: Artistic Practice and Public Space in Luanda
Art and Urban Space in Luanda
The Empty Pedestal
Reworking of the Empty Space on top of the Pedestal
Rearranging the Remains from the Top of the Pedestal
Fictionalizing the Remains
Intervention into the Urban Script
References
Chapter 10: They Took Him Away but It Was Like He Was Still Around: Can New York City Move Beyond the Legacy of J. Marion Sims?
Introduction
Background History
The Fame and Infamy of J. Marion Sims
Engaging in Issues of Race and Memory
Moving Beyond the Legacy of J. Marion Sims?
Conclusion
References
Chapter 11: Disgraced Monuments: Burying and Unearthing Lenin and Lyautey
Introduction
Commemoration and Remembrance
Monuments and Heritage
Statues also Die
The Afterlife of Fallen Statues
Conclusion
References
Part IV: Traces of Violence
Chapter 12: Urban Memory After War: Ruins and Reconstructions in Post-Yugoslav Cities
Introduction
Urban Space and the Memory of War
Contested Memories of the 1990s Wars in Two Post-Yugoslav Capital Cities
Dissonant Memories: Monuments and Memorials in Postwar Urban Space
“Violent Reconstructions”: Intentional Monuments and Contested Memories in Belgrade and Sarajevo
Ruins: Between Realms of Memory and Places of Amnesia
Conclusion
References
Chapter 13: Monumentality, Forensic Practices, and the Representation of the Dead: The Debate about the Memory of the Post-Civil War Victims in the Almudena Cemetery, Madrid
Introduction
Topography of Victim Memorials: Between Local Mnemonic Designs and Global Aesthetic Circulations
The Memory Site at La Almudena: The Controversy Over the Memorial
The Importance of the Names, and the ‘Chequistas’ Dispute
Conclusion
References
Chapter 14: The Mass Grave and the Memorial. Notes from Mexico on Memory Work as Contestation of Contemporary Terror
Opening
Mexican Terror Fields and Memory Agencies
Memorial Markers at Sites of Extermination
Memory as Aesthetic Irruption
Trace, Not Metaphor: Materiality and Imagination
References
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN MEMORY STUDIES

Contested Urban Spaces Monuments, Traces, and Decentered Memories Edited by Ulrike Capdepón Sarah Dornhof

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies Series Editors Andrew Hoskins University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK John Sutton Department of Cognitive Science Macquarie University Macquarie, Australia

The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to that of memory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we remember it’; changes in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory; panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed to an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirty years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This groundbreaking series tackles questions such as: What is ‘memory’ under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination? More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14682

Ulrike Capdepón  •  Sarah Dornhof Editors

Contested Urban Spaces Monuments, Traces, and Decentered Memories

Editors Ulrike Capdepón Universität Konstanz Konstanz, Germany

Sarah Dornhof Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Berlin, Germany

ISSN 2634-6257     ISSN 2634-6265 (electronic) Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies ISBN 978-3-030-87504-6    ISBN 978-3-030-87505-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87505-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: “Liberty for all” by artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo (photographer Martin van Vreden) This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

This edited volume would not have been possible without the support, kindness, and patience of many people, colleagues, and friends. Many contributions selected for this volume stem from the international workshop “Contested Memory in the City: Monuments, Archives, Traces” held at the Institute for Advanced Study, Center of Excellence “Cultural Foundations of Social Integration” at the University of Konstanz that took place in November 2018. Central ideas and arguments that went into this book were initially discussed and deepened in that context. Since then, however, the chapters and topics have expanded in number to include new contributions that cover changing perceptions and debate in the associated fields of memory studies and urban studies. Nor could this book have been published without the benevolent collaboration of the contributing authors. Our deepest thanks go to Aleida Assmann, Alison Atkinson-Phillips, Gruia Bădescu, Anne Huffschmid, Elisabeth Jelin, Stefanie Kappler, Antoinette McKane, Susanne Mersmann, Anke Schwarzer, Nadine Siegert, Jill Strauss, and Astrid Svenson. Their great insights, expert knowledge in the field, and trust have been crucial. Our very special thanks go to artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo who, with racism, sexism, and exclusionary discourses on the rise around the world, designed the wooden statue Liberty for All (2018) shown on the cover, the Statue of Liberty with a Black African American identity as a strong statement against historical denial and contemporary racism. Thanks for sharing your work with us, Fernando. We are also indebted to Aleida and Jan Assmann who, through the Research Project “Memory in the City” funded by the Balzan Foundation, v

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

supported the book project in many ways. Furthermore, we are grateful to Christina Wald, director of the Center for Cultural Inquiry at the University of Konstanz, for her support. Crucial for this edited volume was the assistance of Kate Vanovitch and Brenda Kirsch, who copyedited the manuscript. Their careful proofreading and precise suggestions greatly improved the text. Kate also translated parts of the manuscript from German and Spanish to English. We especially appreciate Kate’s work under pressure, always keeping us reassured and calm. Our thanks also go to Corinne Wiss, who assisted us in preparing the manuscript. Finally, we are grateful to both the Memory Studies Series editors at Palgrave Macmillan for accepting our proposal and the anonymous reviewers for their very insightful, encouraging, and helpful comments. Ulrike Capdepón, Guadalajara

Sarah Dornhof, Rabat

Contents

Part I Approaching Contested Urban Memoryscapes   1 1 Introduction: Contested Memory in Urban Space  3 Ulrike Capdepón and Sarah Dornhof 2 (In)visible Monuments. What Makes Monuments Controversial? 23 Aleida Assmann 3 Australian Welcome Walls and Other Sites of Networked Migrant Memory 45 Alison Atkinson-Phillips 4 Negotiating Binaries in Curatorial Practice: Modality, Temporality, and Materiality in Cape Town’s Communityled Urban History Museums 65 Stefanie Kappler and Antoinette McKane 5 Contesting Sensory Memories: Smithfield Market in London 83 Astrid Swenson

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Contents

Part II Decentered Memories 103 6 Across the Atlantic. Silences and Memories of Nazism in Remote Lands (Eldorado, Misiones)105 Elizabeth Jelin 7 [De]colonial Memory Practices in Germany’s Public Space125 Anke Schwarzer 8 Splinters Between Memory and Globalization: Cosmic Generator Installation by Mika Rottenberg in Münster at Skulptur Projekte 2017147 Susanne Mersmann Part III Fallen Monuments 167 9 The Empty Pedestal: Artistic Practice and Public Space in Luanda169 Nadine Siegert 10 They Took Him Away but It Was Like He Was Still Around: Can New York City Move Beyond the Legacy of J. Marion Sims?185 Jill Strauss 11 Disgraced Monuments: Burying and Unearthing Lenin and Lyautey205 Sarah Dornhof Part IV Traces of Violence 227 12 Urban Memory After War: Ruins and Reconstructions in Post-Yugoslav Cities229 Gruia Bădescu

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13 Monumentality, Forensic Practices, and the Representation of the Dead: The Debate about the Memory of the Post-Civil War Victims in the Almudena Cemetery, Madrid253 Ulrike Capdepón 14 The Mass Grave and the Memorial. Notes from Mexico on Memory Work as Contestation of Contemporary Terror275 Anne Huffschmid Index295

Notes on Contributors

Aleida Assmann  held the chair of English Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Konstanz, Germany, from 1993–2014, and taught as a guest professor at various universities (Princeton, Yale, Chicago, and Vienna). In 2014 she received the Heineken Prize for History (2014) and, together with her husband Jan Assmann, the Balzan Prize (2017) and Peace Award of the German Book Trade (2018). Alison  Atkinson-Phillips is Lecturer in Public History at Newcastle University (UK). Her research interests include “marginalized” histories, how difficult pasts are dealt with in the present, public art, and place-based memory work. She is the author of Survivor Memorials: Remembering Trauma and Loss in Contemporary Australia (2019). Gruia  Bădescu (PhD, University of Cambridge) is an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Konstanz. His research focuses on the connection between place-making and dealing with the past, including postwar reconstruction in Southeastern Europe and the Middle East, and spatial engagements with political violence in Latin America. Ulrike Capdepón  holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Hamburg and is a research fellow of the Reconstructing Memory in the City project, based at the Center for Cultural Inquiry (ZKF), and the research coordinator of the Civic Strength (Gemeinsinn) research project, both at the University of Konstanz. Currently she holds a DAAD longterm Guest Professorship at CUCSH, Universidad de Guadalajara,

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Mexico. Her research interests include memory studies and space as well as human rights policies in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. Sarah Dornhof  is a research fellow at the Humboldt University Berlin. She received her PhD in Cultural Studies and Anthropology from the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder. Her current research examines contemporary art and cultural politics in Morocco in relation to questions of cultural history, collective memory, and archival practice. Among her publications are Alternierende Blicke auf Islam und Europa: Verletzung als Rationalität visueller Politik (2016). She co-­ edited F(r)ictions of Art (2016); Situating Global Art. Topologies—Temporalities—Trajectories (2017); and Islam and the Politics of Culture in Europe. Memory, Aesthetics, Art (2013). Anne Huffschmid  is a cultural scientist and audiovisual researcher. She works at the Latin American Studies Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin and specializes in topics such as social memory and urban studies, visual cultures, and experimental research methods. Her long-term project “Memory in the Megacity” explored traumatic memories in Buenos Aires and Mexico City (see the monography Risse im Raum). Her latest project dealt with forced disappearance and forensic agencies (see the documentaries Persistence and Dato sensible as well as the web documentary Forensic Landscapes). Elizabeth  Jelin  is an Argentine sociologist engaged in research in the areas of human and citizenship rights, social inequalities, gender and the family, social movements, and memories of political repression. She is a senior researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and at IDES (Institute of Economic and Social Development) in Buenos Aires. She is the author of numerous books and articles, among them, State Repression and the Labors of Memory (2003) and La lucha por el pasado. Cómo construimos la memoria social (2017)— translated into English as The Struggle for the Past. How we Construct Social Memories (2020). In 2013, she was awarded the highest prize for scientific achievement in Argentina, the Bernardo Houssay National Prize, for her research trajectory in the social sciences. In 2014, she received a Doctorate Honoris Causa at Université Paris Ouest, Nanterre—La Defense. Stefanie  Kappler is Associate Professor of Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding at Durham University. Her main research interests include

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spatial approaches to peace, memory politics, and the role of the arts in peace formation processes. Recent publications include Peacebuilding and Spatial Transformation: Peace, Space and Place, (2017), co-authored with Annika Björkdahl, as well as journal articles in Political Geography, Peacebuilding, Memory Studies, Cooperation and Conflict, Review of International Studies and Millennium—Journal of International Studies. She is working on projects to investigate the connection between memory politics, cultural heritage, and peacebuilding (see http://peaceandmemory.net/), funded by the Swedish Research Council and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, as well as the role of the arts in peace formation processes, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK. Antoinette  McKane  is Lecturer in Museum and Heritage Studies at Liverpool Hope University where she coordinates the MA in Museum and Heritage Studies in partnership with National Museums Liverpool. Her PhD was funded by the AHRC and awarded by the University of Liverpool, in close collaboration with Tate Liverpool. She is particularly interested in the social and political roles of art museums, galleries, and exhibitions. Her research interests include community engagement and participation in art museums, and the relationship between museums, galleries, and urban change. She is an active member of the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Centre for War and Peace Studies at Liverpool Hope University. She recently co-edited a special issue of Kritika Kultura focusing on the theme of arts, peace, and conflict. Susanne  Mersmann is an art historian. She focuses her research on French war monuments, critical museum studies, and contemporary art practice. Her doctoral thesis on the Musées du Trocadéro: Viollet-le-Duc and canonical discourse in 19th-century Paris was awarded the Book and Art Review Fair Prize at the French National Art History Festival in Fontainebleau. Anke  Schwarzer  is a journalist and social scientist based in Hamburg. She conducted research for the German Institute for Human Rights in Berlin and the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights in Vienna between 2016 and 2018. There she contributed to the monthly data collection on the current migration situation in the European Union. Since 2019 she is member of the Advisory Board for the Decolonization of Hamburg at the Hamburg Department of Culture.

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Nadine Siegert  is a researcher and curator, and a publisher with iwalewabooks. She works for the Goethe Institute and was the Deputy Director of Iwalewahaus, University of Bayreuth (2011–2019). In 2016, she published her PhD (Re)mapping Luanda on nostalgic and utopian aesthetic strategies in contemporary art in Angola. Jill Strauss  is Associate Professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. Her research involves restorative practices and the visual interpretation of narrative and difficult histories. She is co-editor of Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (2019) and other articles and book chapters. Astrid Swenson  is Professor of History at Bath Spa University. Her publications include The Rise of Heritage in France, Germany and England, 1789-1914 (2013) and From Plunder to Preservation: Britain and the Heritage of Empire (edited with Peter Mandler, 2013).

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 8.1

Aljoscha, the dis- and replaced Russian soldier (a “monument of gratitude”), Tallinn. Photograph by the author 26 Namibia Memorial (Antikolonialdenkmal, Bremen), Fritz Behn 1931. Photograph: Peter Schröder, CC BY-­SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons 40 Sydney Welcome Wall, Pyrmont Bay. Photograph taken by the author, November 2013 51 Reasons to Remember Wall, last remaining section of South Australia’s first native school. Photograph by the author 60 Charterhouse Street Port of London Authorities. Photograph by the author 94 Photograph displayed in the Eldorado Cooperative Museum. Photograph by the author, 2017 107 Exhibition view, Eldorado Cooperative Museum. Photograph by the author, 2017 108 Map of Eldorado 110 Humboldt-Forum Berlin. Photograph by Dirk Schäfernolte, 2020129 Bismarck-Denkmal Hamburg. Photograph by the author, 2020 132 Mika Rottenberg, Cosmic Generator, 2017, Asian shop, exterior view during the Skulptur Projekte 2017, Münster/ Germany. LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster/Skulptur Projekte Archiv/Henning Rogge ©Mika Rottenberg. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth 150

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List of Figures

Fig. 8.2 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 11.1 Fig. 11.2

Fig. 12.1 Fig. 12.2 Fig. 13.1 Fig. 13.2 Fig. 14.1 Fig. 14.2

Mika Rottenberg, Cosmic Generator, 2017. The first saleswomen in the Yiwu Market, video still (2:41); Battista, 2019 156 António Ole, Mitologias, painted metal, 1985, photograph by the author 174 Kiluanji Kia Henda, Redefining The Power IV (with Miguel Prince), from the series Homem Novo, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Fonti 176 J. Marion Sims Pedestal, photograph by the author 189 Vinnie Bagwell, Victory Beyond Sims (rendering). Courtesy of the artist, Vinnie Bagwell, and BCT Design ©2019 196 Mohamed Arejdal, Face à Lyautey, 2019. Digital photographic print. Courtesy of the artist and Comptoir des Mines Galerie, Marrakech214 Head of the monumental Lenin statue (by Nikolai Tomski) in Berlin-­Friedrichshain, erected in 1970, dismantled in 1992. View of the exhibition “Unveiled. Berlin and its Monuments” in the former Provisions Depot at Spandau Citadel, Berlin. Photograph by the author, 2020 221 The Generalštab complex, destroyed in 1999 by the NATO bombings. Photograph by the author 242 Vraca Memorial Park, Sarajevo, used for shelling the city and then destroyed during the Siege of Sarajevo (1992–1995) by Bosnian Serb paramilitaries. Photograph by the author 247 Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Memorial, Almudena Cemetery, Madrid. The memorial after the names were removed in November 2019. Photograph by the artist 268 Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Memorial, Almudena Cemetery, Madrid. The memorial in its current state, after its demolition and the removal of the name plaques. Photograph by the artist 270 Memorial Lagos de Moreno (video-still short documentary “Dato sensible”, ©Huffschmid and Diaz Tovar) 280 Aerial image of the excavation site in Colinas de Santa Fe, Veracruz (video-still short documentary “Dato sensible”, ©Huffschmid and Diaz Tovar) 282

PART I

Approaching Contested Urban Memoryscapes

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Contested Memory in Urban Space Ulrike Capdepón and Sarah Dornhof

In times of intensifying migration, mobility, and diversity, as well as rising populism and nationalistic backlash, urban memory politics has become an increasingly contested field. In 2020, we witnessed a proliferation of worldwide protests against monuments that glorify colonial and racist legacies on the one hand, and against current racism and state violence on the other. What started with the Black Lives Matter movement evolved into a widespread global movement for racial justice, connected to various demands and actions to decolonize urban spaces, but also public institutions such as museums, archives, and universities. In the wake of all this, urban memory culture is now a central issue of contestation, both in its historical and topological dimensions, and in its racial, social, and gendered constitution.

U. Capdepón (*) Universität Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany e-mail: [email protected] S. Dornhof Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 U. Capdepón, S. Dornhof (eds.), Contested Urban Spaces, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87505-3_1

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Similar to monuments, collective memory reveals its political dimension primarily when it is questioned, contested, abandoned, or transformed. The highly mediated acts of toppling statues—such as that of slave-trader Edward Colston in Bristol, Congo colonizer King Leopold II in Brussels, or Confederate monuments in the United States, accompanied by violent clashes with white supremacists in Charlottesville—are visible manifestations of a stirring up of hitherto marginalized, forgotten, and suppressed memories. We take the urban space as a starting point for thinking about practices, stakeholders, narratives, and imaginations within the dense complexity of this material, symbolic, and performative contestation of memory. By addressing a wide range of geographies, histories, and collectivities, the contributions to this book focus on historical circumstances and contemporary practices in which urban space and articulations of memory interrelate and transform each other. The city, as well as the margins and outsides which demarcate it as a center, clearly shows, along and across geopolitical and cultural differences, ways in which spatial memories are fragmented and fluid, moving between historical inscriptions and erasures, silence and oblivion, questioning and resignification of monuments and traces. While the book focuses on urban centers in different parts of the world as sites where collective memories of diverse people, of different times and places, connect, it seeks to decenter perspectives on urban memory—in terms of spaces, subjects, and issues. Contributions to the book draw attention to topics and perspectives that have long been marginalized in urban memory manifestations, such as colonial histories (Schwarzer, Strauss) and migration (Assmann, Jelin, Atkinson-Phillips); to geographies that do not figure centrally in memory studies, like Angola (Siegert) or Morocco (Dornhof); to contestations of forgetting and erasure, such as remembrance of post–civil war victims in Madrid (Capdepón) or of contemporary violence in Mexico (Huffschmid); and to ways in which physical sites and material traces remember, as in urban memory in post-Yugoslav cities (Bădescu), in an art installation by Mika Rottenberg (Mersmann), in curatorial practices in community-led urban museums in Cape Town (Kappler and McKane), or in sensory memory in London (Swenson). From different academic fields and interdisciplinary approaches, the book thus interrogates methodologies and fields of study in which centers and margins, memory and forgetting, local and global histories intersect and challenge each other. The focus on monuments and traces from such decentering perspectives accounts for tensions, frictions, and conflict between presences and

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absences of materialized memory, between situated forms, transculturally circulating aesthetics, and translating concepts. It draws attention to historical and cultural entanglements as well as racial, gendered, and social inequalities underlying them. The book’s approach to contested memory in urban space therefore acknowledges the locatedness of the historical and material conditions of remembrance and, at the same time, analyzes global implications and power relations. The following questions are central to the contributions in this volume: How are history and memory inscribed, erased, or transformed in urban space, and how does the cityscape shape ways of remembrance? How do subjective memories become an issue of heritage and identity politics, a matter of public commemoration, monumentalizing, art, or activist intervention? Who is participating in the shaping and transformation of memory in urban space, and who is marginalized and excluded? How can we listen and respond to the silences and absences in the mnemonic cityscape; to inequalities, appropriations, or subsuming generalizations in public commemoration? How can we activate, recognize, and archive future memories of the contemporary city in a plural and democratic way? Along these questions, the contributions to this edited volume focus on the in/visibility and affective power of memory in urban spaces, and contestations in the present through political, activist, and artistic practices. While they generally draw on dynamic, political, and psychological dimensions within the field of memory studies, they pay special attention to the built environment, urban architecture, and sites in which memories are not merely attached, but where they live, circulate, associate, disappear, or haunt, thus unsettling the very urban fabric and leading to manifest transformations. The material dimensions of memory, the traces of past histories, and the monuments erected or overthrown at different moments of time provide a common conceptual thread and relational framework for the case studies assembled in this volume.

Contribution to Memory Studies: Urban Space, Inequality, and Decentered Remembrance As argued by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1992), both individual and collective memories are not only inscribed in “social frameworks of memory” that refer to the deep embeddedness of individual memory in social groups, but they are also spatially determined, as the

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collective frameworks of memory are profoundly shaped by spatial locations and physical surroundings. The “spatial turn” has brought new dimensions of research to the field of memory studies, highlighting the importance of space, cities, and the built environment in the study of the social, the political, and the cultural dimension of remembrance. Scholars working in memory studies have engaged deeply with the spatial and material dimension of remembrance. Examinations of the relationships between space and collective memory have, for at least the last two decades, shifted from examining national framings to a more global analysis (Levy and Sznaider 2006; A. Assmann and Conrad 2010), transnational approaches (A. Assmann 2014; De Cesari and Rigney 2014; Rothberg 2009), and transcultural perspectives (Crownshaw 2011; Erll 2011; Bond and Rapson 2014). While memory studies draw attention to the importance of memory politics for the constitution of national identities, collective narratives, and forms of public remembrance, interrogations in the field also focus on ways in which memory has been shaped and erased in transcultural, often violent encounters throughout imperial, colonial, de- and postcolonial, postwar, and post-dictatorship scenarios. In that sense, national remembrance today can be conceptualized as resulting out of transnational and transcultural connectedness, conflict, and collective violence and atrocity, and attention has been drawn to various forms of subjectivity based on political struggles, shared traumata, diasporas and networks, selective bonds, and solidarities across national borders. As a consequence, memory studies have adopted cosmopolitan approaches (Levy and Sznaider 2006) and conceptualizations of multidirectional (Rothberg 2009) or traveling memory (Erll 2011). These approaches emphasize the relational, dialogical, and processual character of collective memory. Rather than being fixed to a place or determined by a group identity, processes of remembrance are able to create identity, connectedness, belonging, and affective bonds. At the same time, memories are formed in contact zones, throughout historical entanglements, and most often in conflict and within hierarchical relations. Memory narratives commonly imply multiple collective references, non-­ linearities, ambivalences, manipulations, and blind spots. Practices, forms, and media of memory become perceptible as they are traveling and transforming through time and space, as the very condition for a living memory culture (Erll 2011: 11–12). Arguing against a competitive “zero sum logic” by which the memory of one group erases, diminishes, or relativizes that of another, Michael Rothberg (2009) has shown how memory can

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evolve out of relationality and comparison, enabling forms, expressions, and mutual recognition through multidirectional remembrance. With his concept of multidirectional memory, Rothberg introduced a new paradigm by connecting transnational and postcolonial perspectives in memory studies. By establishing a dialogue between collective memories of the Holocaust and memories of slavery and colonialism, he opens a perspective for productive mutual fertilization, arguing against competitive, exclusionary hierarchies of memory (Rothberg 2009: 15). However, collective memory does not circulate freely across national, social, and cultural borders. New technologies, social media, and global networks have stretched the scale of communities, manifestations, and scapes of social remembrance much more broadly, but many historical narratives and acknowledged forms of subjectivity remain centered around identities framed in normative or hegemonic terms of national, social, cultural, and gendered belonging with corresponding constructions of alterity, silencing, and oblivion (e.g. Trouillot 1995; Passerini 2007; Hartman 2007). The shift from national to transnational or transcultural memory also involves a shift in focus from state-centered memory politics around the conservation, commemoration, and commodification of heritage to a variety of claims founded on a “right to the city” (Lefebvre 1968; Harvey 2008, 2012), often entailing iconoclastic and performative contestation. The movement of the International Situationists, based in Paris in the 1960s, for instance, reclaimed urban space to encourage new social aesthetic practices of urban life such as “dérive” and “détournement.” Their innovative approach of psychogeography aspired to new modes of perception, emotion, and behavior and promoted tactical subversions of the city’s cultural logic. Nevertheless, the purpose of this shift was not to formulate an antithesis between state politics on the one hand and practices “from below” on the other, but to analyze particular formations and transformations of state-citizen relationships (De Cesari and Herzfeld 2015) and to develop new social and artistic practices for participating in the shaping of urban memory. Recent contestations of colonial monuments and imperial traces, such as demands to restitute the many looted colonial objects in European museums, show not only how today’s postcolonial critique addresses both historical violence and its structural perpetuation through state institutions, but also that civil and artistic efforts to acknowledge silenced or subaltern memories can no longer be easily ignored by governmental discourses.

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The focus on monuments and traces attempts to grasp such challenges of power relations in the realm of urban memory (studies) as moments of contested meaning—symbolic, aesthetic, and political, as well as critical practice. Monuments and traces are not understood as static, given, or merely constructed as repositories of history. Monuments reproducing selective versions of the past are created and destroyed, displaced and dissolved, their histories forgotten, restored, or re-signified through their sheer materiality, as well as through acts and interaction, perception, deor revaluation in the present (Riegl 1982; Musil 1986; Vattimo 1995; Assmann 2015). Traces bear evidence of past events, meanings, recognition, and erasure, but also of the ephemeral and the contradictory. The trace deconstructs and constructs meaning; it is the absence of a present, a mark of the not-here and not-now, a simulation of a presence that dislocates and refers beyond itself (Derrida 1976; Harvey 2008). From this point of analysis, the differentiating line between monuments and traces becomes fragile, fluid, and shifting. The city, with its manifold overlapping of monuments and traces, is a space for multiple meanings, inscriptions, and haunting presences (Freud 1925; Benjamin 1931; Ricoeur 2004; Stoler 2008; Gordon 2008). It is a privileged site in which to elaborate on the relations between matter, trace, and memory (Benjamin 2010; Huyssen 2003, 2016), considering relations between history, space, and place (Lefebvre 1991; Soja 1996; Assmann 2015; Jelin 2018; Jelin 2002; Jelin and Langland 2003), and between memory and geography (Dwyer and Alderman 2008). Controversies around monuments, traces, and decentered memory also raise important questions within the field. Ways in which racial, social, and gendered lines of difference structure formations of memory in subjective experience, public acknowledgment, and political representation in various times and places found their way into the multi-, trans-, and interdisciplinary endeavor of memory studies. In their close connection to cultural history, literary criticism, and psychoanalytic approaches, memory studies lend themselves to interrogating the past not only from a historiographical perspective, but essentially in its present, subjective, emotional, and imaginary dimensions as well as in its potential to open up to future horizons. Critical theories and methods from social and cultural, historical, and political sciences, anthropology, and postcolonial, feminist, and gender studies have opened a range of fields and approaches to differentiated constructions, politics, and controversies around memory and how they shape the cityscape.

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Eurocentric and postcolonial critique has, in many ways, focused on the reduction and governing of time and space through the expansion of imperial and colonial powers of capitalist modernity. In his influential book Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) argues against the mythical figure of Europe as the source of modernity. The book is a critique of modern historicism, in particular of its underlying assumptions about disenchanted space, secular time, and sovereignty, associated with universalist categories of the abstract figure of the human. Opposing the reduction of other historical forms and experiences to something incomplete, lacking or not yet achieved, Chakrabarty makes a claim for understanding and recognizing historical difference and the diversity of subjective experience, which have always shaped and modified the histories of capital and modernity. Johannes Fabian, in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983), analyzes how anthropology has created an allochronic discourse which places its object of study—most often non-European cultures—in a different, unchanging, past time. Anthropologists’ denial of coevalness has, simultaneously, reassured the present of Euro-America as the standard and privileged time against which the other appears in another temporal zone. What does it mean for memory studies to interrogate and represent the diverse expressions of memory and instances of silence within a world in which history, space, and temporality appear to be always already centered around privileged narratives, sites, subjectivity, and practice? Can memory studies serve as an antidote to the Eurocentric tendencies that underlie human sciences to a large extent?1 What is the role of urban remembrance within hierarchical histories and marginalizing structures? To what degree are individual and collective memories, trauma, and hope embedded in historical inequalities of recognition and representation, and how can they be used as critique, resistance, or potentiality for change? In postcolonial critique collective memory plays a central role in deconstructing naturalized ideas of marginalization and oppositional hierarchies, demonstrating imbrications in the formation of subjectivity of both colonizer and

1  Eurocentrism can be described as a mode of thinking that places Europe in a hierarchical position from which historical time, norms, and morals spread into the world; from where Europeans patronize and appropriate material and cultural production of Others, denying both the Others’ achievements and their own violent appropriation (Shoat and Stam 1994).

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colonized, and foregrounding subaltern histories, trauma, and erasure of memory (Werbner 1998; Göttsche 2019). Following Achille Mbembe (2010), the postcolonial moment began with an experience of decenterment, the experience that one’s own thinking, feeling, and self-imaging is constructed from an exteriority, through a graft which reinscribes the enclosure of race (12). In many instances, thinking about Africa—in Europe and on the continent—relies on a European myth which essentializes Africa and cuts it off from any future. For Mbembe, a decolonizing of the future, and thus of memory as remembering a more desirable past, lies in becoming human by becoming a nonracial being, a self-formed subjectivity.

Decentered and Decentering Memory in the City Decentered memory points, on the one hand, to the problematic of collective memory in postcolonial and post-dictatorial territories where memory has not merely been erased, but subject to complex practices of depriving, policing, imposing, appropriating, and overforming remembrance and silence. Decentered memory can be understood as a displacing and projecting of memory practices from the former imperial and colonial centers onto territories, cultures, and people, as well as a subjectivation of individuals and collectivities under hegemonic forms of remembrance. On the other hand, decentered memory evokes critical analysis, in the study of memory, which accounts for other spaces and temporalities in the common present of a globalized world: for attention and recognition of deprived, marginalized, minoritized, or subaltern memories in the here and now, and for the imaginary and possible futures to which they open. Decentered memory, therefore, is considered as a notion and figure of thought, a movement between diagnosis and analysis, a questioning and multiplying of perspectives, rather than a unifying concept or model. It relates to ways of thinking that undercut models of center and periphery, ground and figure, or progressive timelines of past, present, and future. Focusing on urban space, decentered memory draws on Michel Foucault’s notion of “the archeology of knowledge” (1969), on the basis of which it translates into the image of an urban archeology of contested memories and folds up into fragments of a global geographical map. Different cultural extracts and historical traces become visible, each enfolding their own entanglements with other geographies, times, and migrations. As a model for human memory, Freud’s notion of the palimpsest—the

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Wunderblock (the mystic writing pad) (1925)—can serve as another figure for considering a decentering of memory from the evident and rational toward traces of the past hidden in unconscious spheres. The notion of palimpsest, in which layers of memory coexist in urban space, can be understood as a literary trope relating to writing, intertextuality, and historical intertexts in arts and cultural analysis. It has been further developed by Andreas Huyssen’s readings of cities as “configurations of urban spaces and their unfolding in time without making architecture and the city simply into text” (2003: 7). On a temporal level, decentered memory emphasizes ways in which the past and the future are imbricated in the present, as a mode of critique and a potentiality of other ways of living (Passerini 2007; Muñoz 2009; Hartman 2019) An example of the changing political, aesthetic, and temporal memory practices in the city can be seen in the ephemeral monument to migrants that was set up during one day in Berlin, on September 7, 2020. Several refugee organizations installed 13,000 white chairs in front of the Berlin Reichstag, symbolizing the number of people who, at the time, lived in the overcrowded Moria refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece, which became the scene of arson attacks only one day later. The chairs also symbolized the number of refugees that German communities proposed to accommodate, in opposition to the blockade by the federal government. This example of an ephemeral monument not only points to the centrality of disrupting social time, but also of connecting social space, if only for a short instant and situation. For the brief moment of one day, Moria became present in Berlin, and state representatives as well as passers-by were confronted with the—symbolic—interlocking of empty places and overcrowded camps. Protests against the precarious situation of migrants in European refugee camps as well as mobilization against colonial monuments, expressed in the tearing down of statues and the renaming of places and streets in many different cities worldwide, are examples of how past injustices keep on shaping social tensions in the present. Contemporary inequality is significantly germinated from the legacy and memory of historical injustices and past violence (Barkan 2000; Hinton 2010). The making of the modern world cannot be separated from the violence and injustice of colonialism and slavery. This violence and injustice continues to affect social inequality, also in relation to memory cultures in the present. Social inequalities affect the way in which the past is remembered and represented in urban space, and above all the extent to which different voices

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and divergent memory discourses can be articulated and have an impact on symbolic representations at the local level of the cityscape. Therefore, when analyzing the relationship between cultural memory and social inequalities, it is also necessary to discuss modes of silence, erasure, and exclusion from discourses and symbolic spaces of commemoration, and the effects these have on representation in the memorial landscapes. In that sense the cover image reflects current struggles over exclusion and historical denial in urban representation. Artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo designed the wooden statue Liberty for all (2018) shown on the cover. His version of the Statue of Liberty portrays a black woman challenging and deconstructing the power of monuments. She is expressing and advocating an inclusive cultural memory in urban space. According to a little-known historical rumor, the French artist who created the original Statue of Liberty, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, to whom Aleida Assmann refers in her chapter, originally designed his statue with an African American identity, before it became a global icon for freedom. Fernando took this hidden historical information and used it for a contemporary comment and critique on foundational, exclusionary racism in the US and beyond.

Book Structure and Chapter Overview The contributions from different disciplinary backgrounds—political science, (public) history, cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, communication studies, and art history—assembled in this book are intended to do justice to the complexity of urban memory constellations. They take us to different sites, cities, and world regions; draw attention to a diversity of histories and collective memories, to social, political, and aesthetic intervention in urban remembrance, and so, we hope, allow us, as an ensemble, to construct a fragmentary image of junctions and disjunctions of decentered memory. The chapters emphasize constructive and reflexive aspects of various approaches to memory in public space. They challenge notions of collectivities and cultures by paying attention to how colonial violence, migration, war, and dictatorship keep influencing subjective experience and representation of collective histories: how racial, gendered, and social constructions of memory and commemoration have not only been inscribed in bodies, emotions, and the unconscious, but also in the city—its built environment, architecture, monuments, memorials, and names; its

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surroundings, its density and inner connections; its open places and hidden corners; its smells, sounds, rumors, and mysteries. They show how colonialism, war, political transformations, and migration have changed social constellations of cities, so that we can no longer assume cultures or collectivities that share a common heritage and are thus grounded in a common memory. Lines of difference run through politically divided groups, through generations, geographical as well as social backgrounds. The focus on memory in urban spaces indeed foregrounds cultural heterogeneity, historical differences, and dynamics of controversy and contestation around their remembrance in the present. The chapters are structured around four parts, looking at contested memories in the city and transformations of public remembrance in the making. The first section offers different approaches and methodologies on urban memoryscapes, in particular curatorial and community work concerning commemoration, monuments, and museums of migration and spatial dis/connections, as well as sensory memory and conceptual ties between remembrance, nostalgia, emotions, and space. The second cluster of chapters focuses on ways of decentering memory in urban spaces by looking at how historically ignored and globally marginalized perspectives challenge and inject tension into postcolonial memory cultures. The third part examines cases of toppled statues and monuments in the context of urban commemorative reconfiguration, while the final fourth part draws attention to traces of political repression, war, destruction, and contemporary atrocities. The opening section, Approaching contested urban memoryscapes, offers a diversity of approaches to intersections of collective memory and urban space. The first contribution by Aleida Assmann begins with a historical account of a variety of monuments, offering a panoramic view and analysis of different manifestations of cultural memory in urban space, showing how monuments change their meaning over time. By focusing on ways in which monuments move between visibility and invisibility, the contribution analyzes contexts of political change or general shifts in mnemonic aesthetics. Moving across times and geographies, Aleida Assmann gives examples of, in the first part, different conditions for monuments to become contested and reinterpreted over time. Monuments can (re)gain public attention when they are negated and removed, replaced by new ones, or when they are historicized and their political message is neutralized. The second part of the contribution sheds light on the history of migration monuments. Contrasting statues in countries of overt

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immigration, like the United States of America or Brazil, to the situation in Germany, where immigration has only recently become an accepted topic for public remembrance, Assmann shows how monuments exist only in and through frames of national narratives as well as silences, as two sides to the same coin. Contestations of monuments are a sort of flipping the coin so that what was previously hidden becomes revealed. The chapter thus shows that a monument is not timeless, given, or carved in stone, but rather that its historical status is changeable and adaptable to contextual transformations. In the following chapter, Alison Atkinson-Phillips examines examples of monuments and museum sites of Australia’s migrant heritage. The comparison of different sites and practices reveals continuities and fractions in the settler-colonial myth of Australia as being a nation of migration, but also a white nation into which migrants are either drawn or welcomed. This idea is strengthened by the “user pays” participative principle of most Welcome Walls, which favors the visibility of success stories and narratives of successful integration at the expense of others. In particular, these sites stand in tension with the ongoing violence of settler-­ colonization for Aboriginal Australians, and the treatment of the (usually non-white) asylum seekers or refugees who arrive by boat. Drawing on Dennis Byrne’s concept of networked heritage, the chapter considers monumental sites of migrant memory in dialogue with other less visible sites of Aboriginal and settler incarceration, postwar reception centers, and the “black sites” of contemporary immigration detention. In the next chapter, Stefanie Kappler and Antoinette McKane analyze and compare curatorial work in two community-based museums, the District Six Museum (D6M) and the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum (LMLM) situated in peripheral townships of the South African metropolis. By inserting them in the urban fabric, interpreting the museums particularly from the angle of where they are located, Kappler and McKane not only offer insights into how specific memories of apartheid are curated; they also reveal curatorial possibilities in politically marginalized environments, allowing these communities the agency to represent and interpret urban space. The contribution from Astrid Swenson that follows examines the making of “sensory memories” and its role in urban contestations. In the case of the Smithfield market area, today’s largest regeneration project in the city of London, the chapter picks up various threads to show how emotions and senses are shaped and contested within complex cultural,

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economic, and political contexts. It examines how a selective and nostalgic “sensory memory” recently developed in relation to Smithfield as a liminal space, characterized by the old meat market and an established culture of late-night clubs, pubs, and cafes, the upcoming move of the Museum of London to the area as well as new businesses, gentrification, and rising rents. While a certain historical consciousness is gaining in value, especially mobilized to resist sociocultural changes connected to regeneration, the traces of violent pasts and marginalized histories, often linked to histories of Empire, do not play a major role in current contestations. Based on rich material of different modalities to register senses as part of cultural memory, Swenson’s contribution demonstrates how contestations of urban memory are more about the future than the past, ranging from nostalgic memory to resisting extensive regeneration prospects, to senses and feelings of the present that aid in strengthening future historical displays in the upcoming museum. The second part, Decentered Memories, focuses on global inequalities and how collective memory and commemoration can be a site of tension and dispute within entanglements between the Global North and South. By focusing on aesthetic interrogation and political activism, the following contributions reveal how legacies of colonialism, past injustices, and violence are shaping memorial landscapes and struggles over urban memory in the present. The first contribution by Elizabeth Jelin interrogates ways in which entangled histories articulate in memories and silences, as well as in personal feelings and implications in academic research, from the point of view of Eldorado, Misiones, a small town in northeastern Argentina. Starting from a photograph in a town museum, the chapter traces the history of the former settler colony and questions the silences and halfwords which run through community memories at all levels. The photograph in question shows a resident of Eldorado in a Nazi uniform, who died at the Russian front in World War II. This blatant public display of a Nazi symbol is telling about the absence of collective reflection on the intercommunal history and conviviality of that remote place in Argentina, in which supporters of Hitler’s Germany as well as Jewish migrants were part of the large community of German origin, living side by side. Conceptually, the chapter brings into focus the “local” not as what is left out of the “center” but as a “decentered center” from where world history becomes visible not as a history of places but one of global, transcultural flows, entanglements, interconnections, and networks.

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In the next chapter, Anke Schwarzer follows a different direction of decentering memory, by showing how central monuments and myths have been questioned in current debates on the decolonization of urban space in European cities, focusing particularly on German cities. From the Humboldt Forum in Berlin to debates not only about the Bismarck statue in Hamburg but also colonial traces elsewhere in Germany, the chapter examines myths surrounding Germany’s colonial past. Schwarzer, by arguing for a power-critical approach, emphasizes how these debates relate directly to historical and official exclusion and inclusion practices applied by German state institutions. The last contribution in this section follows up on connections between art, cultural memory, and space. Susanne Mersmann takes an aesthetic approach to questions of globalization and its mnemonic inscriptions in the city by examining spatial dimensions of the art installation “Cosmic Generator” by Mika Rottenberg. The contribution decenters the physical space of that installation in an abandoned Asian shop in the German city of Münster, which was part of the Skulptur Projekte festival in 2017, by guiding the reader through the artistic transformation of the site and into the video loop that was part of the installation. Following different tracks opened by the installation’s place, space, and media, we are invited to draw connections between sensual and virtual elements of the artwork, reflections of spatial structures in the surrounding city and faraway settings of poorly paid service labor, mostly performed by female migrant workers, which condition globalized urban lifeforms and aesthetics. By inscribing Rottenberg’s installation into a net of real places and art historical references, the text unfolds a memoryscape of unequal globalized labor and consumption in which, as in a loop movement, the visible and non-visible conditions of globalization alternately surface and disappear. The third part, Fallen Monuments, interrogates contested statues, artistic subversion, and the cultural resignification of memorials and monuments in the city. Nadine Siegert focuses in the first chapter on the Angolan capital of Luanda. She engages with how artists relate in different ways to its complex history, shaped by Portuguese colonialism, civil war violence, and the recent history of socialism, and how their engagement can be considered as a form of memory work that is distinct from official commemoration efforts. By looking at a variety of artworks from different postcolonial moments, the contribution shows how the city can be seen as an urban archive where the cityscape can be redefined by artistic enactment and new meanings can be inscribed.

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Jill Strauss’s contribution, too, is connected to resignification of urban space and struggles over a colonial statue that became contested over time. Strauss examines the discussions around the removal of a monument in the El Barrio/East Harlem neighborhood in New York City to the nineteenth-­ century gynecologist J.  Marion Sims, who operated on enslaved and poor immigrant women without their consent. Grassroots activist groups today have managed to call into question and remove the statue that celebrated him over decades. The chapter describes the local controversy surrounding this urban marker and the struggles to re-signify it, replacing it with an alternative monument. The contribution by Sarah Dornhof interrogates disgraced monuments and moves between postcolonial and post-socialist commemoration practices, and between urban spaces as diverse as Berlin, Rabat, and Marrakech, to explore the afterlife of displaced monuments to the socialist revolutionary leader Lenin and the French colonial governor in Morocco, Marshal Lyautey. Dissimilarities and resonances emerge as thoughts travel between East Berlin, where Lenin’s dismantled head now sits in a historical exhibition of fallen monuments, and Marrakech, where a series of artworks respond to Lyautey, including a reproduction of his monumental sarcophagus in Paris by the Moroccan artist Mohamed Arejdal. Because the creation and destruction of monuments play such a key role in narratives of political transition, their decomposition and recomposition within the sphere of art and museums offer a space to contest the ways in which fallen regimes are remembered in the present. While Lenin’s head on display in a Berlin museum seems to proclaim the final burial of socialism, further erasing post-socialist memories, the reappearance of Lyautey in an exhibition in Marrakesh suggests that postcolonial memory is very much alive, seeking responses to and critical appropriations of colonial legacies. The last part, Traces of Violence, which considers the remembrance of war, dictatorship, political repression, and destruction in urban memoryscapes, opens with Gruia Bădescu’s chapter about two former Yugoslav cities, both affected by wars in the 1990s. In discussing connections between postwar architectural reconstruction and contested memories in Belgrade and Sarajevo, he also examines the role of architects and city-­ makers, as mediators between people’s collective memories and the official narratives and state strategies in the complex process of dealing with the past. After exploring the relationship between urban space and the contested memory of war, Bădescu moves on to discuss different contested memories embedded in urban space in both cities. Highlighting several

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ruined sites, the chapter problematizes how urban reconstruction relates to strategical remembrance, finally arguing that urban reconstructions and ruins have to be situated in local contested memory landscapes. In the following chapter, Ulrike Capdepón engages with the debates sparked by the memorial in the Almudena cemetery in Madrid conceived to honor the 2936 victims executed there as part of the Francoist repression following the Spanish Civil War. By reconstructing the controversy surrounding this memorial that, after a political shift, was destroyed by removing the listed names of victims, the contribution analyzes the symbolic meaning of dead bodies and how they relate to memorials from a forensic perspective. By contextualizing the controversy in global circulations of memorial aesthetics and practices in relation to memorials, it also highlights the importance of the naming of victims in public acts of remembering, particularly to memorialize and acknowledge the traces of violence left after the post–civil war repression. The chapter analyzes commemorative practices in the context of local political change and the struggles around memory in contemporary Madrid. The section closes with the contribution by Anne Huffschmid that, likewise from a forensic perspective, discusses the agency of memorial and artistic interventions in relation to contemporary forms of violence in Mexico. To explore the connection between current violence and memory work, the chapter argues the need to extend the focus beyond the urban realm toward a variety of spatial typologies, ranging from suburbs to deserts, that have become crime scenes during the last decade. Drawing on her audiovisual research project “Landscapes in Transition,” Huffschmid investigates diverse geographies that have in common an uncanny dual condition as sites of extermination and exhumation. Analyzing memorial agencies at work in these landscapes of necropolitics, the author questions the very notion of memory in contexts of ongoing everyday violence, and its generalized notions of closure or healing.

References Assmann, Aleida. 2014. Transnational Memories. European Review 22 (4): 546–556. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1062798714000337. ———. 2015. Transnational Memory: The Future of the Past. In Bananen, Cola, Zeitgeschichte: Oliver Rathkolb und das lange 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Lucile Dreidemy et al. Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau.

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Assmann, Aleida, and Sebastian Conrad. 2010. Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Barkan, Elazar. 2000. The Guilt of Nations. Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices. New York: Norton. Benjamin, Walter. 1931/1972. A Short History of Photography. Trans. Stanley Mitchell. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (1932–1934/38). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bond, Lucy, and Jessica Rapson, eds. 2014. The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory between and beyond Borders. Berlin; New York: De Gruyter. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Crownshaw, Richard. 2011. Transcultural Memory. Parallax 17 (4). De Cesari, Chiara, and Michael Herzfeld. 2015. Urban Heritage and Social Movements. In Global Heritage: A Reader, ed. First Edition. Lynn Meskell: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. De Cesari, Chiara, and Ann Rigney, eds. 2014. Transnational Memory. Circulation, Articulation, Scales. Berlin: De Gruyter. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translation of De la Grammatologie (Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967) by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dwyer, Owen J., and Derek H. Alderman. 2008. Memorial Landscapes: Analytical Questions and Metaphors. GeoJournal 73: 165–178. https://doi. org/10.1007/S10708-­008-­9201-­5). Erll, Astrid. 2011. Travelling Memory. Parallax 17 (4): 4–18. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/13534645.2011.605570. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1969/2002. Archaeology of Knowledge. New York and London: Routledge Classics. Freud, Sigmund. 1925. A Note upon the Mystic Writing-Pad. In General Psychological Theory, Chapter XIII. Gordon, Avery F. 2008. Ghostly Matters. Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Göttsche, Dirk, ed. 2019. Memory and Postcolonial Studies. Synergies and New Directions. Oxford, Berlin and New York: Peter Lang. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hartman, Saidyia. 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. ———. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals.New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company.

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Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities. From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London and New York: Verso. Harvey, David. 2008. The Right to the City. New Left Review II 53: 23–40. Hinton, Alex. 2010. Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities After Genocide and Mass Violence. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present Pasts. Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2016. Memory Things and Their Temporality. Memory Studies 9 (1): 107–110. Jelin, Elizabeth. 2002. Los trabajos de la memoria. Paracuellos: Siglo XXI. ———. 2018. La lucha por el pasado. Cómo construimos la memoria social. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Jelin, Elizabeth, and Victoria Langland, eds. 2003. Monumentos, memoriales y marcas territoriales. Madrid: Siglo XXI. Lefebvre, Henri. 1968/1996. The Right to the City. In Writings on Cities, eds. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 1974/1991. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. 2006. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2010. Sortir de la grande nuit. Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée. Paris: La Découverte. (engl. 2021. Out of the Dark Night. Essays on Decolonization. New York: Colombia University Press.) Muñoz, José Estaban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. 10th Anniversary ed., Published 2019. New  York: New  York University Press. Musil, Robert. 1929/1986. Monuments. In Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Burton Pike. New York: Continuum. Passerini, Luisa. 2007. Memory and Utopia. The Primacy of Intersubjectivity. Sheffield: Equinox, Published 2014 by Routledge. Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. (La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubi. 2000. Paris: Seuil.) Riegl, Alois. 1903/1982. The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin. Trans. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo. Oppositions 25: 21–51. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Shoat, Ella and Robert Stam (eds.). 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism. Multiculturalism and the Media. London and New York: Routledge. Soja, Edward. 1996. Thirdspace Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-­ Imagined Places. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

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Stoler, Ann Laura. 2008. Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruinations. Cultural Anthropology 23 (2): 191–219. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past. Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Vattimo, Gianni. 1995. Postmodernity and New Monumentality. Anthropology and Aesthetics 28: 39–46. Werbner, Richard (ed.). 1998. Memory and the Postcolony. African Anthropology and the Critique of Power. New York: Zed Books.

CHAPTER 2

(In)visible Monuments. What Makes Monuments Controversial? Aleida Assmann

According to Robert Musil, monuments are paradoxical media of memory, because they do exactly the opposite of what they stand for and are designed to do. “What is most conspicuous about monuments,” he writes, “is that they are not noticed.” Instead of reminding passers-by of a famous person or memorable event of the past, they have an inbuilt mechanism to ensure they become invisible. “They are obviously created to be seen and to attract attention, but at the same time, they seem to be effectively impregnated against public attention which recoils from them like a drop of water from an oily surface without getting stuck even for an instant” (Musil 1978: 506). Today, we would change the metaphor and speak of a “Teflon-” or “lotus-effect,” but otherwise Musil’s observation has lost nothing of its fresh and provocative spirit after almost a century. He explains the paradoxical phenomenon psychologically by referring to a basic law of Gestalt psychology, namely the contrast between “figure” and “ground”: “everything that stays put will sooner or later lose its power to attract attention.

A. Assmann (*) University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 U. Capdepón, S. Dornhof (eds.), Contested Urban Spaces, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87505-3_2

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Whatever composes the fixed elements of our daily life and is part of the stationary stage of our consciousness is bound to recede into the background of our attention” (Ibid.: 507). For Musil, who argued from a modernist point of view, such static monuments had lost their appeal in the metropolis of Vienna and needed constant innovation to stimulate the attention and vibrate with a new temporal rhythm. He contrasts the backwardness of old-fashioned monuments made of brass or marble with the modern culture of advertising, which pops up with striking ads praising a product as unique or superior and which is strategically much better geared toward attracting attention. In satirical mode he muses that attention to monuments could be boosted easily by decorating them with slogans like “Goethe’s Faust is the best,” or “Snap up this author’s ideas now at the cheapest price!” (Ibid.: 508). Musil sums up his argument: “Like everybody else today, monuments should put more effort into what they do. Standing quietly at the wayside hoping to attract the gaze is not impressive. Today, we may demand more from a monument!” (Ibid.: 508). Musil is often invoked in discussions about the function and power of monuments because he makes the interesting point that these structures “aspire to something that goes against human nature and can only be fulfilled under particular circumstances” (Ibid.). Rather than endorsing Musil’s provocative statements, I take them as a point of departure to rethink the possibilities and limits of monuments. When he writes, for instance, that “whatever composes the fixed elements of our daily life and is part of the stationary stage of our consciousness is bound to recede into the background of our attention,” this is by no means an argument that such monuments have thereby lost their power in the public realm. They recede, it is true, into the cultural infrastructure of cities, which, in a way, only confirms how solidly they are anchored in the public consciousness. If, however, a monument in the public space becomes visible again and the focus of attention, this is often connected with a new gaze that triggers a debate and thereby exposes the precarious quality of a monument. Monuments, in other words, are like sleeping dogs and often profit from not being too eagerly scrutinized. A “contested monument” is obviously the opposite of a “sleeping dog” in which the values of a society are safely enshrined. My questions therefore are the following: What brings monuments back to our attention and makes them controversial? What makes them visible again and propels them into the focus of public debates and heated discussions? One hundred years after Musil, we may perhaps generalize that there are two

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important reasons for the renewed visibility and controversial status of monuments: one is a change in political circumstances; the other is a change in public and aesthetic sensibility. I will start with a few comments on the change in political circumstances.

Toppling Monuments—Change in Political Circumstances A sudden and striking move from local invisibility to almost global visibility befell the bronze monument in Tallinn, Estonia, of a Russian Soldier, informally named Alyosha, which commemorates the victory of the Red Army over Nazi Germany in 1945. After standing in its place for exactly sixty years, this monument suddenly became visible the moment it became invisible; in other words, when it disappeared from its spot in the center of the city in 2007. Estonian politicians had decided that its position opposite the museum commemorating the Estonian national trauma of Soviet occupation was at odds with the sentiments of Estonian citizens. They removed the statue to a cemetery on the outskirts of the city, close to the graves of Russian soldiers. The sudden disappearance of the Russian Soldier from his central location in the city of the living and his transfer to the realm of the dead caused considerable outrage among the city’s large Russian-speaking population. It became immediately obvious that “memory in the city” is not homogeneous. It is contested because different communities hold different perspectives and are committed to different historical narratives and memories. In addition, memory in the city can stir up turbulence that reaches far beyond the limits of the city, and even the nation. In this context, the conflict not only touched the population of Tallinn, but had much wider reverberations. Alyosha became the symbol for a much larger geopolitical issue, the cooling of relations between the European Union and Russia after 2007. This monument belonged to a category called “monuments of gratitude.” The post-Soviet countries were littered with such monuments praising the heroic achievements of the Red Army. During the Cold War, they were by no means invisible; they were hot spots every year on May 9, a date celebrated with marches, flags, and flowers to demonstrate the strong alliance of states within the Soviet Union (Fig. 2.1). Musil wrote his essay in 1927 in the spirit of urban modernization and the accelerating whirl of time, when the presence of the past in public

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Fig. 2.1  Aljoscha, the dis- and replaced Russian soldier (a “monument of gratitude”), Tallinn. Photograph by the author

space became more and more obsolete. But in the 1920s, after the Great War, there was no shortage of monuments, when every city and village commemorated their fallen soldiers in stone. While monuments multiply after wars, they tend to disappear abruptly after a political regime change. When regimes and their political ideologies change, the symbols of former heroes and values become suddenly intolerable and are consigned to oblivion. This impulse is reflected in the iconoclastic frenzies that became familiar in many post-Communist societies after the collapse of the Soviet Union. After 1989, statues of Lenin toppled from their pedestals, and streets and squares were renamed. In Moscow, the process unfolded with less revolutionary zeal. Until 1991, a statue of the founder of the KGB, Felix Dzerzhinsky, a man once termed “the sword of the revolution” because of his merciless eradication of Russia’s counterrevolutionary forces, stood in a public square in the center of Moscow outside the

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former headquarters of the secret service. Meanwhile this monument has been silently withdrawn: the statue is spending its retirement in a park within the city. Dzerzhinsky and other iconic revolutionary figures were dislodged and an asylum was found in a context that neutralized their symbolic power. Divested of their political message, the former heroes were allowed an afterlife in a public park, a frame that was rather similar to that of an art museum or an historical archive.1 Another example is the monument park in Budapest where deposed former rulers, divested of all signs of authority or terror, are granted a quiet, folkloristic pension. As a rule, the toppling of monuments leaves their pedestals intact for reuse. New aspirants, hauled out of banishment and oblivion after such system changes and restored to public recognition and prominence, queue up for a visible position in both the public urban space and society’s cultural memory. New political alignments usually force an either-or decision, the new system immediately replacing the old one. There are, however, problems with this total replacement of symbols, because it blots out material traces and historical memory. For this reason, we can distinguish at least three options in respect to political monuments in the public realm: • forgetfulness through negation: clearing away the old monuments, • affirmative commemoration: replacing old monuments with new ones, and • historicization and aestheticization: neutralizing the message of a monument by downgrading, distancing, and folklorizing it and making it self-reflexive.

Counter-monuments—Changes in Public and Aesthetic Sensibility While exchanging monuments is a palpable response to abrupt political regime changes, there is also another method that responds to slower and more gradual but nevertheless obvious changes in public consciousness. Since the 1990s, for instance, the history of monuments has undergone a profound change, from heroic to critical and self-reflexive forms, 1  From this neutral space, however, they can also be recalled. Since 2009, there has been a discussion in the Duma about restoring Dzerzhinsky to his former place as a symbol of law and order (rather than of persecution, terror, and gulags). http://www.moskau.ru/moskau/stadtnews/wiederaufbau_des_denkmals_fuer_kgb_gruender_dserschinski_1445.html.

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expressing a cultural transformation that is less disruptive. In a way, the conceptual approach behind counter-monuments takes its cue from Musil’s ground argument, adopting his figure into its constituent principles. These postmodern monuments have become self-reflexive in that they not only remind passers-by of what they are to remember, but also alert them to what they are forgetting. This change of artistic paradigm resonated with a deeper change in historical sentiment. James Young, who was the first to eloquently promote the new counter-monuments in Germany in the 1990s, drew attention to the larger context and an important cultural change: “While history is rich in monuments perpetuating the triumph of victors, and equally rich in monuments presenting the martyrdom of victims, it is rare that a nation has focused on the victims of its own crimes” (Young 1992: 270). Young was the first to draw attention to a new group of artists like Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, and Horst Hoheisel, who in the 1990s experimented with new forms of monument. He coined the term “counter-monument” and with his publications helped to establish the international fame of these artists and their new paradigm. For the first time in history, monuments were created that reminded society not of triumph and victory but of historic crimes and unheroic suffering. These German artists were true pioneers. They had their biographical reasons for creating self-critical national monuments for which they had neither a pattern nor historical models. Their monuments helped to break the collective silence in Western Germany and to bring a repressed history back into the public space. One interesting example of such a counter-monument in our context is Christian Boltanski’s work Missing House (1990) (Alberti 2020). This immaterial monument takes up the issue of (in)visibility and makes visible what is no longer there. The artist chose an empty space in a line of houses in Berlin caused by the impact of a bomb during the Second World War. He marked the adjacent walls on either side with the names of the former inhabitants, recalling how Jews and Germans used to live door by door in these apartments. The gap in the row of houses also shows what was quickly filled up and forgotten after 1945: a landscape of ruins gave way to modern buildings and economic progress, burying the trauma together with the past.

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A New Form of Visibility—Karl Lueger’s Monument in Vienna One of the monuments in Vienna that had just been erected when Musil wrote his essay was located in the Karl Lueger Square and dedicated to Dr. Karl von Lueger, mayor from 1897 to 1910. Due to Lueger’s reputation as a staunch populist with racist politics, this mayor had always been targeted as an opponent by representatives of socialist Vienna. However, the monument had sunken into “the stationary stage” of Viennese consciousness, supporting the normative political status quo. For many decades, the political message of this monument had been ignored and was perceived by passersby mainly as a resting place or a meeting spot. It took until the beginning of the new millennium for the prominent presence of this mayor to become visible again. In 2009, its status quo was interrupted by a competition, instigated by Vienna’s University of Applied Art and Design, for transforming the statue into a “monument against anti-­ Semitism and racism in Austria.” The call to transform the square prompted many people to take a closer look—effecting what we may call a wake-up call in the heart of the city. What ensued was a lively debate. By April 2010, over 150 proposals had been submitted. Not only artists began to think about the person of Karl Lueger, but also politicians, city offices, councils, and ordinary citizens found themselves involved in a process of self-reflection. Lueger and his statue became an object of general attention and heightened perception. Much creative imagination was generated, inventing alternative poses and framings of the monument. Lueger’s biography was discussed in blogs and on websites. He was no longer just a familiar name but transformed into an object of public interest, inquiry, and reassessment. In this way the statue was suddenly resuscitated, returning from “nature” to “history,” and from history straight into heated current debates. What was at stake in this debate? The goal was clearly a new positioning of the Lueger monument in the city’s narrative and self-image, that is, Vienna’s representation of its own urban history. Lueger’s major project to modernize the Ringstraße had gained him a firm place in the city’s historical memory. What was revisited in this process, however, was his forgotten role as an early proponent of populism and anti-Semitism. The purpose of the competition was to not take this history for granted any more, but to make it explicit and counteract it. In the various artistic proposals for restaging the monument,

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collective awareness was raised, and its historical baggage was brought back to the surface in the present. At the time, Austria, like other European countries, was on the way to becoming a nation with a strong immigrant component.2 These new developments had an ambivalent effect: they increased right-wing, xenophobic sentiments, but they also raised critical awareness of the populist impact on Austrian politics. Seen against this background of a new racism, Lueger’s person and role in history could no longer be taken for granted. Citizens felt obliged to mark their distance from a homegrown anti-­ Semitic tradition that had already pervaded the country a generation before the 1938 Anschluss, Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria. But disclaiming does not necessarily mean demolition. Marking distance from Lueger did not require the elimination of his statue which, together with the offending object, would have disposed of history altogether. In the urban space, history can be retained in heterogeneous layers in order to sharpen awareness for both historical continuities and ruptures. The competition prize was awarded to the design by Klemens Wihlidal, which called for the statue and base to be tilted 3.5 degrees to the right: a significant inclination judiciously poised between obvious deviance and safe normality. This minor aberration of the statue from its vertical axis would have produced a subcutaneous irritation, a light disequilibrium. It sends a slightly vertiginous signal that something about the monument is “awry,” stimulating insecurity, curiosity, and inquiry. This effect was praised by the jury and led to its decision. The plan spelled out Vienna’s ambivalence toward its former mayor, revealing the ongoing relevance of the debate. The “imbalance,” the jurors indicated, pointed to the city’s unresolved relationship with its anti-Semitic past; the slight tilting of the monument broke its heroic vertical axis, casting Lueger’s mythic status as Vienna’s father figure into doubt.3 Such a tilting of the monument is easily presented on paper and aptly described in a publication,4 but it is obviously much harder—and much more expensive—to execute this brilliant plan in reality. After almost 2  Every third resident of Vienna (597,200 people) either immigrated to the city or came from a migrant family. Statistisches Jahrbuch für Migration & Integration, 2010 www.statistik.at (accessed August 3, 2020). 3   Wien Heute.at, April 2012 http://www.heute.at/news/oesterreich/wien/ art23652,694316. (accessed April 15, 2014). 4   Arbeitskreis zur Umgestaltung des Lueger-Denkmals in ein Mahnmal gegen Antisemitismus und Rassismus, Wien, 2011.

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another decade, the eponymous square and its monument remain totally untouched. Changing a name, however, is much easier than tilting a statue. In April 2012, “Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Ring” was renamed “Universitätsring.” This was a timely decision, indeed, since Lueger strongly opposed intellectuals and referred to universities as “breeding grounds for the deconstruction of religion and fatherland.”5 This promising enterprise geared toward changing a central monument in the city also shows the limits of controversy and discussion. In this case, the wake-up call has not yet led to changing the monument; it fell back into the stationary position of the sleeping dog. Admittedly, Martin Krenn, the initiator of the project, has not given up, but until a clear perspective for realizing the artistic plan is in sight, another project could help to fill the gap. I am thinking of number 118 on the entry list, put together by a designer team headed by Lucienne Roberts. It proposes to redesign the square by surrounding the Lueger monument with a circle of variously colored flat figures, schematically modeled after the statue and of the same height, representing ten individuals of varied migrant backgrounds living in the city. In this reconstruction of the statue, Karl Lueger moves out of his isolation into a new constellation and enters into a communicative exchange. He “converses” at eye level with those ten figures of differing backgrounds. The schematic figures are individualized through a rectangular transparent window inserted into the construction at eye level with the square’s visitors, offering them (changing) information about new citizens of the city and their stories of immigration. This installation could have a double effect: creating a link between both Karl Lueger and Vienna’s history on the one hand and the city’s new residents and their experiences on the other; and presenting a new phase of the city’s migration history in a public space.4 With simple means, such a new framing of the monument could build a bridge across Vienna’s past, present, and future. In a public square, it offers the residents information about social transformations in their city in a symbolically vivid and informative manner. Such a display in a public square can mobilize attention, interest, and curiosity, transforming a static monument into a site of dialogue, contact, and reflection.

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 https://wien.orf.at/v2/news/stories/2529607/ (accessed November 21, 2020).

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Migration Monuments Given the new importance of the global history of migration, the second part of this essay considers older and new types of monuments addressing this topic. Monuments of migration have undergone considerable change in style and meaning between the beginning of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries (Baldasar 2006). Migration monuments obviously have a close connection with the history of migration. Where were they erected? What is their style and message? Who sponsored them? To whom are they addressed? And how do the old migration monuments differ from the recent ones that are being erected in countries only now opening their borders in a new age of global mass migration? Given the new urgency of the migration issue in recent years, has this development sparked new migration monuments and, if so, what distinguishes them from the traditional ones? What shape do they take and whose perspective is presented? The Lueger monument in Vienna could have become Austria’s first migration monument. But it has remained invisible as it was just an option buried in an archive, where it survives as a pure speculation. Germany, already saturated with monuments, is after thirty years still awaiting the realization of its unification monument. But does it have a migration monument? There are already monuments in Germany dedicated to victims of Turkish descent murdered by the racist NSU, and there will be a memorial to the victims of the terrorist act in Hanau. But there is as yet no monument celebrating the arrival of Turkish migrant workers in Germany in the 1960s, whose children and grandchildren make up a sizable part of the population and who are actively shaping Germany’s economy, culture, and politics. To answer some of the questions listed earlier, I will start with some examples of migration monuments from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Migration and Nation-building in the United States, Argentina, and Brazil The most famous migration monument of all was erected in the United States. I refer to the Statue of Liberty in Upper New  York Bay, which stands for the American nation but has also become a global icon and a universal symbol of freedom. The statue was conceived and constructed

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by three Frenchmen—a politician, an artist, and an engineer. They started to work on the project in the 1870s. The colossal copper statue arrived in 1886  in New  York as a French gift and token of friendship to confirm strong ties around global political aims and projects. A remarkable shift in meaning occurred when the focus of the symbol was transferred from the heroic nation to the unheroic migrant. One of them was Jewish-American Emma Lazarus, who wrote a poem that reframed the statue of Liberty as the “Mother of Exiles.” In the period between 1880 and 1920, the United States witnessed the peak of its immigration, admitting, absorbing, and integrating one million migrants every year. Many of them were Jewish and, like Emma Lazarus, had fled from small towns in Eastern Europe where they had suffered religious and political persecution, hoping for a new and better life in an America that they envisioned as a “promised land.” In her sonnet, the poet recasts the statue as a symbol of hope for refugees, thus changing the national symbol into a flight-and-migration monument. Twenty years later in 1903, her poem was engraved on a metal plaque and mounted in the statue’s foundation. The sonnet creates a sharp contrast between the old Europe of the past and the future-oriented United States. While in Europe old myths prevail, in which male gods strike with lightning and male leaders wield power to magnify their own image, the United States is presented as a modern country where lightning has been tamed by the electric torch, and a female and motherly figure welcomes the weakest and most wretched souls of the world: “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries sheWith silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-­ tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

If there is a prototype in the history of migration standing for a culture of welcome, it is surely Emma Lazarus’s mother figure greeting the refugees with a torch of light at an open door. Another story of immigration monuments can be told about South America.6 The general situation there was rather similar: from 1880 to 6  For the following paragraph I am indebted to an essay by Eloisa Helena Capovilla da Luz Ramo, “The cities and their monuments: a study about the Italian immigration in Buenos Aires an d Caxias do Sul 1910—1954—2016,” in: Almanack no.17 Guarulhos Sept./ Dec. 2017.

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1915, approximately 31 million immigrants arrived in the Central and Southern America, most of them coming from Western European countries, such as Italy, Spain, or Germany. These immigrants were not refugees but arrived at their destination with the hope for better living conditions and economic prosperity. But like Emma Lazarus they also wanted to become part of their new homeland and to inscribe themselves into its process of nation-building. The choice and style of Latin American migrants’ monuments clearly reflected this aspiration. An interesting example is the participation of the Italian immigrant community in the celebration of Argentina’s Independence Centenary in 1910 (Costa 2010). The Italian gift to this historic celebration was a monument of Christopher Columbus in Buenos Aires. While Emma Lazarus had set up a polemic opposition between old Europe and modern America in her poem, the Italian immigrants built a bridge between Europe and Latin America, creating a strong link between their country of origin and the discovery and conquest of their new homeland in the tradition of “long distance nationalism.”7 As Susana Costa points out, “the “Monument to Cristoforo Colombo” is the only monument to Columbus in a Spanish-speaking country bearing the name of the Genovese navigator in his native language.”8 The laying of the cornerstone and the dedication ceremony were carefully staged political events charged with national symbolism, celebrating—as in the case of the Statue of Liberty—the close friendship between the two nations. But monuments also have their expiry dates. A hundred years later, in 2013, the statue was dismantled by Argentinian President Christina Kirchner and transferred to Costanera Norte, where the navigator now lies on the ground on the bank of a river, wrapped in forgetting, taking a long nap after his historical feats. Meanwhile his empty pedestal was quickly filled again. In July 2015, Columbus was replaced by Juana de Azurduy de Padilla: a woman, a representative of the indigenous population, and a historical heroine in the fight for the independence of Argentina and Bolivia.9 7  Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, “Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation-state building, migration and the social sciences,” Global Networks 2, 4 (2002) 301–334; 316. 8  Cited by Eloisa Helena Capovilla da Luz Ramo, footnote 25. 9  While sited in the center of Buenos Aires, right in front of the Casa Rosada, with the change to the conservative government of Mauricio Macri following Kirchner, the Azurduy de Padilla statue was again moved in September 2017 to the Plaza del Correo, a less central location.

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In Brazil, in 1950, the idea of a monument to immigration arose in the context of another anniversary, this time the 75th anniversary of Italian immigrants arriving in Rio Grande do Sul in 1875. Caxias do Sul developed what can be seen as a standard type of immigration monument. It represents a settler family in the style of heroic social realism. A woman with a baby in her arm stands next to a muscular male figure who is raising his left arm to look into the far distance, discovering his new homeland together with a bright future. Behind this family, a high-rising obelisk confirms the year 1875 as the beginning of a new era. Its dedication is spelled out in golden letters: “The Brazilian Nation to the Immigrant.” This is a monument of gratitude commemorating the great importance of new settlers to the collective project of nation-building in general, and the immigration history of Italian pioneers in particular. The monument does not only address the newcomers, it is also a form of collective self-­ fashioning, presenting the nation as “quintessentially destined to be a friendly nation, the great welcoming homeland, where the children from every end of the Earth may work in an atmosphere of encouragement, tolerance and fraternity” (Vargas 1954: 2).

Migration as Rupture As the history of migration has moved on, new types of monument have again been created. In this context, I would like to distinguish between art performances and monuments; in other words, between temporary symbols and permanent and stationary objects. Since the peak of the movement of migrants crossing European borders in 2015, many artists have responded to these events with happenings and installations, drawing the attention of European citizens to a humanitarian disaster by creating striking symbols and performances in the centers of their cities. An example is the Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei, who collected masses of lifejackets of drowned migrants on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Some of them he took to the center of Berlin and used these orange jackets to cover the columns of the concert hall at Gendarmenmarkt. He arranged others in the shape of lotus blossoms floating on the lake in the park of the Belvedere in Vienna. In doing so, he used conspicuous national sites in cities to make the tragedy of anonymous migrants visible and to propel them into the consciousness of European citizens. Spectacular interventions are also the trademark of the activists at the “Center of Political Beauty” (Zentrum für Politische Schönheit, ZPS), a

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collective of seventy performance artists who aim at making the invisible visible by bringing into the center of the collective focus what society urgently wants to ignore and forget. According to their self-description, the members “engage in the most innovative forms of performance art” by creating moments of shock in the name of an “aggressive humanism.”10 In the tradition of performance artists like Josef Beuys and Christoph Schlingensief, the Zentrum für politische Schönheit (Center for Political Beauty) (ZPS) mobilize mass media in the name of art. Josef Beuys created the term “social sculpture” to emphasize that a politically inspired work of art has a context and a larger life beyond the museum. Gunter Demnig created the “stumbling blocs” (Stolpersteine), covered in small brass plates, in the pavement to commemorate the victims of Nazi Germany; he used this term to emphasize the social networks that are attached to the material plate, thus emphasizing the invisible component of the monument next to its visible part. While the public commemorative artwork of Demnig is designed to engage and involve civil society in the city, the much more scandalous interventions of the ZPS are calculated to breaking of taboos with a strong appeal to cultural codes and moral norms. One of their performative actions in June 2015 was called “The dead are coming.” They also drew attention to the mass death of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, this time by bringing dead bodies to the destination that these migrants had failed to reach alive. These dead were buried with family in attendance and appropriate religious rites at a cemetery in the capital of Berlin. Sarah Dornhof comments that some of the ZPS’s projects might also derive their controversial status from a questionable hyperrealism and a moral attitude that functionalizes the dead or people in a vulnerable position without their consent to make radical and scandalous statements through art. The breaking of taboos certainly enhances the visibility of monuments, but the question also remains: which taboos: Religious? Cultural? Political? Monuments to migration are still rare in Germany and often evolve out of art projects. I will focus here on two German cities, Kassel and Bremen, that do not represent any norm or pattern but rather demonstrate singular and even exceptional cases.

 https://politicalbeauty.de/aggressiver-humanismus.html (accessed November 20, 2020).

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The First “Flight and Migration Monument” in Germany The first German “Flight and Migration Monument” started as an art project in 2017 in Kassel, the city that hosted the avant-garde art show documenta 14. Participating in the event was the Nigerian-American artist Olu Oguibe, who erected a 16-meter obelisk of granite slabs on busy Königsplatz in the city center. In the lower part he engraved an inscription in gold capital letters. The text, taken from the Gospel of Matthew (25, 43), could be read on the four sides of the obelisk in German, English, Turkish, and Arabic: “I was a stranger and you took me in.” The work of art was a response to Germany’s “culture of welcome” that made headlines all over the world when the migration of refugees into the country peaked in September 2015. After documenta ended, the citizens of Kassel decided that the obelisk should remain at its location, and donations were collected to buy the artwork. Thus, the obelisk remained in the city and became the first Flight and Migration Monument in Germany. Due to its outstanding visibility, it made headlines and triggered a fierce debate. This work of art is remarkable in many respects. First, it is astonishing that this verse from the Bible, which is after all part of Christian and Western cultural memory, was perceived by part of the local population as an intolerable provocation. In fact, representatives of one political party, the AfD, reacted with hostility to the obelisk. “Mr. Oguibe should wrap up his work of art instead of bothering our beautiful city with this unspeakable subject!” They referred to this art as a “deformation” and denounced the obelisk as a symbol of power. In the course of the debate, the obelisk became a clinical thermometer, gauging the temperature of this heated controversy. Despite loud demands for the obelisk to stay in place, the Social Democrat mayor finally gave in to pressure from the opposing camp and had the offending monument removed. This happened, of all days, on October 3, 2018. He chose the symbolic date of German unification to confirm that such a monument has no place in the center of a German city. After its dismantling, the obelisk was stowed away in a safe place to patiently await its fate. Several cities abroad expressed their interest in the work. But even in Kassel the drama was not yet over. A new location for the obelisk was found on Treppenstraße in Germany’s first pedestrian zone, which has close links with the history of art and the documenta. In April 2019, the obelisk was reerected at the new location. This transfer slightly altered the meaning of the work: what

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was once a public monument on Königsplatz is now more of an art event on Treppenstraße. In this monument, created by a Nigerian-American artist with a history of migration, the sentence from the Gospel of Matthew is spoken from the perspective of a migrant. Oguibe commented on his work as follows: “The obelisk is a timeless form, a form that dates back to antiquity, originally it comes from Africa. It traveled around the world. We use it in this context to project a universal, timeless principle into the future: the idea of mercy and hospitality towards strangers” (Olu Oguibe 2017). What is in fact special about this monument is that it radically rededicates a symbol of the victors, of power and imperial rule and makes it the bearer of a completely different timeless message, namely human rights and human duties. From the artist’s point of view, the Kassel obelisk conveys yet another message, and that is gratitude to the hosts. I quote a longer reflection by the artist: I believe that mercy and hospitality ultimately require reciprocity … To open your door to a stranger is an act of trust. All this is interwoven in the text chosen for the inscription. It affirms the need for hospitality, it affirms the need for reciprocity, the recognition that charity is an act of trust. When such strangers come into a community, they also bring something with them. They bring skills, they bring diversity, culture, they bring cuisine. In this way they enlarge the community, they enrich the community … they enrich the human experience. For me, the goal is to leave a space for reflection, for contemplation, perhaps even for debate on the questions of hospitality and gratitude. (Ibidem)

This monument, then, is not just for thinking but also for thanking (Denkmal / Dankmal): the obelisk is used as a medium conveying the gratitude of the migrant to the host. But the obelisk is also a symbol for the stranger; it is itself a foreign body that stirs up emotions, provokes heated debates, and has to be removed from the public space. Works of art are symbolic objects and proxies; they have the power to make visible sensually what is invisible in society. Oguibe’s obelisk symbolically expressed and publicly reenacted what the debate is all about: integration or exclusion, diversity, and participation or isolation in a homogenous community. Everything related to the obelisk was symbolic, including its removal. Even the hole left in the ground was immediately perceived as a “wound”; flowers were placed there to express sadness and empathy.

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This is what works of art can do so well: they can bring society’s expressed and unexpressed feelings to the surface by giving them a concrete form, thus making them visible and audible. They also help to create a story that shapes the conflict by provoking words, feelings, statements, and actions. German “welcome-culture” is a term that was coined at the peak of mass migration in 2015 when helpers in many cities volunteered in task forces set up to tackle the reception and organization of the newcomers. It was quickly countered by vocal discourse from the right and far right of the political spectrum, who condemned this procedure as a fatal political flaw. From time to time, critical voices shed light on cases where things go wrong, but the practical integration work with immigrants has become invisible and carries on mostly unheeded and unpraised. It is to these tireless supporters of German welcome culture that the message of Oguibe’s obelisk is addressed.

The (anti-)colonial Monument in Bremen In the German context, migration is certainly a new subject for inspiring monuments. There are still very few of them, but as this country is in a process of political, social, and cultural transformation from its self-image as an ethnically but rather homogeneous society to an ethnically and culturally diverse immigration society, their number might soon increase. Another special case related to Germany’s colonial history is the “anti-­ colonial monument” in the city of Bremen. Ten-meters high, it is in the shape of a large elephant made from dark-red glazed North German bricks. It is not a recent monument, nor has it ever altered or changed its location. In material substance and shape it has remained (almost) untouched in its original site, but in the course of time its meaning has altered radically (Fig. 2.2). The plan for the monument goes back to the early years of the twentieth century when merchants in Bremen, with its international port and long tradition of overseas trade, were active entrepreneurs in the colonial expansion of the German empire and profited immensely from the increased wealth of this period. The First World War and the following economic crisis interrupted this development, but the monument is a sign that the colonial spirit was revived in the early 1930s. The “Reichs-­ kolonial-­ehren-denkmal” (imperial colonial honor monument) was built and dedicated in 1932. The rather pompous name shows that it was designed to serve the dual purpose of memory and pride, namely to honor

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Fig. 2.2  Namibia Memorial (Antikolonialdenkmal, Bremen), Fritz Behn 1931. Photograph: Peter Schröder, CC BY-­ SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

the German soldiers killed in the colonial wars far away from home, and to reconnect with pride and determination to Germany’s recent history as a powerful and prospering colonial nation. This short tradition had been terminated in 1918 after Germany’s defeat in the Great War, which included the loss of its colonies in Africa. Reclaiming those colonies, and even building a monument dedicated to “our colonies,” was an obvious breach of international law. This new-old colonial mission was clearly expressed at the dedication ceremony, where various speeches reestablished Germany’s right to expand its Lebensraum, or “life space,” for the growing nation: “A great nation needs colonies in order to live. The aim of colonial politics is not to spread culture, but to survive … Without colonies a flourishing nation will be suffocated. Colonies are the expression of the vital power of a nation.” 11

 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikolonialdenkmal (accessed August 3, 2020).

11

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After 1945, the monument underwent various changes. In the course of material repair, its militant symbols, such as the names of German colonies and military leaders, were silently removed, and a book commemorating the fallen soldiers of the colonial wars during the First World War was transferred into the city archive. Purged from these symbols and designations, the monument fell back into the status of a mere animal sculpture that could as easily have served as an entrance sign for any zoo. This state of neutralization and “naturalization” ended when the monument received a new name and inscription. This happened in 1989, a moment of historical transition and transformation that we usually attribute only to Eastern European cities. In that year, Bremen joined a movement called “cities against apartheid,” and it took the opportunity to rename the monument in the following year. The formal occasion for this event occurred two months after the transformation of a former German colony into the independent African state of Namibia in March 1990. When it ceased to be “German South West Africa,” it had come under South African mandate rule after the First World War and under the direct responsibility of the United Nations in 1966. When in 1996 the new Namibian president visited Bremen, the monument was recharged with a history now presented in a post- and anti-­ colonial narrative. German colonial history is still reflected in many street names and other vestiges, like zoos, museums, and scientific collections at universities (Bechhaus-Gerst 2019). The elephant, however, is by far the largest and most conspicuous colonial monument in Germany, and a powerful symbol that points to a vexed history of more than a hundred years. In the presence of the African president, the monument was rededicated with two new bronze plaques to confirm a shared history. One of them mourns the African victims of German colonial rule from 1884 to 1914, while the other completes the narrative of Bremen’s colonial and postcolonial history with a promise: “Africa has found new friends in the city of Bremen. The monument is a symbol for the responsibility that arises from our history” (Gustafsson 2003: 439). To live up to this responsibility, in the last decades the city has supported mutual projects between Bremen and Namibia’s capital Windhoek. A civil association for diversity and tolerance was formed with the name Elefant! to initiate projects relating to Bremen’s past in the present. Various institutions, such as universities, schools, and historical museums, have joined forces to create projects designed to decolonize the city of Bremen and the minds of the inhabitants.

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The citizens of Bremen have obviously made clear and strong statements of solidarity, but the question remains whether they can disregard the history of their nation in the larger frame and context. This national history includes the genocide of the Herero and Namaqua (1904-7), which remained officially unacknowledged until 2015; there was no concession of German guilt until 2004. It could be the case that a new chapter in the history of the elephant has started with the new migrants in the city. In this context, this monument has turned into a symbolic contact zone for the former colonizers and the former colonized. It provides a concrete historical reference and political stage for contrasting experiences, discussions, and reenactments. On August 11, 2019, for instance, the elephant was the site for the citizens of Bremen to commemorate, after 115 years, the beginning of the Herero and Namaqua genocide in 1904, the first genocide in the twentieth century. Two months later, it became the site for a demonstration by “Together We Are Bremen” (TWAB), an association consisting of migrants and activists from Bremen who criticized the mismatch between the preaching of integration and the practice of exclusion and segregation. The migrants protested against their life in a camp and against transfers and deportations, demanding resident permits, better living conditions, and education for everyone. On this occasion, the African migrants did not fail to express their emotions, backing up their claim to solidarity with historical memory. Referring to the elephant, one of them said: “This is a monument that means a lot to me and my fellow Africans! This is a monument that presents cruelty in its highest form, barbarity and exploitation in its highest form!”12 Their message about the monument was clear: last time you came to us, now we are coming to you. The monument gives their protests and claims a much wider resonance because it shows that the present crisis is an episode in a much longer, entangled history.

Conclusion There is an important dimension missing in Musil’s brilliant essay. Monuments are never complete entities in themselves. Their material shape is only one half of the story. The other half consists in a set of immaterial cultural practices performed at the monument—its dedication, 12  http://togetherwearebremen.org/impressions-demo-19-10-19/ 3, 2020).

(accessed

August

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recurring celebrations on commemoration dates, political debates, and material attacks—making it a living monument. Strategies of appropriation, like speeches, music, and flowers, but also acts of desecration, can raise public attention and reanimate any monument from one moment to another, or commit it to oblivion. Despite all the grandeur of their form, monuments soon lose their capacity to attract attention. But their contexts are seldom as stable as the material they are made of. Political contexts change generally, and sometimes abruptly. However, the reframing of monuments and artistic interventions also stir up attention in urban spaces. On their inverse pathway toward becoming “historical,” monuments can be recharged through controversies. Then they are hit by the spotlight of contemporary attention and become the focus of a public debate. Controversies, provocations, and public arguments mobilize strong emotions, because redefining monuments is an essential way of changing a city’s self-image. Monuments change their meaning over time. Calling old symbols into question is an effective way of renegotiating the city’s past and imagining its future. In such a moment, the city has to decide anew about the future of its past. In this state of new public awareness, citizens must renegotiate their history, self-image, and values, and it is often a monument that is the site of transformation and reflects the important process of renewing a collective self-assessment.

References Alberti, Sarah. 2020 (in print) Momentaufnahme im Vakuum. Das Ausstellungsprojekt “Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit” in Berlin im Jahr 1990. Dissertationsschrift Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Fakultät Kunst und Gestaltung. Baldasar, Loretta. 2006. Migration Monuments in Italy and Australia. Contesting Histories and Transforming Identities. Association for the Study of Modernity 11 (1): 43–62. Bechhaus-Gerst, Marianne. 2019. Koloniale Spuren im städtischen Raum. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 1: 40–42. Costa, Susana. 2010. Participación de la colectividad italiana en los festejos del Centenario. Revista Devoto Historia, n. 19. Edición invierno. Junta de Estudios Históricos de Villa Devoto. Buenos Aires: Revista de colección— Devoto Historia. Gustafsson, Heinz. 2003. Namibia, Bremen und Deutschland. Ein steiniger Weg zur Freundschaft. Delmenhorst/Berlin: Aschenbeck and Holstein.

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Young, James. 1992. The Counter-Monument: Memory Against Itself in Germany Today. Critical Inquiry 18 (2): 267–296. Musil, Robert. 1978. Denkmäler. In Gesammelte Werke, Band II: Prosa und Stücke, ed. Adolf Frisé, 506–509. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Oguibe, Ole. 2017. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obelisk_(Olu_Oguibe); https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmFPwI4auPo). Accessed August 3, 2020. Vargas, Getúlio Dorneles. 1954. Discurso proferido no ato de inauguração do Monumento Nacional ao Imigrante. Caxias do Sul: Jornal O Pioneiro, 06 de março de 1954: 2.

CHAPTER 3

Australian Welcome Walls and Other Sites of Networked Migrant Memory Alison Atkinson-Phillips

As a settler-colonial nation, the majority of Australians can trace their ancestry back to overseas migrants. Indeed, migration plays an important role in the Australian national imaginary. Public spaces for remembering migration are most often located at real or imagined places of entry to the nation. As Byrne has pointed out, migration heritage is almost always conceptualized through a nationalist frame (Byrne 2016), and, indeed, migration memorials most often are aimed at drawing the migrant into the wider story of the nation-state (Atkinson-Phillips 2019). This chapter seeks to understand the “Welcome Wall” in Sydney and the “Welcome Walls” in Fremantle and Albany as part of a network of places that tell the story of migration within and to Australia. Beyond their physical locations, these sites exist in tension with two of the most difficult issues of Australia’s settler-colonial past and present: the impact of the ongoing violence of settler-colonization on Aboriginal Australians, and the treatment of the (usually non-White) asylum seekers or refugees who arrive by boat. While by no means commensurate, these issues are inextricably linked. By

A. Atkinson-Phillips (*) Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 U. Capdepón, S. Dornhof (eds.), Contested Urban Spaces, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87505-3_3

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adopting the terminology of “welcome,” these migrant memory sites explicitly engage with questions of Aboriginal sovereignty, including the question of who is host and who is guest. The concept of “welcome” has particular saliency in Australia’s settler-­ colonial context, where Aboriginal sovereignty was neither ceded nor formally recognized by the dominant settler society.1 Traditional ownership of the land is a complex legal and cultural process, and Aboriginal people continue to understand themselves as having responsibilities as custodians of land, regardless of whether their ownership is recognized by Australia’s settler-colonial legal system. While there is considerable diversity between the many Aboriginal nations, tribes, and peoples within Australia, a shared tradition of offering welcome to the stranger has developed into a contemporary practice of beginning formal events with a Welcome to Country, offered by a recognized Traditional Owner. For example, since 2008, the opening of Parliament in Canberra has begun with a Welcome to Country by an Elder of the Ngambri people on whose lands Parliament House sits. Such welcomes are usually tailored to the particular context in which they are offered, but often follow a similar form, giving a brief explanation of who the welcomer represents and their people’s relationship to the land, before extending a formal welcome to the land to those present. While strict protocols govern regarding who is authorized to offer Welcome to Country, an alternative is the Acknowledgement of Country, which can be offered by anyone as a mark of respect to the Traditional Owners of the land on which the event takes places. Both Welcome and Acknowledgement of Country continue to be contested in Australia’s settler-colonial context. Nonetheless, on many formal occasions Australians at least pay lip service to the recognition of Aboriginal peoples as the Traditional Owners and custodians of the land, which also means recognizing their exclusive right to be the ones to offer welcome to those whose cultural heritage is from other places. Welcome Walls enter into dialogue with this practice. This paper also considers the Welcome Wall(s) in dialogue with other Australian sites of migrant hospitality and rejection. Many of these sites are recognized in state, national, and international heritage registers, but as 1  In 2017, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders from across the Australian continent and islands joined together for the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which emphasizes their continuing sovereignty and sacred relationship to the land. See https://ulurustatement.org/the-statement.

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Byrne has argued, such recognition requires the drawing of physical and conceptual boundaries that close off dialogue between sites (Byrne 2014). Instead, and drawing on Byrne’s concept of networked heritage, this paper considers Welcome Walls in conversation with other migration memorials across Australia, rural and remote places where settler and migrant beginnings are acknowledged, and the hidden spaces of contemporary immigration detention. In doing so, this paper aims to contribute to the unsettling of settler-colonialist narratives, within Australia and beyond. Influenced by First Nations practices, and taking advice from feminist scholars including, I begin by locating myself. I am a settler/migrant British-Australian, currently living between my land of birth and the land of my children, the land of the Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation in the South West of Australia. Methodologically, I am a cultural historian and memory scholar. My research draws on an interdisciplinary mix of methods that include oral history, content analysis, (auto)ethnography, and critical photography, that is, the use of photographs as a tool of analysis rather that to document. The photographs used in this paper were taken as part of a PhD research project that ran 2012–2015, and focused on Australian public memorials that acknowledge lived experiences of loss. Within that project, I took extensive photographs of memory spaces. Influenced by Jessica Neath’s analysis of the work of photographic artists Anne Ferran and Ricky Maynard, who both consider “empty” landscapes, I began to look at what is left out of commemorations and what is included (Neath 2012). I am interested in both the cultural work of commemorative practices and the histories of the people whose stories they seek to tell. Drawing on the work of cultural geographer Doreen Massey, I understand places as where the specificities of the local meet the global flows of power and capital (Massey 2005). Massey’s approach brings an ethical understanding that the actions and decisions made in one place have an impact elsewhere, and that place itself plays an active part in the process of public remembering.

Australian Migration History Australia, like other settler-colonial nations, sometimes characterizes itself as a “nation of migrants.” Such a characterization works to exclude First Nations peoples from the imagined national community. Also in common with other settler-colonial nations, the question of who makes the “ideal” migrant has changed radically over time. As Byrne points out, “the

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transition from colony to nation-state in the late nineteenth century was racially framed,” and the legal foundation of the new nation-state included the passing of the 1901 White Australia Policy, which expelled many of the Chinese migrants who had until that point made up about three percent of the population (Byrne 2016).2 Also enacted in 1901, the Pacific Island Labourers Bill excluded those South Sea Islanders who worked in the Queensland sugarcane industry, many of whom had been forcibly brought to Australia as indentured laborers (Neumann 2015: 14). In the first half of the twentieth century, Australia explicitly defined itself as a white nation. Key to this self-understanding was the complete erasure of the 500 Aboriginal nations that exist within the boundaries of the Australian nation. Aboriginal people were not only excluded from voting but were not recognized in the census. By the 1933 census, Australia was still categorizing people as either “British” (born inside or outside Australia) or “foreign,” with further subdivisions of nationality. Only about 13 percent of people counted in the census were British born overseas, and less than 1 percent were “foreign” nationals.3 The term “Anglo-Celtic” obscures divisions between people of Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and English heritage. Its use within Australia created a sense that “White” Australians shared a common cultural heritage. Australia’s migration policy post-Second World War was driven by a need for workers, as well as a desire to increase the population of “White” Australia to mitigate the perceived threat of Asia in the north (Neumann 2015: 81). However, when Australian policy-makers began to recruit from European groups that did not share this imagined Anglo-Celtic heritage, the “Whiteness” of those migrants became suspect. Postwar refugees and displaced peoples (DPs) were accepted into the country as indentured labor, rather than under a true humanitarian program, and had a very different experience from the British migrants traveling under other forms of assisted-passage schemes. Many were immediately transported to ex-army barracks far inland, and from there were assigned to various work projects. Women and children were sometimes left behind in the camps for extended periods, in harsh conditions.4 In order to combat racism or fear about 2  Byrne also makes the point that this legislation is mirrored in other settler-colonial contexts, including Canada, New Zealand, and the USA. 3  Irish is not listed as one of the foreign categories in this census, although Irish migrants have been a constant within Australian history. See Australian Bureau of Statistics (1993). 4  There has been significant research into the experiences of postwar migrants. See, for example, Darian-Smith and Hamilton (2019).

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migrants taking Australian jobs, the Australian government worked hard to explain the “New Australians” as contributors to Australia’s postwar reconstruction effort. As Jayne Persian (2011) has pointed out, this developed into a discourse that celebrated “migrant contribution.” In the 1970s, the White Australia policy was finally rejected, and new waves of immigration included refugees from Asia and South America. Multicultural policy introduced a move away from the idea that migrants should assimilate into an existing culture, for example, including provision of language services to assist those whose first language was not English. Yet rhetorically, multiculturalism was always framed as specifically about the “ethnic” migrant, as distinct from the dominant Anglo-Celtic center (Dellios 2019). In the 1980s, this celebration of multiculturalism, alongside the increased focus on social history within the heritage sector, led to the establishment of a number of migration museums and migrant history collections (Henrich 2013), which, at times, reinforced this distinction and, at others, attempted to remove it. In 1988, Australia celebrated the bicentenary of the arrival of the First Fleet in Sydney Cove, and drew upon the idea of a “nation of immigrants” to bridge the gap between “settler” and “migrant.” At the same time, throughout the 1980s, the level of support offered to both new migrants and refugees was scaled back, as the economic need for migrants decreased, and 1992 saw the introduction of mandatory detention of asylum seekers for the first time. In 1996, John Howard was elected prime minister on a platform of celebratory nationalism that left little room for celebration of difference. The 1988 bicentenary had provided a focal point for the counter-memory of Aboriginal activists and supporters, who challenged the government’s approach to remembering colonization, leading the Labor government to declare a Decade of Reconciliation, 1991–2001. However, high-profile legal cases—Mabo in 1992 and Wik in 1996—began to challenge the settler myth of terra nullius (the empty land) and raise questions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty and land rights. The Howard government appealed to the Anglo-Celtic settler core and was overtly antagonistic to non-celebratory views of Australian history (Macintyre and Clark 2013). Concurrent with this, the late 1990s saw an increase in refugee boat arrivals. For over two decades now, the treatment of asylum seekers who arrive by boat has been a highly divisive and politicized issue. The Howard government used a range of measures designed to “deter” asylum seekers, including excising parts of Australia from the mainland so that citizenship rights could be withheld, and sending asylum seekers to

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detention facilities constructed in other countries, known as the Pacific Solution, a policy briefly rejected by the Labor government when it came to power in 2007, but reintroduced (with bipartisan support) in 2012.

Welcome Walls I first visited the Sydney Welcome Wall almost 20 years ago on one of my earliest visits to the city. Without knowing much about it other than that it contained a list of migrant names, I had hoped to find the name of one of my ancestors: a great-great-great uncle who arrived in Sydney in the 1880s. The “wall” took a while to find, partly because it wasn’t what I thought it would be (a stone or brick wall), and I never found Uncle Walter’s name. I realized only later that this was for a very simple reason: no one had paid for him to be “welcomed” or remembered there (Fig. 3.1). The Sydney Welcome Wall is co-located with the Australian National Maritime Museum (ANMM), running along one side of the museum and facing the Pyrmont Bay ferry stand. Like many waterfronts previously centered around industry and production, the area was originally a busy wharf, but was redeveloped in the 1980s with a focus on tourism and commerce. The Welcome Wall project was announced in 1997 and, as Henrich argues, was at least partly generated by a desire to build bridges between different waves of Australian migrants: those who had arrived before the Second World War and were thought of as “settlers,” and those arriving in the postwar period (Henrich 2015). Henrich’s work has focused on the influence of the Ellis Island “Wall of Honor” (USA) on the development of the Sydney Welcome Wall (ibid.). However, when we look beyond the city, there is another model that may have influenced the creators of the Welcome Wall. Opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1988 as part of the bicentenary celebrations, the Stockman’s Hall of Fame is located in Longreach, Queensland—the rural “outback” being the space associated with settlers in the national imaginary. In her 1980s survey of Australia’s civic memorials, Chilla Bulbeck argued that the architecture of the Hall of Fame was influenced by the Australian War Memorial, “that other national shrine in which the ordinary bloke is made heroic.” Bulbeck traces an evolution of the “roll of honor” used to acknowledge soldiers, although she notes that whereas the rolls of honor at Australian war memorials list all soldiers, only prominent names—the famous few—are displayed physically in Longreach: “The names and presence of others are reduced to anonymous images or hidden within

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Fig. 3.1  Sydney Welcome Wall, Pyrmont Bay. Photograph taken by the author, November 2013

computer programs” (Bulbeck 1991). The roll of honor at the Hall of Fame is a virtual database on which names and stories supplied by “pioneer” families are recorded.5 The Sydney Welcome Wall, constructed a decade later, stands in tension with this celebration of the “settler,” using similar technologies—the database of names and “ordinary” stories—but carefully constructing an alternative narrative that rejects the distinction of the “settler” experience. Physically, the Welcome Wall is more of a fence. The public-facing side shows a glossy black surface made up of a series of panels, whereas on the back, which faces the museum, the metal frame is visible. This construction allows panels to be moved out and names to be added, but does not provide a sense of permanence. The first panel of the Sydney Welcome Wall (read left to right) frames it as a symbol of Australia’s “great diversity and our unity.” It states that: “More than six million people have crossed 5  There is no mention of this “roll of honor” on the current Stockman’s Hall of Fame website, but Unsung Heroes, published in 2013, was edited from names and stories entered on the database by “pioneer families.”

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the seas to settle in Australia. They have come from most countries on earth to the lands of the Cadigal, the Burraburragal and beyond.” By noting the Aboriginal names of the land in and around Sydney, the text acknowledges Aboriginal people as having a special relationship to the land.6 In the context of the late 1990s, this was a significant act. As mentioned before, the landmark Mabo decision, just five years before the Welcome Wall’s construction, had challenged the myth that the Australian continent and islands were empty lands waiting to be “settled.” So using the Aboriginal names of the land and its peoples was, at the time, a radical act. Nonetheless, it now reads as woefully inadequate. The text is written from a settler-colonial point of view—it is the settler community that offers welcome, not the First Nations peoples. In other words, it acts, at best, as an Acknowledgement of Country, but does not give Aboriginal peoples the right to act as host, or to offer welcome on their own terms. By grouping all other Australians as people who have “settled,” the text reinforces the distinction between First Nations people and those who have come from elsewhere. However, in doing so it elides differences between different types of migrants. Perhaps unsurprising given its location at a maritime museum, it uses the metaphor of crossing the seas, despite the fact that many of the migrants whose names are on the wall would have come by plane. This is also significant, in the context of the harsh treatment of asylum seekers who have been arriving in Australia by boat since the late 1990s. Most of the rest of the wall panels contain lists of names. These are not ordered in any visible way, either alphabetically or by arrival date or by ship number, but are instead added in the order the names have been registered with the museum. This reflects the egalitarian nature of contemporary commemorative practices that have developed since Maya Lin’s groundbreaking Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which lists the names of the war dead chronologically, rather than by rank. The lists of names are punctuated by panels containing short quotations from migrants, selected to suggest diversity across time and place of origin. The name and arrival date is noted for each quote, and the selections also demonstrate a range of migration experiences that are difficult, emotional, or funny. The quotes are seemingly chosen for their ability to convey personal stories with a

6  As a non-Aboriginal person, it is not my role to explain Aboriginal peoples’ relational approach to land or country. See, for example, Wooltorton et al. (2020).

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wider resonance. For example, an excerpt from the diary of Emma Tompsitt, noted as arriving in 1884, states the following: we were stopped in order that the health officer should come on board and very slowly discover for himself whether we were secretly hiding some dreadful disease especially small pox just to let it loose on the innocent inhabitants of that city. After due and careful examination of all on board he satisfied himself that we were a harmless people merely intent on bettering our position and earning our daily bread more easily than some of us had done in the old country.

This story gives a glimpse into historical quarantine procedures, as well as a more “universal” story of the migrant as someone who is seeking a better life. Although Emma’s country of origin is not noted, her name, the date, and the reference to the “old country” suggest she is from Britain. Most of the other quotations are carefully selected to include the country of origin. For example, this one from an ANMM oral history interview with Hussein Hage (arrival date 1977) states: “Everyone in Lebanon saw Australia as a ‘dream country’. When you get there it’s not so. You have to start again.” While some narratives, like Hage’s, hint at the difficulties of migration, the only mention of “trauma” comes from British migrant Bill Paterson (arrival 1970), in reference to the shocking change of temperature from a London winter to an Australian summer. Often, stories of hardship and everyday racism are treated with humor, such as that of Moni Lai Storz, who arrived from China in 1963 as a student and had to wait alone for many hours because her name had been mistaken for a man’s. As well as the acknowledgment contained within that brief mention of the “lands of the Cadigal, the Burraburragal and beyond,” another panel offers an explicit Welcome to Country in the form of a statement by three Darug Traditional Owners, Edna Watson, Fay Richard, and Patricia Jarvis. It reads: For over 40,000 years our people have walked this land. We are the Darug, custodians of this land. We do not own this land, it is our mother. Care for it as you would care for your own. When the White man first set foot on Sydney shores the first people they saw were Darug. They are known today as Eorah or coastal Darug.

The quote is attributed to an ANMM interview, although it seems unlikely that all three interviewees actually spoke these words together.

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Rather, it is a collective statement by Aboriginal Traditional Owners that the museum has attempted to fit within the format for other quotations. The date of 1998 is presumably the date of interview, but this is unclear. Because the graphic format is not visually distinct from the surrounding migrant narratives, the Welcome to Country is denied authority. The experience of Aboriginal Traditional Owners is instead incorporated into the migration narrative and, consciously or unconsciously, co-opted to lend authority to the Welcome Wall project. The Western Australia (WA) Welcome Walls are co-located with state maritime museums in Fremantle (the port city of the Swan River) and Albany (the site of the earliest European settlement in WA). Begun slightly later than the Sydney Wall, the first original Welcome Walls were constructed in Fremantle in 2004 as part of the commemoration of the 175th anniversary of the Swan River colony. They commemorate a specific point of entry by sea—either Fremantle or Albany—rather than all migrants. Another difference, as the name suggests, is that the memorial is constructed of multiple short walls, each listing names along with a date of arrival. Some 21,000 inscriptions are listed on panels that cover the forecourt of the Maritime Museum, while the much smaller Albany Welcome Walls, dedicated in 2010, have 500 inscriptions. The panels include a much wider range of quotes compared with the Sydney Wall, as well as images etched into metal and glass panels. Despite this attempt to acknowledge a wider range of experiences, narratives of success and “migrant contribution” dominate. The Aboriginal peoples of southern Western Australia are known collectively as the Noongar nation, made up of fourteen different language groups. Both Albany and Fremantle are located on Noongar boodjar (land), with Fremantle being on the land of the Wadjuk language group. The Noongar peoples have been heavily impacted by colonization, yet they retain a strong sense of culture and connection to their land. In contrast to the Sydney Wall, the Fremantle Welcome Walls respect the role of the Traditional Owners as host, offering a direct welcome in Noongar language (with translation): “Wanju wanju Nyoongar boordjar Derbal Yaragan Whadjuk boordjar: Welcome to Nyoongar country, to Derbal Yaragan the land of the Whadjuk people.” Another section tells part of the long history of Wadjemup, a coastal island now known as Rottnest. The Welcome to Country offered here can either be read as deeply generous or as having been tamed to avoid making a settler audience uncomfortable. Acknowledging that “migration is a complicated emotional and physical

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journey” that involves “uprooting and confronting an unknown future,” the Welcome Walls skirt the fact that migration has also involved the uprooting of the Whadjuk and other Nyungar people, along with the internal migration, forced or voluntary, of other Aboriginal peoples on to and within Nyoongar boordjar.7

User-Pays Commemoration In 2014, a promotional panel on the Sydney Welcome Wall was still encouraging people to register their own or their ancestors’ names as part of “one of history’s great migrations.” The advertisement pointed to the authenticity of the location, claiming that “Thousands upon thousands disembarked at wharves here on the Pyrmont Peninsula and at similar landing points across Australia.” It continued: “The Australian National Maritime Museum is building the Welcome Wall as a lasting tribute to all of those people who made the voyage and settled.” This place of memory is part of a national museum, so does not limit itself to those who arrived in Australia via Sydney. In one sense it is much more egalitarian: anyone who migrated to Australia can have their name included—or can while registration is still open.8 But in another sense, it is much more exclusionary, because only those who have paid—or who have someone to pay for them—can be remembered. At the time of first construction, the fee (or “gift”) to be paid to ANMM was AUD100, which has now increased to AUD500—about two-thirds of the minimum weekly wage. The user-pays commemoration model has proven popular in both preand post-Second World War migrant commemorations around Australia, and is often an important fundraising strategy. The Immigration Museum’s “Tribute garden” is a sunken courtyard at the back of the museum site, near the Yarra River in central Melbourne. The entire space is a study in polished metal, granite, and concrete, drawing on traditional memorial elements to create a sense of sacred space in the middle of a busy city. Names are engraved on to plaques which line the walls of the space, but 7  In common with the settler communities, Aboriginal peoples have moved; sometimes these migrations were voluntary, at other times forced. I point this out not to draw a false equivalence between the two experiences of settler-colonization’s brutal history, but to acknowledge that focusing on the commemoration of settler-colonial migrants to Australia risks perpetuating settler-colonial logic and marginalizing Aboriginal experience. 8  Registration closed for a while. At the time of writing it is open again.

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are also engraved into the base of two reflecting pools. In South Australia, the Migration Museum Foundation runs a program called “Settlement square” through which people are able to buy a tile in the museum courtyard to be engraved with a migrant’s name. In common with the Welcome Wall project, new tiles are installed periodically and dedication ceremonies are held. The program acts as a fundraiser for the museum and is very popular, with tiles often given as a gift to older family members.9 Bonegilla Migrant Experience, on the site of a major postwar migration camp on the border of Victoria and New South Wales, combines the settlement square and welcome wall approaches. The wall of names is tiled, with each name engraved on a single metal tile. The remote location (12km from the inland border town of Albury-Wodonga) means plaques are added one at a time, rather than during a ceremony, with a photograph and certificate posted to the contributor. At Uranquinty, the site of another postwar migrant hostel, a sculpture titled Kaia commemorates the migrant women and children housed there, again in army barracks. In this “outback” memory space on the side of the Olympic Highway, a section of red brick path engraved with names runs between the local war memorial and the sculpture. Places around Australia have used a combination of these approaches—engraved plaques and bricks—to remember different types of migrant and settler experience. For example, in Northcliffe, a tiny forest community in southern Western Australia that was the site of a group settlement scheme in the early twentieth century, family names are engraved into plaques that line the sides of a path leading to the local museum.10

Remembering Hyphenated Australians Welcome walls and the other user-pays commemorations all focus on the moment of arrival. Indeed, this is common across many migration-themed exhibitions and commemorations. Sara Wills suggests that “in the rush to be Australian,” migrants’ identities become invested in places of arrival as an original story that ignores the before—either of the migrants themselves or of the violence and dispossession of settler-colonization (Wills 2009: 272). One explanation for this focus on the moment of arrival is the need to engage with the aforementioned narrative of migrant 9

 Interview with M. Paul, April 2015.  Personal correspondence with W. Elby, April 2020.

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contribution in order to be accepted as Australian. However, whereas the welcome walls and some migration exhibitions seek to smooth over differences between different migrant experiences, Lorenzo Veracini argues that a distinction needs to be made between settlers, who belong to the dominant culture, and migrants, who do not. He uses the term “hyphenated citizen” to refer to migrants whose nationality is modified by the addition of a previous origin, and argues that “In the end, the greatest dissimilarity between colonial and postcolonial migrations is that in the context of a colonial system of relationships it is the hegemonic party that moves” (Veracini 2015: 34). This means that the distinction is not one of temporality but of power. However, power shifts and some hyphens are optional. The unstable nature of settler status can be seen in the comparison of two migrant memorials: the “Australian Monument to the Great Irish Famine (1845–1852)” in Sydney and the “Vietnamese boat people monument of gratitude” in the inner-city Northbridge area of Perth, Western Australia. The Australian Irish Famine Memorial was part of a transnational wave of commemoration at the time of the 150th anniversary. Designed by Valamanesh and Valamanesh and dedicated in 1999, it includes a glass panel on to which are etched the names of destitute Irish women who were sent to Australia under an assisted passage scheme in the aftermath of the famine.11 Through the memorial, the experience of these marginalized women has been recuperated into the settler-colonial narrative, but at the time women were far from being part of the hegemonic class. A newspaper report from 1850 claimed that: “Everybody is crying out against the monstrous infliction, and the palpable waste of the immigration fund, furnished by the colonists in bringing out these worthless characters” (qtd in O’Neill 2018). As Ghassan Hage’s work clearly shows, definitions of what it means to be White in Australia have changed over time (Hage 2002), so that although Irish-Australians may see themselves as “hyphenated citizens” (Veracini 2015), their incorporation into the Anglo-Celtic dominant culture means that the hyphen is now optional. In contrast, the Vietnamese memorial demonstrates the careful way more recent, non-White migrant communities must negotiate issues of memory and identity. Although it serves as a memorial for those Vietnamese refugees who died during the journey to Australia in the aftermath of war, the naming of the memorial carefully frames that loss within a narrative of gratitude toward the new  For a more detailed discussion of this memorial, see Atkinson-Phillips (2019: 105–109).

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host nation. At the time of its dedication, Anh Nguyen, president of the WA chapter of Australia’s Vietnamese Community Association, stated his belief that “The monument will be a tribute to Australia, and also will remind the next generations, and the public, about the ordeal that the first Vietnamese settlers went through on the high seas and in the jungle” (Wynne 2013). By reframing the Vietnamese refugees as “settlers,” the monument helps to legitimize their position within Australia. Yet the fact that this story needs to be told through a statement of “gratitude” suggests the Vietnamese-Australian story is still very much hyphenated. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Australia’s social history museums began to focus on histories of migration, a lack of existing research constrained their ability to tell migrant stories (Szekeres 2011). One effect of this was that, alongside the establishment of migration-focused collections and permanent exhibitions, museums invested in building relationships with migrant communities. Many of the new social history museums, including the two new migration museums, had specially designated community-­access galleries and, for the first time, migrant communities were given entry to the formal space of the museum as authors, rather than visitors. The “Australians and the Past” research project, conducted over a similar period to the initiation of the Sydney Welcome Wall, included a major survey of Australians’ relationship with history (Ashton and Hamilton 2010: 13) and found that non-Aboriginal Australians had a high level of trust in museums as cultural institutions (ibid.: 78).12 Engaging with Australia’s formal cultural institutions provided opportunities for migrant communities to co-opt the cultural authority of the museum to tell their own stories, albeit in ways that were constrained by curatorial practices. Out of these engagements, other commemorative practices have emerged. One of these is the “Reasons to Remember Wall,” located within the courtyard of the South Australian Migration Museums. It pre-dates the individualized remembrance discussed earlier, instead acknowledging collective migrant histories. The first plaque was instigated by the Baltic Council of South Australia, which approached the museum in 1992, in the context of the break-up of the Soviet Union. Other plaques have been 12  Aboriginal peoples tend to have low trust in Australian institutions, as a direct result of their experiences of colonial institutional violence and racism. See, for example, Cox (2007). For a history of Aboriginal struggles for rights, see Attwood and Markus (2020).

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added over time, all a negotiation between a formalized migrant community group and the museum. The layering of first-person quotes at the Welcome Wall/s mirrors a curatorial practice commonly used within social history museums, which Andrea Witcomb suggests risks having the individuals themselves as “a container for particular kinds of narrative tropes” (Witcomb 2019). In contrast, the collective testimonies presented within the plaques are specific, situated narratives that point beyond the moment of arrival to reasons for leaving, and offer a rare opportunity for “hyphenated citizens” to remember what was left behind (Fig. 3.2). The Reasons to Remember Wall is built on the last remaining part of South Australia’s first native school, constructed as part of the genocidal policy of separating Aboriginal children from their families and traditional culture. This history is acknowledged at the Migration Museum, in a stand-alone plaque that is near but separate from the wall. Vivienne Szekeres, former director of the Migration Museum, says the plaque developed out of discussions with elders of the Kaurna people, the Traditional Owners of the land on which the museum is built, and was directly influenced by the adoption of Reconciliation as a policy of the Keating Labor government in the early 1990s. In contrast to the Welcome to Country statements in Sydney and Fremantle, the plaque begins with an acknowledgment in the voice of the museum, which dedicates the plaque to “the original occupants of this site, who were dispossessed of their homelands by British settlers.” Reflecting the time of its installation, the plaque places dispossession in the past and does not acknowledge the Kaurna peoples’ ongoing relationship to Country in a way that now seems adequate. The rest of the text briefly tells the story of the boarding school and links it to the history of the Stolen Generations, although this term had not yet been widely adopted when the plaque was installed. While it is important to recognize that the terms of the telling of both migrant and Aboriginal histories are set by the museum (Atkinson-­Phillips 2019), the story of the Kaurna plaque suggests there is some opportunity for dialogue. Following on from the plaque and its accompanying discussion, the curators refocused the strategy of the museum itself, extending its coverage from migration, which Szekeres says risked subsuming Aboriginal history “by the grand narrative of the success of European settlement,” to colonization. This, she argues, “enabled us to present Aboriginal history as fundamental to any understanding of Australian culture, rather than a side issue” (Szekeres 2011: 45). Nonetheless, the ‘us’ that is presenting

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Fig. 3.2  Reasons to Remember Wall, last remaining section of South Australia’s first native school. Photograph by the author

this history remains a settler us, and the museum remains within colonial systems of land ownership.

What About the Not-Yet-Hyphenated? The memorials and memory spaces discussed so far have been created with the aim of drawing migrants into the “imagined community” of Australia. However, more than two decades of policy and political rhetoric have worked hard to exclude one particular group from joining this community: asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat. In June 2015, a small plaque appeared anonymously next to a public sculpture in Sydney’s city center, “Youngster” by Caroline Rothwell, as an act of remembrance and advocacy. It read: Lest we forget them. Children seeking asylum in Australia are kept in detention as part of a government policy which inflicts harm on refugees fleeing violence and persecution. Their suffering is our shame. Here at this site we remember them and together call out for change.

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The City of Sydney, having already declared itself a “Refugee Welcome Zone,” gave permission for the plaque to remain, and the artist made a statement in support of this reinterpretation of her artwork. Refugee welcome zones are an initiative of the Refugee Council of Australia that began in 2002. Such zones are, of course, only necessary in opposition to refugee hostility. The plaque’s call to remember connected both with the traditional refrain of war commemoration and with an Australian Human Rights Commission report of children in immigration detention, which had been released six months earlier. The focus on children was part of a strategy widely adopted by refugee and asylum seeker advocates at that time, which aimed to bypass political debates about the legality of asylum seekers, instead tapping into sentimental tropes that characterized children as innocent victims. Despite the plaque’s strong call for empathy and compassion, nothing did change. It took until 2018 for children to be removed from the offshore detention of Nauru and Manus Island. But this itself was a limited win, as some continued to be held in inland detention centers, and many of the children had turned eighteen in the intervening years.13 As early as 1998, curators at the Migration Museum were attempting to address negative public attitudes toward asylum seekers with their “Twist of Face” exhibition (Szekeres 2011). Indeed, the original exhibition at the ANMM included a Vietnamese refugee boat (Henrich 2013), and quotes used at the welcome wall/s demonstrate attempts to incorporate refugee stories into the broader migration story. Despite this consistent effort over two decades, the treatment of asylum seekers remains a highly politicized issue, and Australians continue to vote for parties who support offshore detention policies. Perera and Pugliese argue that humanist refugee advocacy work has unwittingly reinforced the terms of the debate, claiming that “Even as they mobilise emotions of shock, compassion or grief at the loss of life, these humanitarian tactics disguise or distort the forms of violence practiced by the state, as in instances where asylum seeker deaths at sea are mourned as unavoidable tragedies” (Perera and Pugliese 2018). For example, the humanitarian need to stop asylum seekers from risking their lives at sea was used as a justification for the reintroduction of indefinite offshore detention. 13  At the time of writing, a campaign to gain the release of the Biloela family and their two children from Christmas Island detention center is ongoing https://aran.net.au/campaigns/no-deportation-to-danger/biloela-family/.

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Perera and Pugliese are founding members of Researchers Against Pacific Black Sites (RAPBS), a group of academics engaged in the fraught question of “how to intervene in the destructive relation between the spectacle and the secret of refugee policies in Australia” (Perera and Pugliese 2018). During Human Rights Week 2015, they staged an intervention that engaged with similar sites as the welcome walls and migration museums, but in a very different way. “Called to account” was a performative reading out of charges against the state, by actors who included First Nations Traditional Owners, settler and hyphenated citizens, non-citizens, and “never to be citizens.” Three performance sites were chosen for their connection with Australia’s settler-colonial history of dispossession and incarceration: Mrs McQuarie’s Chair in Sydney, Federation Square in Melbourne, and the Roundhouse in Fremantle. The Roundhouse is only a five-minute walk from the Welcome Walls, and is a colonial jail constructed by some of the colony’s first prisoners. It looks out to the island of Wadjemup/Rottnest, where Aboriginal men were imprisoned during the colonial period (Stasiuk 2015). In “Called to account,” RAPBS links the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees with the treatment of Aboriginal peoples, within the violent logic of the settler-colonial state. In doing so it constructs a history that is at once more inclusive and infinitely more difficult.

Conclusion Australia is a nation in which the majority of the population are immigrants and descendants of immigrants. At the 2016 census, just under half of the population had either been born overseas or had a parent born overseas, reflecting the continuity of over 200 years of settler-­colonization. Throughout that history, some migrants have been more welcome than others; some have been more able than others to claim an Australian identity. Australia is also a nation built on the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Attempts to create a shared national history which focuses on common aspects of the experiences of migration across time inevitably collide with the violence of this history. Australian welcome walls and other forms of user-pays commemoration provide sites of recognition and acknowledgment for those who have found a place within the narrative of what it means to be Australian. However, as I have shown, the concept of “welcome” creates in itself a division between host and guest. This relationship is unsettled by the

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(always partial) acknowledgment of Aboriginal sovereignty. It is also unsettled by the arrival of asylum seekers who claim welcome, without first waiting for it to be offered by the dominant culture. Processes and practices of hospitality are not straightforward. In this chapter, I have not aimed to offer solutions, but to draw out some of the difficult knowledge that is sometimes hidden and sometimes brought to the fore when the questions of sovereignty and racism that are the legacy of settler-­colonialism are remembered in Australia’s public spaces.

References Ashton, Paul, and Paula Hamilton. 2010. History at the Crossroads: Australians and the Past. Halstead Press. Atkinson-Phillips, Alison. 2019. Survivor Memorials: Remembering Trauma and Loss in Contemporary Australia. University of Western Australia Publishing. Attwood, Bain, and Andrew Markus, eds. 2020. The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A Documentary History. Routledge. Australian Bureau of Statistics. 1993. Census Volume 1 Part XI: Nationality. Bulbeck, Chilla. 1991. Remembering Ourselves. Meanjin 50 (2/3): 406–414. Byrne, Denis. 2014. Affect and Empathy: Thinking About the Power of Material Things to Move Visitors. In Silent System: Forgotten Australians and the Institutionalisation of Women and Children, 71–80. Australian Scholarly Publishing. ———. 2016. Heritage Corridors: Transnational Flows and the Built Environment of Migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42 (14): 2360–2378. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2016.1205805. Cox, Leonie. 2007. Fear, Trust and Aborigines: The Historical Experience of State Institutions and Current Encounters in the Health System. Health and History 9 (2): 70–92. https://doi.org/10.2307/40111576. Darian-Smith, Kate, and Paula Hamilton. 2019. Remembering Migration. In Remembering Migration, 1–14. Springer. Dellios, Alexandra. 2019. Personal, Public Pasts: Negotiating Migrant Heritage— Heritage Practice and Migration History in Australia. In Remembering Migration: Oral Histories and Heritage in Australia. Springer: 219–236. Hage, G. 2002. Multiculturalism and white paranoia in Australia. Journal of International Migration and Integration 3 (3&4): 417–37. Henrich, Eureka. 2013. Museums, History and Migration in Australia. History Compass 11 (10): 783–800. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12090. ———. 2015. Paying Tribute: Migrant Memorial Walls and the “Nation of Immigrants”. The Culture of Migration.

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Macintyre, Stuart, and Anna Clark. 2013. The History Wars. Melbourne University Publishing. Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. Sage. Neath, Jessica. 2012. Empty lands: Contemporary art approaches to photographing historical trauma in Tasmania. Journal of Australian Studies 36 (3): 309–325. Neumann, Klaus. 2015. Historians and the Yearning for Historical Justice. Rethinking History 18 (2): 145–164. O’Neill, Siobhan. 2018, October 25. Remembering the 4,000 Irish Famine Orphans Shipped to Australia. The Irish Times. https://www.irishtimes.com/ life-­and-­style/abroad/remembering-­the-­4-­000-­irish-­famine-­orphans-­shipped-­ to-­australia-­1.3674497. Perera, Suvendrini, and Joseph Pugliese. 2018. Between Spectacle and Secret: The Politics of Non-Visibility and the Performance of Incompletion. In Visualising Human Rights, ed. J.  Lydon, 85–100. University of Western Australia Publishing. Persian, Jayne. 2011. Displaced persons (1947–1952): Representations, Memory and Commemoration. Stasiuk, Glen. 2015. Wadjemup: Rottnest Island as Black Prison and White Playground. Szekeres, Vivienne. 2011. The Past is a Dangerous Place: The Museum as a Safe Haven. In Curating Difficult Knowledge, 41–54. Springer. Veracini, Lorenzo. 2015. The Settler Colonial Present. Springer. Wills, Sara. 2009. Between the Hostel and the Detention Centre: Possible Trajectories of Migrant Pain and Shame in Australia. In Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with “Difficult Heritage”, ed. W.  Logan and K.  Reeves, 263–280. Routledge. Witcomb, Andrea. 2019. Oral History and First-Person Narratives in Migration Exhibitions: Tracking Relations Between “Us” and “Them”. In Remembering Migration, 203–217. Springer. Wooltorton, S., Collard, L., Horwitz, P., Poelina, A. and Palmer, D. 2020. Sharing a place-based indigenous methodology and learnings. Environmental Education Research 26 (7): 917–934. Wynne, Emma. 2013. WA Vietnamese community builds a monument to safe arrival of refugees. ABC Local, 28 October, viewed 11 November 2021, http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2013/10/28/3878717.htm.

CHAPTER 4

Negotiating Binaries in Curatorial Practice: Modality, Temporality, and Materiality in Cape Town’s Community-led Urban History Museums Stefanie Kappler and Antoinette McKane

Introduction Curating difficult or troubled histories is a controversial task and involves political decisions. In countries emerging from a history shaped by conflict, violence or oppression, curatorial practice takes on a particularly heated character. In urban settings, where population density is high, clashes between different memories of the violence that took place and how it should be represented in public and semi-public spaces are

S. Kappler (*) Durham University, Durham, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. McKane Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 U. Capdepón, S. Dornhof (eds.), Contested Urban Spaces, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87505-3_4

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common. Curators have the important role of negotiating such contestations. We argue in this chapter that the curatorial process is further complicated by the tensions that arise from engaging in materialist commemorative practices that are characterised by problematic binaries: forgetting and remembering, past and present, absence and presence. In museum and heritage practice, curatorial choices determine which aspects of urban fabric and material culture are preserved, and which are not. In doing so, curators play a key role in narrating the memories of urban communities and have the power to articulate these memory narratives through both museum space and urban space, which, in turn, affect the public understanding and experience of urban history and its relation to contemporary politics. These spatialised memory narratives, or memoryscapes, are inscribed in the urban palimpsest and account for gaps of representation (Massey 2005: 110). As different layers of memory overwrite one another, the problematic binaries between forgetting and remembering, past and present, and absence and presence, also take on tangible spatial expressions, with different memoryscapes struggling to exist alongside each other in the city. The urban space that is both interpreted and shaped by such curatorial interventions reveals underlying political tensions and power dynamics as they play out beyond the formal political sphere. To theorise and explain this reciprocal relationship between curatorial practice and the urban landscape we focus on two community-based museums in the wider area of Cape Town (South Africa). They include the District Six Museum (D6M) and the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum (LMLM). Both museums are products of the post-apartheid era, where new spaces have emerged in which the apartheid state could be curatorially challenged. Founded and run by community activists, who not only designed the museum space but also maintain it and provide guided tours, both museums seek forms of justice to mitigate the injustices experienced by their host communities during colonial and apartheid times. The memory narratives they present use the urban space as a canvas on which to voice the concerns of communities who do not get to speak in the dominant museum circles. Yet, their ways of navigating the binaries introduced in this chapter differ to account for their specific political messages. Methodologically, our analysis is based on personal visits to the museums between 2012 and 2018 (several visits to D6M and one visit to LMLM). We employ this visitor experience in our analysis of the display of material culture, the interpretive narratives, and commemorative techniques, which

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serve as the basis for our theoretical claims. Whilst we acknowledge that the experiences curated in those museums are specific to the lived experiences of apartheid, they still allow us to draw wider conclusions about curatorial possibilities in politically marginalised environments. We show that curatorial practice is one possible tool that endows marginalised communities with the agency to represent and interpret urban space. In that process, curators navigate a three-dimensional space shaped by the modality (remembering—forgetting), temporality (past—present) and materiality (absence—presence) of memory.

Museums as Part of the South African Memoryscape The South African memoryscape is one that is marked by visual and material traces of violence. South Africa’s major urban areas are largely marked by segregation, displayed through the presence of gated communities for the well-off. The latter are sharply contrasted by the presence of townships which are often in dire condition and suffering from infrastructural shortages. The memory of colonialism and apartheid thus clearly plays out spatially, with structures of inequality deeply engrained in urban landscapes (cf. Björkdahl and Kappler 2017). Indeed, the legacy of apartheid is a cityscape reminiscent of the urban ‘cleansing’ that took place throughout many South African cities, the centres of which were claimed for whites only, while non-whites were evicted to urban peripheries. Contestations about space are fierce to this day, ranging from demands for land reform and restitution (cf. Fraser 2007; McCusker et  al. 2015) to processes of gentrification in selected parts of the major cities (Visser and Kotze, 2008). Such processes of gentrification are produced by and in turn reproduce intersectional social inequalities, which are particularly visible in Cape Town (cf. Forde et al. 2021). Urban transformation has also raised questions about the appropriate artistic memorialisation of apartheid (Miller and Schmahmann 2017). At the same time, most apartheid and colonial memorials have not been changed or removed and continue to haunt public spaces (Marschall 2006: 177). This dilemma has resulted in the so-called #RhodesMustFall movement, which originated at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2015 and challenged the apparent status quo in memorialisation (cf. Holmes and Loehwing 2016). UCT students campaigned for the statue of Rhodes to be removed from campus and, with it, the colonial structures that continue to dominate educational institutions throughout the

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country. Yet, despite the momentum of this movement, which, in the same year, developed into the #FeesMustFall movement, the memoryscape in many South African cities has been largely static, dominated by museums and monuments in urban centres, often edited for tourist purposes at a distance from the residential areas of those who suffered most harshly from apartheid policies. In this chapter, we will turn to investigate two somewhat different curatorial interventions that have emerged after the end of apartheid and present ‘alternative’ accounts of the past, in terms of deviating from both mnemonic notions of the ‘rainbow nation’ and expressions of colonial nostalgia. They are both situated in the wider Cape Town area. The more centrally located D6M commemorates the multi-cultural residents who were evicted from the district of Cape Town as a result of the Group Areas Act of 1950. It opened in 1994 with the transition from apartheid to democracy. The museum is a symbolic anchor for those who have returned or are hoping to do so. Our second example, LMLM, was set up in 2000 as a monument for those exploited by the practice of ‘migrant labour’, thus kept in dire conditions at the outskirts of urban areas and removed from their families who would be required to stay back in what were called ‘homelands’. Both museums were set up by community activists and challenge the static monuments that largely characterise the South African mnemonic landscape. In this chapter, we are concerned with the particular challenges inherent in seeking to commemorate the experiences of marginalised urban communities through museums. The mission of both D6M and LMLM is complicated by a number of challenges presented by the complex legacy of curating as a practice and museums as institutions, both traditionally the domain of the cultural, political and economic elite. Bound up in the formation of the fledgling nation-states of eighteenth- and nineteenth-­ century Europe, public museums emerged in an urban context as important institutions in the formation of the bourgeois public sphere, detaching high culture from its former function of courtly display, and relocating it in a public space of assembly and commentary (Bennett 1995: 25). With a growing recognition from the mid-twentieth century onward, in no small part due to Bourdieu’s criticisms that modern public institutions like museums reinforced a hierarchical society, the ‘new museology’ emerged (Vergo 1989). This more self-reflexive form of museum practice continued to emphasise the museum’s significance as a site on which public opinions are debated and formed, but rejected the historical notion of

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a singular public in favour of recognising different identity groups as active subjects in the interpretation of material culture (Barrett 2011: 4). At the same time, there has been a growing recognition of the ‘soft power’ of museums to influence and accelerate cultural and economic developments, such as tourism, in an urban context (Lord and Blankenberg 2015). It is hardly surprising, then, that marginalised urban communities are seeking to harness this power by establishing museums to remember their experiences and to represent their experiences to those from beyond the community. The problem here is that in adopting the museum model of commemoration, these communities invariably also adopt curatorial practices of displaying material culture as evidence of the past  and practices rooted in authoritative academic discourses of history and archaeology (Smith, 2006). In doing so, community curators risk reinforcing the dominance of these discourses as the only legitimate way of understanding the relationship between the past and the present. This issue is especially pronounced in post-colonial contexts such as South Africa, where the museum can be seen as a cultural import of European colonisers, and the academic disciplines upon which it is based have played a powerful role in the subordination of indigenous peoples and cultures. For the remainder of this chapter we examine how D6M and LMLM navigate this complex terrain and the problematic binaries of remembering-forgetting, past-present, and absence-presence that it presents.

The Modality of Memory: Remembering-forgetting The curation of an environment that has undergone conflict is a particularly challenging one as the curatorial process has to navigate between guarding memorial discourses or transforming those (Levi Strauss 2010: 15). On the one hand, if a curator focuses on exhibiting remnants of violence in public, this may be an important element of transitional justice in terms of acknowledging the suffering that took place. On the other hand, the continuing presence of violence in the public sphere can also make it harder for a society to move on from the past and to plan a shared future. In negotiating the balance between remembering and forgetting, the curator has the power to reactivate forgotten memories and marginalised voices, as well as silencing particular narratives in their exhibition. Pointing to the highly political nature of this process, Chul Lee (2010) suggests that “curatorial space appears to form the situational and/or ideological battleground for visual practices, which is in turn related to how this space

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is produced and reproduced through social praxis and processes” (110). In that sense, we must not see the curatorial process and the space in which it takes place as isolated from the social processes that surround it, but instead as a continuing (re-)negotiation of social narratives and memory battles. Such power struggles may include discursive disagreements between different local communities as well as between top-down imposed narratives that may contradict narratives that evolve from local communities (Martin 2013: 3). The curating of memory is therefore necessarily confronted with counter-memories that refer to manifestations of resistance against the dominant memory narrative. It relates to how memory is actively “displaced, distorted, parodied, exaggerated, or otherwise transformed” (Herscher 2011: 152). Curating in the complex environment of a divided city therefore presents itself with the ethical challenge of doing justice to both remembering and forgetting, to the acknowledgment as much as to the transformation of suffering. What is at stake here for urban communities is significant as, in the case of South Africa, the urban memoryscapes curated by museums hold the potential to address cultural injustices that fall outside of the formal political and legal processes, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In that field of tension, D6M and LMLM take a similar approach in that they both activate elements of history that risk being marginalised by dominant memory discourses. D6M, a small community-based museum full of photographs, maps, personal histories and objects of significance for everyday life in the district, is keen to make the memories of the past available in an intergenerational way to those who were born after the evictions from District Six (cf. Kappler 2015). The latter took place in waves throughout the twentieth century and culminated in the declaration of the district as a white-only area by the apartheid government in 1966, as well as in the removal of an estimated 60,000 inhabitants. The museum involves those who remember the district’s pre-apartheid multicultural times in its curatorial activities, for instance by relying on them as museum guides or by displaying extracts of their personal memories alongside photographic portraits on exhibition panels. D6M is about remembering a forgotten sense of community in which diversity was once possible and celebrated, as opposed to the largely racially segregated cityscape of Cape Town. At the same time, D6M is about remembering the brutality of the evictions that eventually destroyed this very community, both for (former) district inhabitants and for international visitors to the museum space. The physical position of the museum in the district can thus be read as a way of

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claiming the space back from its destructive potential in terms of engraving memories of a different kind of community in that space. A dedicated engraved stone in the museum testifies that “[…] We wish to remember so that we can all, together and by ourselves, rebuild a city which belongs to all of us, in which all of us can live, not as races but as people”. The activist mission of the museum is directly articulated by its curatorial choices of remembering both the history of the district and the violence that sought to destroy its character. The museum stands as a testimony of that community’s resilience and their ability to create a better future, through the ways in which the past is commemorated. This ambition is reflected in the curatorial approach of the museum in that it is not only run by professional curators, who are at the same time social activists, but also draws from the input of former District Six inhabitants, some of whom provide guided tours, while others provide exhibition objects from their personal collections. This is similar to LMLM in that the latter is keen to commemorate the experiences of migrant workers, a group generally under-represented in the public sphere. The museum is located in the township of Lwandle outside Cape Town, far away from the centres of industrial action (cf. Murray and Witz 2014 p.v). It consists of a main exhibition hall, which commemorates the fate not only of the migrant workers of Lwandle itself, but also of those throughout South Africa. In that sense, the process of remembering transcends the immediate local community in which the museum is situated and extends to an entire class of exploited workers in the migrant labour system, who were needed to generate the profitable wealth to the colonial powers and, later on, apartheid government. In addition, the museum features ‘Hostel 33’, which visitors can enter to take a glimpse at the dire living conditions at Lwandle. As there is very little by way of raising awareness of the exploitative structures of migrant labour throughout South Africa, the museum can be considered an attempt at remembering those who have suffered under apartheid, and continue to do so now under its legacy. LMLM uses a way of remembering that is rooted in the community (which is now no longer a place exclusively reserved for migrant workers) and links it to a wider national issue, although there are still considerable tensions between the Lwandle community and LMLM (Mgijima and Buthelezi 2006). The museum has been run by a set of curators and has a management board, but is also closely linked to its surrounding community in terms of negotiating its space as part of Lwandle township and community. Certainly, remembering as a

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national undertaking creates frictions by institutionally forgetting local conditions, and vice versa. LMLM has to balance its wider educational mission in terms of the migrant labour system with the very specific local stories that emerge in its host community. The museum tries to achieve this by featuring a number of panels remembering personal stories of migrant workers, many of whom had originally migrated from the Eastern Cape (Institute for Justice and Reconciliation and Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum 2008: 22). Its focus on oral histories as a postcolonial method of curation is thus an attempt to remember the voices of those traditionally excluded from the privileged spaces of museums (Murray and Witz 2014: 127). What both museums show is that the selectiveness of the curatorial process allows for nuanced and targeted decisions as to what will be remembered and what will be forgotten as a result of this. The emphasis on personal stories, perspectives, actors, spaces or items in abstract narratives contributes to the political-activist nature of both those museums as they claim their space in their community.

The Temporality of Memory: Past-present Curation implies specific decisions about which processes and structures are deemed as of the past, and which are viewed as ongoing in the present. Elsewhere, we have written about the challenges of ‘post-conflict curating’ as a way of making sense of public urban landscapes in the aftermath of war (Kappler and McKane 2019). This certainly implies a somewhat artificial distinction between past and present, as with the ‘post’ prefix in a variety of contexts, such as postcolonial, post-violence or post-apartheid. Instead and specifically in relation to the much-used term ‘post-conflict’, there is a need to acknowledge that peace and war always coexist and are interrelated (Björkdahl and Kappler 2017: 24). This relates to Mac Ginty’s assumption that there are situations of ‘no war no peace’ (Mac Ginty 2006), which are neither fully fledged conflicts nor at peace. Similarly, one could argue that situations can also be ‘both conflict and peace’. Many societies emerging from violent conflict indeed continue to experience deprivation, discrimination and social tensions. Cramer and Goodhand (2002) suggest that “it should be a basic expectation that in a ‘post-­ conflict’ society, violence of one sort or another will continue to be one of the primary policy challenges” (886). Post-conflict societies are never without friction, and ad hoc forms of violence as these form part and

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parcel of the ongoing debates, not only about the future but also about the ways in which the conflict should be remembered, who would qualify as victim and perpetrator and how justice can be restored in the light of troubled histories. In that vein, the manner in which the conflict is represented in museums, in artwork, in oral histories is crucial to understanding the changed power positions that have emerged during the conflict as well as their translation into post-conflict politics. In the South African context, similar dynamics can be observed for discussions about ‘post-apartheid’. We need to ask to what extent ‘post’ means closure and to what extent it reflects a continuation of the past, albeit in different forms. What we find in the literature seems to suggest that, even after the formal transition to democracy in 1994, the post-­ apartheid period is characterised more by continuity than by rupture (Morris 1998). Indeed, many structures relating back to colonialism and, eventually, apartheid remain intact. This concerns urban planning (Freund 2010), residential segregation (Hamann and Horn 2015), migration patterns (Posel 2004) as well as expressions of economic and political protest (Lynch 2012). It is therefore questionable as to whether the ‘post’ prefix in ‘post-apartheid’ actually signifies a rupture or, instead, reflects the continuity of practices of inequality and segregation. The traces of apartheid structures can still be found in all public life, through the presence of gated communities, unequal access to infrastructure and resources as well as the fact that much of the ‘curated’ public life is concentrated on the urban centres, easily accessible to tourists and removed from the lived realities of those who continue to suffer most from economic hardship and poverty. The curation of the relationship between the past and the present involves the drawing of (selective) links and continuities between the past and present, as well as introducing assumed ruptures therein. In this, museums have different possibilities of representing the past: as a continuity into the present, as a trace that materialises in the present, or as a concluded era that bears little impact on present circumstances. With respect to D6M, its exhibitions of artefacts pertaining to a multicultural past can be read as an effort to bring back traces of the past into the present and mark the space of the district by reference to what it once was. Of course, this reference to a better, pre-apartheid past carries with it a taste of nostalgia that reaches back in time. By exhibiting a better era of District Six, the museum makes an a-linear temporal claim in which the past becomes the goalpost for the present and even the future of the district. One of the museum’s panels, entitled “A past and a future for us all”,

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suggests, among others, that “museums can speak of past injustices and remind us to oppose them in future. The museum is here because we want to ensure that we do not forget the injustice of forced removals”. In that sense, the museum entangles its nostalgia for a multicultural past with a focus on the forced removals that interrupted the potential sustainability of multiculturalism in the District Six community. The museum’s activism in the field of return, not least through its neighbouring Homecoming Centre in which events for actual and prospective returnees, amongst others, are hosted, is illustrative of this ruptured continuity between the past, present and future. In this light, the commencement of the museum’s chronological narrative in pre-apartheid times also serves an important representational function. By refusing to victimise the former inhabitants of the district simply as unfortunate evictees, it instead empowers them as the original district residents. The repressive past acts as a political instrument to make claims about a desired present and future. The museum is able to visualise this desired state through its exhibition material, its photographic evidence, the memories transported through individual stories and the large map on the floor which greets the museum visitor upon entry and which refers back to a time before the district was racially cleansed. In contrast to that, LMLM tends to curate migrant labour as a phenomenon that not only but primarily relates to the past. Artefacts reminiscent of apartheid, such as a signpost for “Strand & See. Net Blankes / Beach & Sea. Whites Only” or the referencing of the conditions of migrant labour in the past tense, are illustrative of the temporal location of the museum in the past. However, the museum does make evident the various ways in which this past in which black workers were kept outside the main city centres has implications on the present in new forms: the museum dedicates space to the question of ongoing evictions and the continued marginalisation of those who were exploited by the system. One wall, for instance, is entirely dedicated to an eviction process of Lwandle’s neighbourhood in 2014, although the connection to the migrant labour system is to be guessed rather than directly explained through the panels. Of course, what is less visible is that migrant-worker hostels continue to exist in post-apartheid South Africa,—if not in Lwandle itself, but especially around the resource-heavy mining areas. This curatorial practice certainly raises the question as to whether the positioning of migrant labour in a museum may risk obscuring the fact that this form of mobility management is an ongoing system of neoliberal governance in South Africa (cf.

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Kappler 2021). Although the museum does draw links to continued inequalities, based on race, class and gender, the presentation of these issues in a museum space may suggest to the visitor that they are merely traces of the past rather than ongoing issues in an unequal South Africa. Ultimately, interpreting migrant labour as an event in Lwandle’s past locates the curatorial practices of the museum close to a national discourse in which apartheid has been overcome,—and of course, this was and is subject to continued debate, both among the museum’s host community and in South Africa as a whole. Both examples show that the use of temporal reference points is a crucial tool at the hands of museum curators. The past may be used as an inspiration to the present or as a deterrent to new developments. The temporality of the museum can also be subtler, however, and relate to the, perhaps colonial, ways in which museums are perceived, namely as sites of the past rather than political contemporary activism. If that is the case, museums have to work additionally hard to have their concerns and grievances acknowledged as ongoing pressing issues.

The Materiality of Memory: Absence-presence It has been established here that what gives curators a distinct and powerful role in memory-making in the city is their role in deciding what tangible and visible form the commemoration will take. In deciding what is to be remembered and forgotten curators select what aspects of material culture are preserved and put on public display. As first-hand memories of conflicts fade, material culture plays an increasingly important role in shaping public understanding of the past, particularly for those who did not experience an event themselves (Saunders 2002: 175). The power of the curator is perhaps most evident where some tangible matter is now physically absent in the city, in which case the curator may once again give it a material form through the creation of monuments to celebrate important figureheads and events, or memorials to commemorate those who suffered or lost their lives in conflict. The extent of a curator’s influence depends, of course, on how the material culture that is selected and displayed is encountered by museum visitors. The tangible heritage object or site can be understood as a catalyst for the intangible process of remembering which the visitor performs in response to it, a process of recalling the past which shapes their own sense of identity in the present (Smith 2006: 54). However, some aspects of

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material culture are more effective than others in this process, while some objects arguably have a powerful material resonance of their own, functioning not as mere traces of past events, but shaping our experience in the present (Dudley 2010: 5). Brown explains this material phenomenon further in his distinction between an object, which we look through in order to see what they disclose about history, society, nature or culture, and a thing: We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object then a particular subject-object relation (Brown 2001: 4)

The ability of things to assert a presence and power of their own can be illustrated, in the South African context, by the example of the Rhodes statue at UCT, which was removed in 2015 due to pressure by the students. The continued presence of this colonial icon was experienced by students, not simply as a defunct vestige of a bygone era but as an intolerable obstacle intruding upon their desire for a more just and equal society in the present. In the city-as-museum then, the issue of materiality is especially complex due to the palimpsestic nature of urban memoryscape. The purposeful absence created by acts of iconoclasm, such as that carried out by the #RhodesMustFall movement, points to a paradoxical relationship in the encounter between humans and material things. Fowles identifies this paradox as a blind spot in the ‘turn towards things’ exemplified by much new materialist and post-humanist theory concerned with non-­ human agency (Fowles 2010: 25). Fowles draws attention to the powerful agency of absent things, which, due to their immateriality, can only be understood through the perception of the human subject. Fowles develops the concept of ‘the carnality of absence’ to express how the absence or loss of a thing can be felt so strongly that it assumes a palpable, strangely autonomous presence of its own (Fowles 2010: 27). In case of the #RhodesMustFall movement, the removal of the statue of Rhodes was experienced, by the student protestors at least, not as a loss but as a positive gain in their campaign for social justice and racial equality. Here, the empty pedestal on which the Rhodes statue used to rest is the most

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poignant reminder of its material and symbolic significance. Perhaps not unlike the “statue wars” in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, the material absence of the statue takes on a thing-like presence of its own, the space it once occupied becoming the prized possession of the #RhodesMustFall movement. On the face of it, LMLM appears to be a similar case to the Rhodes monument in its concern with the material remnants of an oppressive past. Perhaps the most important object in this context is Hostel 33, which is located next to the museum’s exhibition hall and represents, by way of example, a living space in which a migrant worker would have typically resided. Such hostels were, and still are, usually overcrowded and suffer from poor sanitary facilities. Visitors can enter the hostel space and take a look at “how things used to be”. A notion of authenticity is implicit in the ways in which the hostel is curated, including destroyed furniture and personal objects (cf. Björkdahl and Kappler 2019). Indeed, what Smith (2006: 279) identifies as the ‘European conservation ethic’ was evident in the very deliberate ‘restoration’ of the structure to a more stable material state in the first decade of LMLM’s operations (Murray and Witz 2014: 30). This presence of the past is contrasted with the fact that the hostel is empty and derelict, so there is an absence of life. This in turn seems to suggest that the dire living conditions of the hostel are a matter of the past. However, this suggestion exists in tension with a placard that greets visitors on entrance to the hostel, a replica of a sign put in place by the hostel’s former residents in protest at the museum occupying the structure while they were still waiting to be rehoused. This sign indicates that the acquisition of the hostel by LMLM was the cause of significant tension in the community. For some local residents, the hostel building continued to function as an object of shelter in the immediate post-apartheid period, evident in its continued use by Lwandle residents as accommodation and a tavern (Murray and Witz 2014: 4), until it was recognised by some members of the community as being more powerful than mere shelter. It was recognised, by those that went on to establish the museum, as tangible evidence of the migrant labour system, as having the ability to tell the story of those from within the community to those from outside through a materialist language of commemoration. This was the moment that the hostel as object became the hostel as thing, that is, it asserted a power that intruded upon the lives and the aspirations of the community in a material way.

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D6M differs from both the Rhodes and Lwandle examples in that the founding of the museum sought not to preserve or destroy a material trace of the apartheid, but rather to address a glaring material absence created by it. We refer here to the absence of the original residents of the district, the loss in urban materiality resulting from the destruction of their homes and businesses and the consequent disappearance of the multiculturality of the district. D6M can be understood not simply as a site of commemoration, but as a site of repatriation. The museum reunites the original inhabitants, through the presence of their individual stories, photographs and the living bodies of those that work as guides, with the material culture that they inhabited, through the presence of personalised heirlooms, furniture and street signs, on the D6M site. Their residency is reconstituted, made present both in the temporal and material sense of the word, through the restoration of specific human-object relations at a specific site. Harries (2017) argues that the materiality of objects as mediated through a process of touching dissolves a neat distinction between past and present. This has been linked with the postcolonial return of human remains, where the latter act as signifiers of presence and absence alike (cf. Harries 2010). Such debates are powerful in South Africa and extend to bodies and material objects. In repatriating the original residents of District 6, D6M has the potential to focus our attention on the aspects of residency that continue to be absent, that is the legal status and property rights afforded to the district’s ‘newer’ residents from the apartheid era onwards.

Conclusion In conclusion, it is important to draw together our findings on the modality, temporality and materiality of memory to consider what these reveal about the memoryscapes curated by our two selected community museums in their wider urban context. We have established that LMLM commemorates the experiences of local people under apartheid’s migrant labour system. It situates this local experience, as told through oral histories, photographs and the urban fabric of the hostel compound established at Lwandle, as part of the wider national story of the  migrant labour system. However, we have argued that the museum roots this experience primarily in the past by temporally anchoring the memoryscape it creates in the apartheid era. The materialist conservation practices which restored Hostel 33 to a former state reinforce this emphasis on the past use of the building. This focus on

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remembering the past risks being interpreted as failing to acknowledge that mobility management is an ongoing experience in present-day South Africa. The tensions resulting from this past-present binary are evident in the museum’s acknowledgement of a local protest against the establishment of the museum itself. This would suggest that LMLM’s role is most powerful in communicating the story to those outside the community. The insistence that Lwandle’s migrant labour history is experienced at the site on which it happened may enhance visitor understanding of the spatial marginalisation experienced by those whose story the museum tells and may also bring the profits from related tourist activity closer to that community. However, in terms of the urban memoryscape it creates, LMLM runs the risk of casting Lwandle’s built environment and its residents, many of whom continue to live in converted hostel structures, as a kind of living museum where those from outside the community can experience the present-day racial segregation, economic uncertainty and social inequality as inevitable consequences of the apartheid past. Such risks are inherent in the appropriation of the dominant commemorative model of the museum. However, with this model also comes a form of legitimisation. Ultimately, in recognising that Hostel 33 had the power to communicate the experience of those who were marginalised, and by taking control of this valuable heritage resource, LMLM’s activist curators sought to empower the community to tell its own story and to have that story recognised and validated beyond the community. Despite the tensions, the creation of LMLM can be understood as a strong statement of community control over the migrant labour memoryscape and its implications on contemporary political forms of marginalisation. Like LMLM, D6M sought to commemorate the atrocities of the apartheid, in this case the forced evictions of the residents of District 6. However, D6M also remembers the multicultural community that existed in the district prior to these evictions through the personal memories and domestic objects of the former inhabitants, and through a reconstruction of the lost urban fabric of the district in the form of original street signs and an immersive map. We have argued that, in taking the pre-apartheid past as its chronological starting point, D6M avoids representing the former inhabitants as the displaced victims of the apartheid evictions and instead empowers them as the original residents of the district. Furthermore, their residency is rematerialised by the museum, which reunites both the people and their domestic material culture on the site of the district. By making present what was forcibly removed from the district, curatorial

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practice at D6M can be understood as an act of repatriation. This is not to say that the appropriation of the museum model, in this case, does not pose inherent risks. Indeed, the commemoration of seemingly better pre-­ apartheid times is tinged with nostalgia. However, we argue that the real power of D6M lies in its relationship with its urban surroundings, specifically in the contrast created between the rematerialised multicultural district within the museum and the ongoing segregation in the city outside the museum. By refusing to take the apartheid as the museum’s narrative starting point and instead presenting it as a temporal rupture in a formerly multicultural district, D6M effectively brings the racial segregation of the district both during apartheid and in the present day under scrutiny. From this perspective, the lack of diversity in the surrounding district is not perceived as an inevitability of the apartheid era, but is reframed as a problematic disequilibrium in a formerly multicultural urban community. By making both the former inhabitants and their possessions present in the district, and by making strange the present-day racial segregation, it can be argued that the memoryscape curated by D6M paves the way for the actual repatriation of original residents and for the reformation of an ethnically diverse urban community beyond the walls of the museum.

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Lynch, Gabrielle. 2012. The Economic Is Political and the Political Is Economic: Protest, Change, and Continuity in Contemporary Africa. Review of African Political Economy 39 (134): 547–550. Marschall, Sabine. 2006. Commemorating ‘Struggle Heroes’: Constructing a Genealogy for the New South Africa. International Journal of Heritage Studies 12 (2): 176–193. Martin, Paul. 2013. The Past in the Present. Who Is Making History? In The Public History Reader, ed. Hilda Kean and Paul Martin, 1–10. Abingdon; New York: Routledge. Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage. McCusker, Brent, William G.  Moseley, and Maano Ramutsinela. 2015. Land Reform in South Africa: An Uneven Transformation. London: Rownman & Littlefield. Mgijima, Bongani, and Vusi Buthelezi. 2006. Mapping Museum–Community Relations in Lwandle. Journal of Southern African Studies 32 (4): 795–806. Miller, Kim, and Brenda Schmahmann, eds. 2017. Public Art in South Africa: Bronze Warriors and Plastic Presidents. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Morris, Alan. 1998. Continuity or Rupture: The City, Post-Apartheid. Social Research 65 (4): 759–775. Murray, Noëleen, and Leslie Witz. 2014. Hostels Homes Museum. Memorialising Migrant Labour Pasts in Lwandle, South Africa. Cape Town: UCT Press. Posel, Dorrit. 2004. Have Migration Patterns in Post-Apartheid South Africa Changed? Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics 15 (3–4): 277–292. Saunders, Nicholas J. 2002. Memory and Conflict. In The Material Culture Reader, ed. Victor Buchli, 175–180. New York: Berg. Smith, Laurajane. 2006. The Uses of Heritage. Abingdon: Routledge. Vergo, Peter. 1989. The New Museology. London: Reaktion Books. Visser, Gustav, and Nico Kotze. 2008. The State and New-build Gentrification in Central Cape Town, South Africa. Urban Studies 45 (12): 2565–2593.

CHAPTER 5

Contesting Sensory Memories: Smithfield Market in London Astrid Swenson

Introduction: Memory and the Senses It was market-morning. The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with filth and mire; a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest upon the chimney-­tops, hung heavily above. All the pens in the centre of the large area, and as many temporary pens as could be crowded into the vacant space, were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the gutter side were long lines of beasts and oxen, three or four deep. Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a mass; the whistling of drovers, the barking dogs, the bel-

I would like to thank Sarah Dornhof, Ulrike Capdepón Busies, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback, as well as my colleagues on the research team, Monica Degen, Camilla Lewis, Isobel Ward, and Manuela Barz, and our interviewees, without whom this research would have been impossible. A. Swenson (*) Bath Spa University, Bath, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 U. Capdepón, S. Dornhof (eds.), Contested Urban Spaces, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87505-3_5

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lowing and plunging of the oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs, the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides; the ringing of bells and roar of voices, that issued from every public-­house; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and yelling; the hideous and discordant dim that resounded from every corner of the market; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite confounded the senses. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (London 1837-39; repr. 1985).

Charles Dickens’ sensory description of Smithfield in London in Oliver Twist is perhaps the most reproduced quote about the last of London’s wholesale food markets still operating on its original location. Smithfield used to be a large open space just outside the northern City boundaries, which by the late Middle Ages had not only become the most famous livestock market in the country but also a site of executions, and as the location of Bartholomew Fair, was famed for its debauchery. In the Victorian period, life slaughtering was moved elsewhere, and new market buildings were constructed. At the start of the twenty-first century, Smithfield Market remains the largest wholesale meat market in the UK, and one of the largest in Europe, but parts of the market building are empty and the surrounding factories that produced a constant smell of bacon have closed and are being replaced by fashionable eateries and creative businesses spilling over from nearby Clerkenwell. The site is currently part of a large project of cultural regeneration, with the relocation of the Museum of London (MoL) from the Barbican to the disused parts of the market buildings at its center. This regeneration is likely to change the “feel” of an area, which, so far, has been presented in terms of continuity, despite many processes of transformation in its history. A certain nostalgia permeates public histories and private memories of the area. The Dickens quote, on display on several boards around the market and used in travel guides, websites, and academic works, has played its part in invoking and, as I shall argue here, defending the area’s tradition of sensory exuberance against commercial regeneration in the past. As such, it incites us to reflect on the role of “sensory memories,” and their material supports, in urban contestations. The wider methodological literature on the urban sensorium also likes to draw on Dickens’ rich descriptions to discuss the usefulness of textual sources for researching past sensory experiences (Steward and Cowan 2007: 4). How the senses contribute to transforming spaces into places

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has interested the social sciences since Georg Simmel’s and Walter Benjamin’s pioneering work in the early twentieth century, and the importance of the senses as triggers for memory, famously described in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, has been underpinned by much scientific research. Over the past decades, a veritable “sensory revolution” across the humanities has discussed how sensing is, however, not merely a neutral biological process but culturally contingent (Howes 2005, 2006). The literature on both historic (Corbin 1988; Cowan  and Steward 2007; Classen 2014) and contemporary cities (Adams and Guy 2007; Degen 2008) suggests that battles about the political, social, cultural, and economic life of cities are intimately intertwined with choices about which, and whose, senses are permitted or suppressed, and hence remembered. Nevertheless, the rich literature on the urban sensorium is surprisingly divided into a historical and a contemporary branch. Works that center on the relationship between senses and memories in contemporary urban contexts often focus on the role of individual memories in processes of rapid urban transformation (Degen 2008; Degen and Rose 2012; Bennett 2014; May 2017), with only a few studies investigating the construction of cultural memories (Møller-Olsen 2019). In pioneering studies on collective memory, on the other hand, attention to the senses has often been subordinate (Nora 1998). Studies on the way the past haunts the present in embodied ways mostly investigate sites of violent political conflict (Ladd 2008). Much remains to be done to conceptualize the role of the senses in contested memories in the city in particular with regard to connecting processes of “individual,” “communicative,” and “cultural” memory (Assmann 2008). Jan Assmann’s terminology is useful here to differentiate between memories on the inner, social, and cultural levels, and in particular to distinguish, and connect, forms of collective memory that are informal, embodied, and lived as “communicative memories,” and those that have been codified and formalized as “cultural memories” through material supports (such as the Oliver Twist quote on commemorative plaques) and institutions. The fleeting nature of the senses poses interesting challenges for thinking about processes and agents that shape the shifts from “individual” to “communicative” and “cultural” forms of memory. How can the transient and personal nature of the senses be codified as cultural memory and then retrieved? Who has the agency in sensing, recording, using, and contesting? Does looking at the senses merely reveal another layer when approaching contested memories, or does it do something that is fundamentally different?

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In other words, what is the explanatory power of a sensory focus for memory studies? To grapple with the role of the sensory realm in processes of memory, it is necessary to develop an understanding of both the historicity of sensing and the sensory dimension of historical consciousness. This paper proposes to further this conceptualization of the role of the senses in urban memories through a case study of the Smithfield Market area in central London. Smithfield offers a fascinating example as its sensory history is so explicitly at the heart of debates about its contemporary identity and its future. While all cities are defined by heterogeneity, a vital feature of the Smithfield area is the mixed use of public space by different social groups, which creates particularly dense and juxtaposed sensory “atmospheres” (Degen et al. 2017c; Degen and Lewis 2019). The diversity of social uses gives the area an especially vibrant character contributing to a deep sense of attachment, further enhanced by a powerful sense of history stemming from a combination of a unique historic environment, the longevity of cultural institutions and businesses, and a continuous sensory richness. The paper will examine which histories are silenced in individual, cultural, and communicative memories and suggest how a selective and nostalgic “sensory memory” has been used to construct a narrative of Smithfield as a liminal place that might be able to resist, or at least shape, extensive processes of change. I here develop research conducted collaboratively with Monica Degen (Brunel University London), Camilla Lewis (Manchester University), and Isobel Ward (King’s College London), in partnership with the Museum of London (Degen et al. 2017c). Following on from an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded network to develop sensory methods for urban research, design, and curation, we used a multidisciplinary, mixed-­methods approach (including ethnography, interviews, photography, sound recordings, observational notes, streetscape maps, oral histories, and archival records) to chart the area’s changing sensory and temporal perspectives. Building on the original fieldwork that was motivated by the desire to develop methods to record the sensory “feel” of the area before the Museum of London’s move, this paper uses the case study to contribute two broader questions to this book: how to widen historical approaches to the study of conflicting urban memories through interdisciplinary attention to the senses, and, by comparing and relating the case studies to other areas in and beyond London, how to conceptualize and address uneven distributions of conflictual memories in urban spaces.

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The Site Before discussing questions and methodology further, it is useful to introduce the site. The Smithfield area is located on the boundary of three administrative units in central London, the self-governing City and the boroughs of Islington and Camden, just outside the old city walls. It is best known for its meat market, which is the last of the central London wholesale food markets still operating on its historic site. The meat market has been located here since the fourteenth century. When the slaughtering of animals was banned inside the City itself, these functions of the meat market also moved to the Smithfield area. The Corporation of the City of London formally established a cattle market there in 1636, which operated as a live animal market until 1855. The sale of meat continued after the construction of a covered meat market in 1866, designed by Horace Jones, which remains operational today following extensive refurbishment throughout the twentieth century. Since the High Middle Ages, the area has also been the location of various guilds and religious institutions (many of which now host museums), such as the Charterhouse, St. Bartholomew the Great, and St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. Founded in 1123, the latter remains the oldest hospital in Britain still providing medical services on its original site. An adjacent street on the other side of the market houses the British headquarters and the Museum of the Order of St. John, which reinvented itself from a medieval military Order involved in the Crusades to an international first-aid charity in the nineteenth century. The third prominent aspect of the site connects the history of animal slaughtering to the executions that took place in the area, most famously of William Wallace, “Braveheart,” in 1305. Linked to this was a reputation for crime and public health problems, as the area attracted prostitutes, beggars, vagabonds, and criminals. Today, a sense of the area as a liminal space—in the literal and the figurative sense—remains. Its position between the City and Farringdon makes it a thoroughfare for cab drivers and cyclists, and a popular spot for a break for staff and patients from St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. The meat market’s opening hours between 2:00 and 8:00 a.m. affect the surrounding area’s rhythm; late-night clubbers frequent the site, and a range of pubs and cafés cater to the traders’ and clubbers’ early-morning needs. At the same time, Smithfield is often described (both in the literature and by our interviewees) as a place-in-between which escaped many of the transformations that affected London through the centuries, and therefore

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made a different stage of being possible. In a prime London location, the area has undergone significant changes over the past decades, however. Sitting on the fringes of creative and financial districts, the zone is not densely populated and has been an increasing focus for redevelopment. In particular the western, no longer used, section of the market building has had planning applications for demolition and rebuilding overturned twice through public campaigns. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, café chains and high-end restaurants have moved into premises around the market. Although long-standing businesses remain, their future is uncertain, and so is the meat market’s ability to continue trading. Construction for a Crossrail station has started, which will make Farringdon one of the busiest stations in the UK as part of a new railway for London and the South East, running from Reading and Heathrow in the west. This prospect of increased footfall has already attracted new businesses and led to rising rents for existing ones. In 2016, following years of unsuccessful planning applications and redevelopment plans for the West Smithfield building, the Museum of London was announced as the new occupant of the abandoned parts of the market buildings. The move from its current site in the Barbican is planned for 2022. Furthermore, “The Culture Mile” was announced in 2017 as a major new initiative “to draw all [the] history, innovation and achievement” in the northwest of the City together by connecting arts, heritage, and culture organizations “to animate the spaces in between our buildings and create a sense of welcome” and education (Sir Nicholas Kenyon, cited in Barbican 2017). Several factors thus make Smithfield an informative case study for the questions asked in this book about the ways in which memories are attached not merely to the built environment, but to how they live, circulate, associate, disappear, or haunt it, unsettling the urban fabric and leading to manifest transformations. The first thing that makes Smithfield an interesting case study relates to the fact that the area is moving from the fringes to the center of historic consciousness as the center of London’s largest regeneration project, which will inevitably alter its sensorial and memorial regimes. This might not only occur through socioeconomic change but through a potentially more visible curation of its tangible and intangible “heritages” by the MoL and other cultural actors. It is an opportune moment to reflect on how such a transformation might affect the passing of the sensory features from “communicative” to “cultural memory.”

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Second, continuities in physical and sensory perceptions, and the use of narratives about such continuities in campaigns against regeneration, can help to problematize the relations between materiality and subjectivity within memory studies, and the importance of studying contestations, extensions, and invisibilities of the materiality of monuments and traces in embodied, imagined, artistic, virtual, and ghostly presences of memory in urban space, and, in turn, their potential to act upon material realities. Finally, although the site is full of traces of violent pasts and marginalized histories, including but not limited to histories of Empire, these are— in contrast to many other places in the city, the UK, and indeed globally—not currently at the center of public contestations. On the contrary, contestations appear to be more about the future rather than the past. It is only when inscribing the site into wider geographies of memory that broader themes about the tension between materiality and contestation will appear clearly.

Interdisciplinary Approach The research on which this paper draws was underpinned by a primarily inductive approach, led by a relatively open research question about how sensory and temporal features interact in the creation of place. We came to studying the site as a team through a previous collaboration with curators from the Museum of London on an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project developing interdisciplinary methods to research and curate the senses in urban environments. One of the curators suggested that it would be interesting to record the sensory present before the move of the Museum. While it has been customary since the nineteenth century to take a record of the physical environment before a restoration or transformation project, and often social histories are documented, there are no established protocols for recording sensory features. Moreover, a better understanding of the sensory present might inform the curation of the future. Museums have long paid attention to their visitors’ embodied experience (Rees Leahy 2012). More recently, the senses have been increasingly important in curatorial practices to create richer, more diverse, and more inclusive experiences (Howes 2014). While our research did not focus on the future museum space and its curation as such, we were inspired to reflect how our research might help to move sensory museology beyond a recreation of sensory features (say, for instance, by imitating the crackling of flames during the Great Fire of

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London, or the smell of spices in a room on imperial expansion) by making the alterity of the sensorium of the past explicit. Showing how sensing is culturally and historically contingent could offer not only a richer account of the past, but also awareness about the ways the social body shapes the perceptions of the physical body could help facilitate a dialogue about urban presents and futures. In order to explore the sensory and temporal dimensions of the Smithfield area, we used a multi-methods approach (Degen et al. 2017b) to collect and analyze our data. We visited the currently closed spaces inside and under the market that will house the MoL, but largely focused on the publicly accessible buildings and the surrounding streets. We conducted ethnographic observations, visiting the area at different times during the day and night over the summer of 2017, making notes of historic and commemorative features, sensory characteristics, and various user groups and activities, and taking photographs and sound-recordings; we conducted semi-structured interviews with twenty-five people who have a special relationship with the area, including residents, cultural institution employees, architects and planners from the City of London, and local business owners. We followed up with six walk-along interviews to explore relationships to the built environment and spatial practices in more depth (Kusenbach 2003). For a broader understanding of the area by different social groups, we conducted a vox pop survey on feelings about the area with 110 people at different times of the day during a two-week period, stopping passersby at random. To place present-day narratives in historical perspective, we drew on a range of primary and secondary sources. The architectural and social history of the area is well documented (Forshaw and Bergström 1980 rev. 1990; Forshaw 2015), yet while the sensory features are often mentioned, there has not been a systematic analysis of the area’s changing sensory experience beyond Metcalfe’s vivid study of the meat trade in the Victorian period (2012). The purpose of this paper is not to give a cross-period analysis of the area’s sensory history; instead, I aim to identify elements of history which dominate narratives and sensory experiences. This means paying attention to absences as well as to presences. It has often been pointed out that there is a difference between knowledge about the past and memory. “It is only by forgetting what lies outside the horizon of the relevant” that cultural memory “performs an identity function” (Assmann 2008: 113). In order to problematize changes, as well as absences and erasures in sensory memory, I drew on nineteenth to twenty-first-century

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primary sources, such as evidence presented to parliamentary committees during the period of Victorian transformation, visual and literary rendering of the sites, oral histories dating from the 1980s held by the Museum of London, and twentieth-century sound recording in the British Library, community publications, the local and national press, late twentieth and early twenty-first-century regeneration documents, online histories, and advertisement for historical tours. As urban historians have demonstrated in studies on different cities, there are many ways to study past sensory environments, through direct testimony (for instance, from travelogues, letters, and diaries), government and press reports, works of art and literature, as discussed through the opening quote from Dickens. While the Victorian novelist used his familiarity with the area to evocatively criticize urban deprivation in Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, more often than not familiarity renders sensory features unnoticed. It is, therefore, a noticeable feature that outsiders wrote many of the early modern sources on the senses. However, in the modern period, moments of sensory change, in particular related to modernization projects from the nineteenth century onward, often produce a wealth of sources (Steward and Cowan 2007: 1-9). Moreover, although the nineteenth and early twentieth century did not yet develop explicit methods to record sensory changes systematically, the preservationist drive that developed recordkeeping methodology in disciplines from history to architecture and linguistics, as well as in amateur collecting and photography, often also included attention to some sensory elements, despite the emphasis on visuality in nineteenth-century culture (Buckland and Qureshi 2020). Conscious recordings of particular features of the Smithfield area, such as BBC sound recordings of the market from the 1930s in the British Library Sound Archives (1935 and 1993) and the interviews conducted by the MoL in the 1980s tell us in themselves something about attempts to translate a vanishing history into cultural memory by some of the country’s leading institutions. Representing the senses always involves a process in which something is both lost and gained in translation. To analyze and represent our findings we created hand-drawn maps that brought the different data together, which our digital consultant, Manuela Barz, developed into a digital resource through a range of mapping techniques. These experimented with different ways of communicating and visualizing the various temporal flows, sensory engagements, and fluctuating atmospheres that

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characterize Smithfield Market (Degen et al. 2017a). They are accessible on the project website (http://sensorysmithfield.com).

Sensory Histories and Memories of Smithfield Smithfield’s feel of place is strongly informed by what can be described as a “sense of history,” expressed through a number of narratives that stress the entanglement between past, present, and future experiences of the area. Interviewees described the dense concentration of historical sites in the area as unique in London, and emphasized how the ability to “feel” history contributes to their attachment to the area. However, while history undoubtedly plays a big part in people’s affection, the kind of histories that were highlighted as individual and collective memories is highly selective. Emphasis was put on continuity in the built environment, through descriptions of the survival of buildings and street pattern, as the area is untypical in surviving the Great Fire of London as well as the Blitz (see Map 1: http://sensorysmithfield.com/maps/ map-­01/), offering an embodied way to touch the past through one’s feet on the cobbled streets. Our respondents also highlighted the enduring sensory history of Smithfield as a place of transgression and sensory exuberance. They rarely mentioned the fundamental changes which have taken place in its social and sensory history. Dramatic changes to sensory regimes, as well as to the social and economic fabric, were brought, for instance, by the sixteenth-century dissolution of the monasteries, the Victorian attempts at urban sanitization—which involved the closure of the St. Bartholomew’s fair, the relocation of the livestock market to Islington, the building of the Victorian covered-market buildings, the transfer of public executions to Newgate Prison, and the canalization of the River Fleet underground—and developments in transportation, cold storage, and environmental regulations in the twentieth century (Forshaw and Bergström 1980; Forshaw 2015). All of these fundamentally altered the sensory experience of the site. The global context of Smithfield’s history is also largely omitted from individual, communicative, and cultural memories. While the Museum of London’s pop-up exhibition on the Farringdon Road-side of the market for its “Museum of Londoners” firmly inscribes the city’s diverse present in a longer perspective through a combination of portrayals of current “faces of Smithfield” and images from the archives (Embrace Building Wraps 2019), the area’s history of migration, although still alive in family

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memories, as well as in festivities in neighboring Clerkenwell, has few tangible reminders, except for some publicly displayed photographs in a local café run by the descendants of 1930s Italian immigrants. However, it is the absence of commemoration of the dark histories and legacies of the British Empire that is most striking. Although explored in the MoL’s research into the area, remarks in situ on the history of racism were only muttered about in interviews. This history is perhaps most starkly exemplified by the march on parliament in 1968 of 300 Smithfield meat porters in support of the anti-­immigration MP Enoch Powell and against the Race Relations Bill. According to records kept by the intelligence agency MI5, this march had been organized by Dennis Harmston, who, in the 1966 general election, stood for the party of Oswald Mosley, erstwhile leader of the British Fascists (Norton-Taylor and Milne 1999). The area’s reputation for its anti-immigration protests used to be widely known beyond the locality. This was, for instance, reflected in the fact that in 1972, World in Action, an influential current affairs television program (still freely accessible through the British Film Institute iplayer), which used a “see for yourself” approach, chose to take a shop steward from Smithfield Market to Uganda to find out if witnessing the expulsions of the Asian population there might make him change his anti-immigration stance (British Film Institute 2020). Although an Anti-Slavery Society walking tour from 2012, on the long history of different forms of slavery that shaped London, starts at the site of the killing of the fourteenth-century leader of the peasants’ revolt (Anti-­ Slavery Society 2012), the area’s links to the transatlantic slave trade have no memorial either. In the late eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries the market was often mentioned in the abolitionist literature, to draw comparisons between the treatment of oxen at Smithfield Market and that of enslaved people in the West Indies (Barclay n.d.). However, these links are not remembered. Nor were there, at the time of writing, any tangible reminders that, for instance, some residents of Charterhouse Square, adjacent to the market, benefited from compensation awarded for their Caledonia estate in Barbados as part of the compensation for slave owners after the abolition of the slave trade, although the Legacies of British Slave-ownership Database, compiled and published since 2009 by University College London, allows the public to trace this (UCL 2020) (Fig. 5.1). More generally, there is no memorialization of how London’s role in the expanding British Empire and the resulting emergence of a global

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Fig. 5.1  Charterhouse Street Port of London Authorities. Photograph by the author

meat trade underpinned changes to the physical, social, and sensory fabric of the area (Ball and Sunderland 2001; Metcalfe 2012). The Port of London Authority’s building is a stark visible reminder—but again, there were, at the time of research, no plaques or explanatory signs. A little bit further down the road at St. John’s Gate, in the Museum of the Order of St. John, one can get glimpses of the role the British Empire played in the development of international aid organizations. However, unless one works under the portrait of Queen Victoria in the archives, one does not fully sense that this used to be a meeting place for Britain’s imperial elites (Swenson 2015). These sporadic absences are significant as they point to bigger systemic ones. Silences in interviews might be due in part to the fact that we asked about the sensory “feel” rather than the imperial histories of the area, but that makes the responses—in conjunction with the absences of any

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monuments—perhaps even more revealing of a widespread tendency to relegate the imperial past to particular sites, rather than the very fabric of modern British history (Hall 2004). It is of course impossible to tell the history of each and every trace in four dimensions, and thinking about the way choices are made to mediate different histories through chosen spotlights partly helps to understand the uneven distributions of conflictual memories in urban spaces. The division of narratives between the two existing sites of the Museum of London at the Barbican and in Docklands is a good case in point. Given its centrality to the British Empire and its role in the transatlantic slave trade, the location in Docklands was chosen to tell the story of “London, Sugar and Slavery” as the history of every Londoner in a pathbreaking permanent exhibition on display since the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007. London’s role more broadly across the Empire is woven into the rest of the exhibitions. The Barbican, on the other hand, foregrounds the diversity of Londoners rather than the imperial connections that created their hyper-cultural city (Aylett 2020). And yet, this division between center and periphery in British history through the spatial ordering of museum sites poses questions for the future about how to show how much Britain was, and still is, “at home with the Empire” (Hall and Rose 2006) also in its metropolitan center. At present, beyond the academic work, the history of Smithfield is being told largely in terms of local and sensory continuity, rather than focusing on processes of change and global connections. This present selective memory can perhaps be explained through its usefulness in contesting past and future processes of regeneration. The felt continuity has been repeatedly and successfully invoked to fight past regeneration projects, arguing that “the fragile identity—defined by its architectural character, streets, places and activity patterns”—should be “respected and reinforced rather than ignored” (Farrell 2007: 3; Metcalfe 2012: 8). A decade later, many of our interviewees attributed the success of resisting, or at least tempering, processes of social and economic regeneration that have affected other parts of the city not only to the campaigns, but gave credit, and thus agency, to the historical environment itself in these contestations. We found that belief in the importance of preservation of, and participation in, the area’s history was far from limited to town planners, artists, architects, and conservationists, who focus professionally on the preservation and reuse of the existing architectural fabric. Instead, the importance of preserving and experiencing the area’s architectural and social history, its traditions, and rituals was emphasized by many traders, businesses, and residents too.

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Narratives of continuity sit alongside a strong articulation of nostalgia for the vanishing carnivalesque, working-­class, and sensory excessive features of Smithfield’s history and the twentieth-­century sensory richness of the meat trade, exemplified by this account by an urban designer: It’s changed. They had to, for [general food law regulations] make all the meat fully refrigerated at all times. So, it’s now much more clinical. You don’t wander through the market anymore and buy a side of beef or whatever. It’s all alien to other people—outsiders. There are a few shops that sell to … retail. But it’s no longer a market that you can relate to as a Londoner … now, we’ve lost that ability. It’s all big business.

Beyond the ubiquitous references to the importance of sensing “history,” there was often little explicit discussion about what the markers of “history” are. Different individuals and professional groups put varying emphasis on architectural, social, sensory, or personal features. While professionals such as planners, artists, architects, and conservationists have focused strongly on the preservation and reuse of the architectural fabric, the importance of preserving and experiencing the area’s social history, traditions, and rituals has also been emphasized by many traders, businesses, and residents. This indicates that Smithfield at the moment consists of milieux de mémoire rather than being a mere lieux de mémoire in Pierre Nora’s sense. Multiple “communities of memory” shape the way public displays of the area’s history are fragmented and concentrated in a number of places (see map 2, http://sensorysmithfield.com/maps/map-­02/). The historic churches and the museums of the Order of St. John, Charterhouse, and St. Barts Hospital foreground the monastic and medical history of the area and the foundations of poor relief. A plaque at the hospital also commemorates that, in 1381, the Mayor of London stabbed to death Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasants’ Revolt, partly for seeking to end medieval serfdom. The memorial dedicated to William Wallace is the most visible reminder of the area as an execution site. The history of the market, on the other hand, is displayed most explicitly in the Grand Avenue on exhibition boards, adjacent to a war memorial and a number of commemorative plaques marking the opening of various buildings. What stands out in the Grand Avenue is an official as well as a personal celebration of the social history of the market and the remembrance of people who shaped it. The sensory history of the area is most strongly put on display by various

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businesses, focusing on smells and tastes. Some remnants of an installation from the 2017 Architectural and Designer Week (gone at the moment of writing) focused on the olfactory history of the area using objects and testimonials. A hotel displays the social and sensory history (framed by the ubiquitous Dickens’ quote), while a number of pubs focus on the recreation of Victorian tasting experiences, especially meat and gin, with a modern twist, framed by historic objects, such as bottles, and displays of historical imagery, including maps, historic prints of the market, caricatures of its users, drawings of animals, and meat cuts—sometimes sourced through research in the Museum of London archives. There also is a rich and varied awareness of other histories connected to sounds and textures. Across the interviews, participants told us about how the materiality of the historic fabric and their life stories intertwined. A resident of the area, for instance, reflected on how the sound of the fountains in St. Barts brings back memories of joy and sorrow from her entire life. A local artist drew attention to how sound carried broader cultural connotations: “My wife was born in Barts hospital … So Bart’s at that time was, in some people’s eyes, the hospital you had to be born in to be a Cockney cos’ you could hear the bells from Hackney le Bow.” Other examples are roadblocks near the Rotunda that left echoes in a taxi driver’s mind of hearing the blast of an IRA bomb in nearby Liverpool Street which led to the permanent closing of the road. Often, the feelings of attachment to the area’s history were particularly intense when “official” and “personal” memories enmeshed in this way, and when memories could be revived through a tangible support.

Conclusion: Beyond Sensory Nostalgia By linking historic and contemporary ways of “sensing” and by reinscribing local histories in their global context, this case study has suggested how some of the fractures in the interdisciplinary literature on the relationship between senses, memories, and urban transformation can be addressed. The case study helps to sharpen our theoretical understanding of the way the senses are not only important triggers for individual memories, but are woven into collective ones. While more research is necessary to identify agency in histories of sensory memory codification and place attachment (Madgin et al. 2016, 2018), the case study suggests that sensory memories are selected and curated in manners familiar from the broader literature on collective memory, in particular in the transitional

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space between communicative and cultural memories. They rely on tangible forms of transmission, such as textual or visual sources, that then get reactivated and enmeshed with individual memories again—sometimes even creating “false” individual memories (for instances, of a prevalent sight and smell of blood that we could never quite corroborate), informed by cultural memories rather than individual ones. Next, the way sensory memories are constructed at Smithfield suggests that the selection processes which create sensory memories are shaped by social, economic, and political contestations. Past sensory identities of Smithfield actively inform current imaginations and vision for the future, in multiple, sometimes parallel, sometimes competing, and always selective ways. Although sensory change overall has an ambiguous place in different accounts, it can offer a way to open up debates about the multiplicity of meanings given to urban experiences. The majority of regeneration documents, interviewees, and historical displays express a certain nostalgia for the sensoriality of the past and its associated messiness and liveliness, and a certain fear that these might disappear. Apart from those working professionally with historical sources, few seemed aware of how strongly the sensory landscape—and responses to it—changed not only recently, but repeatedly across time, and in particular since the Victorian period. Regardless of these differences, and some tensions about future uses, the arrival of the Museum of London was often seen as welcome by many interviewees because it is deemed a good custodian of history, even if participants said little on what kind of histories this custodianship might privilege. Yet, there are challenges ahead about whose past and present will live on—not least as the site will be not only about the local memory but about that of all of London. Understanding and acknowledging the reasons for the strong sense of nostalgia that dominates historical consciousness at present appears necessary (Boym 2001). The literature on memory and heritage (and change in post-industrial urban settings more broadly) often takes for granted the idea that a backward longing for a lost past drives attachment to the historic environment. Empirical studies have shown a more complex picture, and it appears that a turn to an idyllic past has often been less about a wish to live in a similar world than a means to shape present and future agendas (Buckland and Qureshi 2020). Yet as Tobias Becker suggested, the emergence and transformation of nostalgia are still in much need of historicization (Becker 2018). The Smithfield case study can contribute to this. Compared to other areas of London whose transformation triggered preservation movements even in the late nineteenth century, the history of Smithfield points to a comparatively late

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emergence of nostalgia related to the economic decline of the late 1980s and the threats of commercial regeneration (as can be traced through the different editions of Forshaw). While current accounts appear to be about a longing for the past, I would argue that for most interviewees, nostalgia for a present, which is feared to be lost in the future, is dominant. There is no real desire to go back to the disease and crime-ridden backstreets of Oliver Twist or even the derelict factories of the 1980s, nor did we find among our interviewees an explicit nostalgia for Empire. Rather we encountered a desire to capture a present moment that is characterized by sensory vibrancy stemming from tangible traces and imaginary echoes of the past, and a relatively prosperous present, in which multiple groups share the space, characterized by its multisensoriality. It is important to acknowledge the nature of, and the reasons for, this nostalgia, but also to move beyond it to address the underlying fears and hopes. While at first sight the strong focus on the senses in local memory appears little connected to politics, a broader examination of the absences in private and public forms of remembrance shows the need to problematize and address the underlying political choices and consequences. Memory and heritage are rarely codified solely within the “imagined communities” (Anderson 2006) of cities or nations, but through processes across borders (Swenson 2013; Assmann 2014). The focus on the sensory as a local, implicitly rather than explicitly, English history is a political choice in itself, even if sometimes it might be unconscious rather than willful forgetting. At the same time, the seemingly universal and apolitical nature of sensing can be a way to create dialogue about divided histories and diverging visions for the future. Some pioneering artistic approaches have suggested how sensory methods can help establish dialogue between divided communities of memories following armed conflict (Grichting Solder et  al. 2012). The case of Smithfield suggests that an emphasis on the multitude of sensory histories of a site and the culturally constructed nature of sensing, as well as attention to the absences created through narratives of sensory continuity, could also offer new ways to open debate in broader processes of urban transformation about how different personal and collective histories and futures might coexist.

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References Adams, Mags, and Simon Guy. 2007. Editorial: Senses and the City. Senses & Society 2 (2): 133–136. https://doi.org/10.2752/174589307X203047. Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, New York: Verso books. Anti-Slavery Society. 2012. London’s Secret Slavery Shame Exposed by New Walking Tour. Published March 20, 2012. https://www.antislavery.org/ londons-­secret-­slavery-­shame-­exposed-­new-­walking-­tour/. Assmann, Aleida. 2014. Transnational Memories. European Review 22 (4): 546–556. Assmann, Jan. 2008. Communicative and Cultural Memory. In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 109–118. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. Aylett, Samuel Paul Tobias. 2020. The Museum of London 1976-2007: Reimagining Metropolitan Narratives in Postcolonial London. PhD diss., The Open University. Ball, Michael, and David T.  Sunderland. 2001. An Economic History of London 1800-1914. London: Routledge. Barbican. 2017. Welcome to Culture Mile. Published May 20, 2017. http://blog. barbican.org.uk/2017/07/welcome-­to-­culture-­mile/. Barclay, Alexander. n.d. A Practical view of the present state of slavery in the West Indies; or an examination of Mr. Stephen’s “Slavery of the British West India Colonies:” containing more particularly an account of the actual condition of the negros in Jamaica: with observations on the decrease of the slaves since the abolition of the slave trade, and on the probable effects of legislative emancipation: Also, Strictures on the Edinburgh Review, and on the Pamphlets of Mr Cooper and Mr Bickell. London: Smith, Elder & Co, third edition. Becker, Tobias. 2018. The Meanings of Nostalgia: Genealogy and Critique. History and Theory 57 (2): 234–250. Bennett, Julia. 2014. Gifted Places: The Inalienable Nature of Belonging in Place. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (4): 658–671. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. British Film Institute. 2020. See for yourself, An East End shop steward is sent to Uganda in this groundbreaking experiment in investigative journalism. Last modified 2020. https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-­see-­for-­yourself-­ 1972-­online. British Library Sound Archives. Smithfield Market. General noise, BBC National Programme Daventry 1935-10-17 ^A240959. British Library Sound Archives. Smithfield Market atmosphere, 1993-07-20. Buckland, Adelene, and Sadiah Qureshi, eds. 2020. Time Travellers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

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Classen, Contance, ed. 2014. A Cultural History of the Senses, 6 vols. London: Bloomsbury. Corbin, Alain. 1988. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cowan, Alexander, and Jill Steward, eds. 2007. The City and the Senses: Urban Culture Since 1500. Aldershot: Ashgate. Degen, Monica Montserrat. 2008. Sensing cities: regenerating public life in Barcelona and Manchester. London: Routledge. Degen, Monica, and Camilla Lewis. 2019. The Changing Feel of Place: The Temporal Modalities of Atmospheres in Smithfield Market, London. Cultural Geographies 1: 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474019876625. Degen, Monica, Camilla Lewis, Astrid Swenson, Isobel Ward and Manuela Barz. 2017a. Sensory Smithfield. http://sensorysmithfield.com. Degen, Monica, Astrid Swenson and Manuela Barz. 2017b. Sensory Cities THiNK-KiT. http://sensorythinktank.com. Degen, Monica Montserrat, and Gillian Rose. 2012. The Sensory Experiencing of Urban Design: The Role of Walking and Perceptual Memory. Urban Studies 49 (15): 3271–3287. Degen, Monica, Camilla Lewis, Astrid Swenson, and Isobel Ward. 2017c. The Changing Feel of Smithfield: Exploring Sensory Identities and Temporal Flows. London: Brunel University London Press. Dickens, Charles. 1985. [first published 1837–39]. Oliver Twist, London: Penguin. Embrace Building Wraps. 2019. New site hoarding graphics for the Museum of London. Published August 31, 2019. https://www.embracebuildingwraps. co.uk/2019/08/31/museum-­london-­site-­hoarding-­graphics/. Farrell and Partners. 2007. Smithfield & Farringdon, Reinforcing Urban Identity & Character. Report published for English Heritage. Forshaw, Alec. 2015. Smithfield: Past Present and Future. London: Robert Hale. Forshaw, Alec, and Theo Bergström. 1980. Smithfield: Past and Present. London: Robert Hale. Forshaw, Alec, Theo Bergström, and rev. 1990. Smithfield: Past and Present. London: Robert Hale. Hall, Catherine, and Sonya O.  Rose, eds. 2006. At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, Stuart. 2004. Whose Heritage? Un-settling “The Heritage,” Re-imagining the Post-nation. In The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies. London: Routledge. Howes, David. 2005. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg. ———. 2006. Charting the Sensory Revolution. Senses & Society 1 (1): 113–128. ———. 2014. Introduction to Sensory Museology. Senses & Society 9 (3): 259–267.

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Kusenbach, Margarethe. 2003. Street Phenomenology: The Go-Along as Ethnographic Research Tool. Ethnography 4 (3): 455–485. Ladd, Brian. 2008. The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Madgin, Rebecca, Lisa Bradley, and Annette Hastings. 2016. Connecting Physical and Social Dimensions of Place Attachment: What Can We Learn from Attachment to Urban Recreational Spaces? Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 31 (4): 677–693. Madgin, Rebecca, David Webb, Pollyanna Ruiz, and Tim Snelson. 2018. Resisting Relocation and Reconceptualising Authenticity: The Experiential and Emotional Values of the Southbank Undercroft, London, UK. International Journal of Heritage Studies 24 (6): 1–14. May, Vanessa. 2017. Each Decade Alters Your Sense of Belonging: Belonging Across the Lifetime. British Journal of Sociology, https://doi. org/10.1111/1468-­4446.12276 Metcalfe, Robyn S. 2012. Meat, Commerce and the City: The London Food Market, 1800-1855. London and New York: Pickering and Chatto. Møller-Olsen, Astrid. 2019. Seven Senses of the City: Urban Spacetime and Sensory Memory in Contemporary Sinophone Fiction. Ph.D diss., Lund University, Museum of London, Oral History Collection. Nora, Pierre, ed. 1998. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French past. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Norton-Taylor, Richard and Seumas Milne. 1999. Racism: Extremists led Powell marches, The Guardian, January 1, 1999, https://www.theguardian.com/ uk/1999/jan/01/richardnortontaylor2. Rees Leahy, Helen. 2012. Museum Bodies: The Politics and Practices of Visiting and Viewing. Aldershot: Ashgate. Grichting Solder, Anna, Maria Costi de Castrillo, Stefanie Keszi, and Georgia Frangoudi. 2012. Stitching the Buffer Zone: Landscapes, Sounds and Trans-­ experiences Along the Cyprus Green Line. Nicosia: First Edition. Steward, Jill, and Alexander Cowan. 2007. Introduction. In The City and the Senses: Urban Culture Since 1500, ed. Alexander Cowan and Jill Steward, 1–22. Aldershot: Ashgate. Swenson, Astrid. 2013. The Rise of Heritage. In Preserving the Past in France, Germany and England, 1789-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2015. Crusader Heritage and Imperial Preservation. Past & Present 226 (suppl. 10): 27–56. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtu024. University College London. 2020. Legacies of British Slave Ownership Database, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/.

PART II

Decentered Memories

CHAPTER 6

Across the Atlantic. Silences and Memories of Nazism in Remote Lands (Eldorado, Misiones) Elizabeth Jelin

This chapter stems from my encounter with a photocopy of a photograph, exhibited in a local museum. A photograph that is almost eighty years old, and that hit me strongly when I saw it. What is important in a photograph? The piece of reality captured or portrayed? The intervention of the camera and the photographer at the time of the shot? The materiality of the object? Its subsequent trajectory? The encounters between the object-photograph and those who look at it, in this case, myself? My encounter with that photo frame standing on a piece of furniture in the Eldorado museum, and the photograph of it I took at that time, speak of a “photographic event” that, as Ariella Azoulay argues, “is never over. It can only be suspended, caught in the anticipation of the next encounter that will allow its actualization.” (Azoulay 2015: 81.) In other words, my own life story and my link to Eldorado shape one moment in the long history of this event.

E. Jelin (*) National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), Institute of Economic and Social Development, Buenos Aires, Argentina © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 U. Capdepón, S. Dornhof (eds.), Contested Urban Spaces, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87505-3_6

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This chapter sets out to unveil meanings and messages that circulate in Eldorado, a small city in Northeastern Argentina, often hidden by a cloak of silence, hesitation, and half-words. Starting from the photograph in a town museum, the chapter will reflect upon the construction of memories and their silences across the Atlantic throughout recent history. It will also allow me to pose some questions about more general issues in social research: the conceptualization of local-global and center-periphery relationships; the private-public divide; the split between rationality and objectivity on the one hand, and passions and emotions on the other; the evocative power of images and the social place of photography; something about chance and choice in asking research questions.

The Place, the Photo This photograph (Fig. 6.1) was on display at the Eldorado Cooperative Museum when I visited in June 2017, on one of my fieldwork trips. The museum where the image is displayed is one of two museums in Eldorado.1 It was inaugurated in 1999 and “shows its visitors a story of socio-cultural progress of the town through the history of the immigrants since its founding on September 29, 1919” (http:/museoprincipal9.blogspot. com/). The photo frame is placed on top of a glass vitrine, next to other framed photographs, in the midst of a display of clothes, hats, teapots and coffee cups, cutlery sets, radios, furniture, and the like. Most of the objects are of European origin, brought over by immigrant families who arrived as settlers. There are also exhibits of ceramics, baskets, paintings, numerous photographs, and books. In fact, it is not a printed photograph but a low-­ quality photocopy, framed in a simple black mass-produced frame (Fig. 6.2). Like most of the photographs displayed, this one has an inscription identifying the person. The first part of the inscription is analogous to many others and fits an interpretive framework that dominates the museum: the reference to the pioneros, the first settlers, and an identification of later generations that privileges kinship bonds with the pioneers. In this case, the person in the photograph is “Alfred Meissner, son of Ernest 1  The Cooperative Museum is housed in the premises of the Electrical Cooperative of Eldorado, in the center of town. The Municipal Museum occupies the building that was the residence of the founder of Eldorado, Adolfo Schwelm, in the park that bears his name, close to the Parana River.

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Fig. 6.1  Photograph displayed in the Eldorado Cooperative Museum. Photograph by the author, 2017

Meissner (Founder of the Agricultural Cooperative, Eldorado 29/03/1931).” Nothing special, nothing memorable. Apart from the German military uniform in the photograph, it is the second sentence that shocks, shakes, and strikes: “Died in World War II in Russia in January 1942.” The uniform identifies him as a German soldier.2 That is, he was someone from Eldorado who joined the Nazi German forces to fight in the war. There are several issues to raise here. First, the history of Eldorado, the significance of the community of German origin, and its relationship with other local ethnic groups, especially Jews, given my own personal history and concern. Second, the links that the population of German origin had 2  I personally did not pay attention to the specifics of the uniform, yet when sharing this text and photograph with a German colleague, she immediately started comparing the uniform with others on the internet. Clearly, the object-photograph carries multiple potential messages and meanings, set in motion in each encounter.

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Fig. 6.2  Exhibition view, Eldorado Cooperative Museum. Photograph by the author, 2017

with Germany, especially during the rise of Nazism and the war. Finally, the place of the memories of that past in Eldorado today. How is it possible to exhibit something that can be taken as a Nazi symbol in a public place in Argentina today? Is it a sign of the presence of Nazism in the country? What clues do we find to make sense of this photo in that place? I could imagine silences about past Nazis; I can understand presences without context much less. What went on during the more than seventy-­ five years since the war to prompt this exhibit now? Furthermore, why did it hit me so hard?

The History El Dorado, “the gilded one,” refers to a legend about a South American tribal chief who covered himself with gold dust to then dive into a lake. There are reports of the legend as far back as 1530 in the Andean region

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that is now Colombia. The legend traveled to Spain, where the imagination transformed El Dorado into a city ruled by this legendary golden king. Many conquistadores followed unbelievable paths to find that city of gold. This mythical or metaphorical name comes up time and again, from John Milton to Edgar Allan Poe, from John Wayne (in the 1966 film, reciting Poe’s poem) to Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The list might go on with Donald Duck traveling in the Amazon and, according to Wikipedia, the legend of El Dorado is featured in the 2008 film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, where it turns out to be a mistranslation and the city holds a “treasure,” but it is not made of gold.

Eldorado nowadays is a city of about 70,000 people, located on the eastern banks of the Upper Parana River, 100 kilometers south of the Iguazú Falls and 200 kilometers from Posadas, the provincial capital of Misiones, on the Argentina-Paraguay border (Fig. 6.3). The “history” of the area—the standard written European-type history—goes back to the seventeenth-century Jesuit missions in the area, which are listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. The province gets its name Misiones from the Jesuit missions (this time, the film version is with Robert de Niro and Jeremy Irons). At an auction in 1918, a rich German-born British citizen, Adolfo Julius Schwelm, bought 67,000 hectares of land with the idea of selling it to settlers from Europe in plots of 25 to 50 hectares. According to some romantic local narratives, Mr. Schwelm was captivated by the area when he traveled to visit the Iguazú Falls. Alternative stories trace the name to Mr. Schwelm’s fishing hobby, dorado being the name of a very common big fish in the Paraná River. On September 29, 1919, the story goes, he arrived at a sandy beach in what was to become the port of the town. The date of arrival was chosen because it was Mr. Schwelm’s birthday; it was also the day of St. Michael the Archangel, patron saint of Germany (Rizzo 1987). Having a significant foundation date was part of his strategy for building future community identity.3

3  Those of us who work on memory know that the politics of memory and future commemoration begins at the very moment when a significant event takes place, often with scripts already prepared for future commemoration.

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Fig. 6.3  Map of Eldorado

Mr. Schwelm arrived in his boat, named Svástica,4 accompanied by another boat, Cuñataí (“my beloved woman” in Guaraní). The Svástica was his “home” for some time when he was in town, until he installed the family house on a plot of land next to the harbor—now a park and the municipal museum in his name. 4  The swastika is an image that appears in many cultures. At the beginning of the 20th century in Europe it was associated with good luck and good omens. The Nazi party adopted it as the emblem of its flag in 1920. In 1919 Adolfo Schwelm probably associated the word with good omens and not with Nazism.

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The first colonos arrived in 1920. They were Danish (recruited in Buenos Aires) and German-Brazilians from Rio Grande do Sul, descendants of the Catholic German immigrants who settled in the south of Brazil in the first half of the nineteenth century. By 1922, the first settlers coming directly from Europe—German and Danish immigrants—arrived. By 1930, Eldorado had around 7000 inhabitants, and was by and large a colony of German culture and language. In order to attract settlers, Mr. Schwelm launched a major advertising campaign. He advertised personally and through offices in London, Berlin, and Paris, through brochures and movies. He had a strong preference for “Northern” European colonists, leaving Mediterranean immigrants aside. It was a matter of personal preference, yet it fitted with prevailing views among the Argentine elites, ready to praise the virtues of these “Northern” races. Given the succession of immigrants with different origins, Don Adolfo decided to organize the colony around identity criteria, basically origin and language. There was a Danish picada (km 0 to 9), a Catholic Bavarian or “Bayernthal” picada (km 24), a “Schönthal” for Germans from Silesia (km 25-31), a Swedish section (km 28), and “Wurtemberg” for German Germans whose roots lay within the German Reich. Brazilian Germans dispersed themselves in various places along the route. By 1929, Mr. Schwelm could present Eldorado as the myth made reality in his advertisements,5 yet, as could be expected, the reality was harsh and confronted settlers with unforeseen conditions. Family reports and autobiographies paint the heroism of the early pioneers—having to overcome every obstacle, including tropical heat and humidity, pouring rain and nonexistent roads or bridges, and mosquitoes and imbarigues—in the certain knowledge that Eldorado did not exist but had to be constructed, and that there was no money to aid in escape. In the various written reports, little is said about the presence of “others” in the colony. Argentines seemed to have no role. All public roles were exercised by the colonists or the staff of the colonization company. In fact, Europeans considered Eldorado as their town, and the “others” were the “foreigners.” Little, if anything, is said in local historians’ writings or in family testimonies about any “native” population. There is almost complete silence regarding the original Guaraní population, often 5  An original copy of a photo album showing the progress of the settlement is housed in the Special Collection section of the Iberoamerikanischer Institute in Berlin.

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identified as “the Paraguayans” (Rizzo 1987: 44). Yet these “obscure and mysterious people of the forest,” as one rare reference in a report puts it, worked for the colonists, offering the cheapest possible labor. They were in charge of the most hazardous tasks, clearing the forest with their axes. The cultural gap between them and their masters was, in fact, an abyss. Colonos had clear images and ideas about the habits of “Paraguayans”: living from hand to mouth, no provision for the future, social instability. German and Guaraní were two worlds apart. The Paraguayan peons were a part of nature, there since the beginning of time, equipped to fight against the forest, and were referred to as Hiesigen (“locals”).6 There are other silences in the reports. Besides the Argentines and the Guaraní, there is no reference to Lebanese or Jewish traders, itinerant and settled. Yet we know that mate traveled to the Middle East, where the drink is an ongoing custom. And there were several Jewish families in Eldorado, including my own. In the early 1930s, when the colony was already established and had a significant productive system, tensions and conflict around commercialization processes grew. The solution was to create a cooperative, in 1931, to which the caption of the photograph refers. Religious and ethnic lines also divided the settlement: Lutherans and Catholics, German Germans (Reichdeutsche) and Germans from Danish and Polish territories (Schönthal), Teuto-Brazilians (Deutschbrasilianer), and Bavarians from Chaco “Die Chaco-Leute.” Each group tried to build its church and organize its own cultural activities, such as choruses and dance groups. In 1935, German associations intensified their activities. More than ever, they cultivated their traditions and praised their fatherland. Gradually, and with the support of the German Embassy in Buenos Aires and the consulate in Posadas (the capital of Misiones), many became strong supporters of Hitler’s Germany. In fact, between 1935 and 1945, the German school, the German sports club, and the Deutschjungen (organized in the same format as Hitler’s youth movement) played a major ideological role. There was a Wochenschau, a meeting where documentaries were shown about German advances in the war. Twenty young colonos left for Germany 6  This silence about the local people contrasts with the significant figure of the mensú in Argentine and Paraguayan history and imagination. The mensú refers to a system of semiservile labor in the region, the name coming from the form of monthly (mensual) “payment,” not in cash but in vouchers. Short stories, novels, popular music, and films are plentiful about this area and these workers.

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to participate in the war (among them, Alfred Meissner). The headquarters of the Nazi party in Eldorado was referred to as Das braune Haus (“the brown house”). After years of struggling against nature, now the Germans devoted themselves to political and social issues. Nazi Germany exalted their identity and ethnicity. Years later, nobody wanted to talk about this period. Historical silence prevailed. Some records and testimonies exist, mostly collected in the late 1960s (Micolis 1973). The people who offered their testimony were mostly those who opposed Hitlerism. For 98% of the Germans in Eldorado, the ideas of world conquest, of power and glory, of the universal reign of Germany for a thousand years—that meant joining a ball and dancing without stopping. We were a very small group of Catholics who refused to enter the game; we were systematically boycotted in economic terms by our own compatriots … In this way and without realizing it, the colonos engaged in a suicidal operation. (Micolis 1973: 33.) We lived in an isolation that was harder to bear than the geographical isolation of the first years of colonization. Our struggle against Hitlerism was much more demanding than the struggle against nature, because against nature we struggled all together, while during Hitlerism we had to struggle against our compatriots. It is much harder to fight against the wildness of the extremist and fanatic man. (Micolis 1973: 35)

In 1939, Adolfo Schwelm resigned as president of the colonizing company. He was disgusted by the orientation his colonos were taking. Twenty years after the foundation of the colony, Eldorado escaped his expectations. Schwelm “exiled” himself in his house and garden, in solitude, where he died in 1948. Before and during the war, the flow of information, money, letters, and photographs across the Atlantic was not minor. At the beginning, settlers sent letters and photos to their relatives in Europe; now they were receiving news from Germany, including from those who had enlisted as volunteers in the German army. The photograph we are talking about was taken in Germany and adopts the pose of an official institutional portrait. It was sent with pride to relatives in Eldorado, who kept it in the privacy of the family. The news of his death on the Russian front reached the family through official diplomatic channels. Years later, the image leaves the family sphere and enters the local public space as a photo in the museum.

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Besides information and photographic images, there was a significant movement of money across the Atlantic during that period. In March 2020, a list was released of 12,000 names of people from Argentina who had deposited money in a Swiss bank to support Germany from the mid-­1930s to the early 1940s. “The Route of the Nazi Money,” as newspapers entitled the news of the discovery of the list (https://www.infobae. com/sociedad/2020/03/03/la-­r uta-­del-­dinero-­nazi-­en-­la-­argentina/, among others), seems to indicate a complex international network dedicated to the laundering of assets stolen from Jewish victims in Europe, using Nazi sympathizers in Argentina as intermediaries. There were also contributions from the supporters themselves. In that list, about seventy names were from Eldorado, further historical confirmation of the collaboration and attachment of Eldoradans to Germany, a theme silenced in local memories for decades. In February 1944, Argentina broke diplomatic relationships with Germany, and it declared war in March 1945, when the end was nearing. The Argentine state imposed sanctions on German citizens and property. In Eldorado, German schools and the German clubhouse were closed, and the property of those who had left for Germany was confiscated. The state banned all German entrepreneurs from selling oil and gasoline. Germans had to ask for permission to leave the town. More than ten years later, in 1956, the German school was authorized to reopen, and a new “normal” life emerged. To finish this part of the story, let me say that local community and family histories are plentiful. Life stories of settlers and their offspring praise the hardship of the pioneers and the heroism of the women who had to take care of families under duress without access to market products, isolated and disconnected from “the world.” They talk about the first period, and at times about the third, “normal” one, since the 1950s. About the period of the war, talk is taboo. As if the middle period were a void, colonos keep silent, or they are trying to forget … As mentioned before, there are other important silences: the presence and activities of the rest of the population of Eldorado, be they Guaraní, Creole, Jewish, Arab, or anyone else—as if Eldorado was only the land of German pioneers dedicated to their families and local sociability, with their basketball teams, their choirs and their churches.

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At a Distance, Silences and Half Words And now? What is said and what is silenced in this “other” story? In 2014 and 2017, I visited Eldorado and, joined by colleagues from the research team, conducted several interviews and collected various documents and observations. They can provide clues to help understand some of the silences and hidden messages. Let’s go over some of them.7 The Recognition of Nazism in Town, Past and Present A woman recounts that her father arrived from Córdoba (Argentina) with the gendarmerie in 1945, when brigades were sent to Eldorado to seize German goods and close German institutions after Argentina declared war on Germany. He remained in Eldorado, married there, and used to tell stories about how people buried Nazi symbols before the gendarmerie approached their houses. Such a matter-of-fact story, as also recounted in several local historical publications, contrasts with others, where there is a relativization of Nazism: in the Hindenburg School, the two flags, the Nazi flag and the German flag were raised. But it was also the time of ... how is it ... it was the official flag of Germany. It wasn’t Hitler’s flag, it was the German flag.8 Perhaps at a very young age the father did what he did, but it is not that he embraced [Nazism] and stayed until the war ended ... No, he escaped as many escaped, against Nazism. But at first he did not realize what was going on. He did what he did under pressure…

In other cases, people flag up practices to compensate for past deeds: (a Jewish resident of Eldorado, referring to a well-known family in town): They approached me with a sense of apology, of forgiveness, of not knowing how to deal with me ... and a friendship was born that lasts until today … And he tells me “I'm not a Nazi, but my dad was the one who opened and closed 7  Eldorado is a small city, where many of the people with whom we talked are easily identifiable, even if their real names are omitted. What is significant here is to look at meanings that are not always explicit, revealed in silences and half-words, related to attitudes that perhaps the people themselves do not explicitly recognize as their own. Therefore, I give the least possible identifying features to the interviewees. 8  Interviews were conducted in Spanish. All translations are my own.

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the doors [in a concentration camp].” So I think that many of them felt something, they felt the need to take care of me, to protect me ... I feel very protected in this community.

Are there signs of Nazism and its symbols in the present? A young man who now identifies as a Jew comments that he has some Nazi friends, and that he can tell from their last names and jokes. Yet he describes such attitudes as foolish jokes with no ideological or political content: (When you say jokes, what type of jokes?)9 For instance, the WhatsApp groups … Not now, uh, but it pops up from time to time ... they throw it at you ... photos of Adolf saluting show up ... saluting the group [in social media]. But no, no ... it used to be like that ... or some comment made. … It happens, you share moments, conversations … they do not know your history, the religious one. You don’t tell them. It sometimes happened … Or say, “Adolfo likes it”, there are those icons ... (What is that about “Adolfo likes it.” Do you use such an icon?) That one of the little hand waving ... I don’t have these in my cellphone anymore because I deleted them; otherwise I would show them to you. But it is just foolish… (Do you react in any way?) No, no.

The diversity of views, and the lack of elaboration and interpretations of memories of this silent past, were also evident in the comments posted in the local online newspaper Extraprensa when it published the names of the seventy people from the community who appear in the documents about those who participated in “the Nazi money route” (http://www. extraprensa.com/2020/03/03/difunden-­listas-­de-­eldoradenses-­que­enviaban-­dinero-­al-­partido-­nazi/). Some paid attention to surnames: Couldn’t it be the grandfather or dad of ...? The family [name] is in the list. Isn’t this the name of ... [an Eldorado family enterprise]? 9

 Interviewer questions are in parenthesis.

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Someone is clearly accusatory: They were murderers, no matter if it was someone’s grandfather or uncle … how many names were the refuge of murderers, and today they are in the names of some streets.

Others have a justifying tone: We can agree or disagree. Everyone can do what they want with their money. The note has errors ... what is published here are donations from Germans to their homeland, not all of them were Nazis.

And those who ask for the silence to continue: this disclosure is compromising. this malicious news is here to harm his descendants. It does no good!!! To bring to light a list 80 years later, when they are all dead, perhaps it is only to mortify the descendants or for an interest in the money involved.

Although in this case there are expressions in different directions that could generate open conflicts, these and other issues did not provoke debates. Rather, it seems that conflicts were avoided, and the memories of the past were left without open elaboration, full of silences, missing the opportunity for collective reflection. Jews in Town. Words Unspoken. Hints and Silences In all the written histories of the town, as well as in other publications, there are no references to Jewish people in Eldorado. The word Jew or Jewish is never mentioned. Yet it is known that there were Jewish people living in Eldorado since the late 1920s, including my own family. And there are Jewish people now. There was never a Jewish community organization, synagogue, or school. In the early years of the town, social life was based mostly on shared language, with almost no interethnic or intergroup exchanges besides commercial ones. Jewish social life was interpersonal and interfamily. It is hard to know how many Jewish people there are in Eldorado, since almost nobody identifies him/herself openly. Yet we talked to some. What is being expressed and what is being silenced or hidden about Jewishness?

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The issue appears in words and in language, yet some (even Jewish people) relativize the expression: Mother: No, and here the word “judiar” ... Son: But it is not to belittle, but just a question ... Mother: It is used in a malign or pejorative way, as if someone bothers you, they say “you are judiando,” “the boy is judiando.” Someone may say “judío de mierda” [fucking Jew] and things of that sort. But I think it never happened to me.

One does not have to search deep to find references to what is not said, hints and silences that show once again the lack of explicit handling of the difficult past and its present presence: I don’t know if he backed Nazism, but ... well, he didn’t dislike it nor ... he didn’t talk about it. Don’t put his name … He is Jewish but does not say it because he has had problems. People don’t talk about that. He denied being Jewish in the Nazi era. I don’t know if it was out of fear, or because I could not overcome it, yet I did not inquire much about Judaism and Nazism, and about what happened here. Maybe it was a matter of not wanting to inquire, and ... to live in peace, to live ... [referring to a Nazi family] I do not know which family ... nor do I know much. Yes I know, but what do I know? Nobody knows … I think that perhaps it does not work socially, but on Facebook they put things that they won’t be able to say personally ... and so-and-so [a well-­ known person] showed himself so anti-Semitic ...

The story of our Jewish woman interviewee is self-revealing: she arrived in Eldorado in the mid-1970s from another province, married to a local professional. She never said openly that she was Jewish, fearing that if people knew, clients would not come to her husband’s office: “I was afraid. And I really was so stupid that I didn’t say.” For more than forty years in Eldorado, she never abandoned the rituals of Shabbat, and for Jewish festivities she usually travels to her hometown, where she celebrates with relatives. Each Shabbat, she lights candles, although she does not invite anybody: “The cat and the son,” says her son. The others don’t matter, says the woman.

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The Photo in the Museum, Now Does the photo, then, refer to the “heritage” of Eldorado? Is it a tribute to a dead son by his relatives in a peaceful town? It is not an ordinary death: it is death in combat, wearing a uniform. Is it a photo of heroism? Of devotion to a homeland and an ideology? All of these at the same time? The photograph is a piece of evidence of a well-known fact—that people from Eldorado joined the German Nazi army, the Wehrmacht—yet my question is about the display of the photograph in the museum in the present. When asking about the past, there is one interpretation that makes a clear break between “before” and “after” the war. The argument says that Germans in the town were highly nationalistic. It was the German defeat in the First World War that led to the displacement and arrival of many of the first settlers, now praised as “pioneers.” Until the end of the war—the explanation goes on—people in Eldorado did not know much about Nazism, anti-Semitism, or the Final Solution. They were attached to a nation that had been badly wounded by the defeat in the previous war, and not to the Nazi ideology as such (Wochenschau notwithstanding). Besides the earlier reference to the German flag, a comment on the publication of the list goes in the same direction: In my case, my great-grandfather is on the list. I know his history ... He got an award as a Veteran Soldier for his action in the Great War … What patriot would not send his savings to help his country?

In the period immediately after the Second World War, the story goes, there was an influx of Germans into Eldorado. Those who had left returned, and Germans who had relatives in Eldorado came to join them. There were also Nazis who came to Argentina after the war and found a receptive community in Eldorado. So Nazism as racism came to Eldorado with this wave of immigrants; it was not there before. How does this history appear in the present? How do memories of that past construct the present? Nowadays, what we find time and again in the collected testimonies is silence, and when it is spoken about, there is a minimization of this Nazi presence. Despite these statements, there are enough hints to show that Jewishness and anti-Semitism are part of everyday life in town, from hiding the fact of being Jewish so as not to lose clients to the references to “Adolph’s likes”

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on Facebook or WhatsApp. There are also signs that hint at a change in practices, at least in the public space, anchored in some protests and new voices. Let me give a couple of examples. The director of the museum relates the story of a Nazi flag: an Eldorado dweller brought a package to store at the museum. It was a big flag.10 The flag—as is usually done with the objects received—was cleaned and restored, and then exhibited to the public. A protest by some people ensued, saying that the museum should not display a Nazi flag. Eventually the flag was taken down. We asked the director whether the museum had put up a sign indicating anything about the flag. Her unbelievable, unimaginable answer was that the sign indicated the size of the flag and the materials of which it was made! For her, seemingly, there was nothing to add. There is an interesting Facebook page, “Eldorado en el recuerdo” (Eldorado in memory), managed by a local resident. People forward photographs and Roberto posts them, inviting people to recognize who is in the photograph and to make comments. It is a public page, with more than 20,000 followers and thousands of photographs. Roberto tells us about one of the conflicts he faced: There was a photo with some people, I even know who they are … and there was a swastika in the photo. Ah, I published it and thought, that’s it. I thought it was simply one more photograph. After a while they started: that they are Nazis, that you have to kill them all; no, that they are good people ... Because here in our area it was full of Nazis. Here the Germans came, it was a German community with people that came from the war. They did not come for tourism, they came escaping war. And well, when they got here they were Nazis ... there were many who weren’t, I tell you. But the vast majority of Germans were all at it.

Posting that photograph created an uproar among some people in town. Our Jewish interviewee tells us that the anti-Semitic remarks she encountered at that time led her to stop talking to some acquaintances and made her come out as Jewish after more than forty years of silence.

10  The museum receives objects that people in the town bring in. Usually the objects shown are on loan, and the owners can retrieve them when they so feel.

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The Personal Dimension in Academic and Political Life Who pays attention to that photo? Why did I pay so much attention to it? At this point, I have another story to tell, a personal one. Because what I did for this paper is research with an explicit reference to personal feelings. How did I come to work on this subject? What led me in this direction? Eldorado was a chapter in my family history and my childhood of which I knew very little. Although I was born in Buenos Aires, I spent my early childhood in Eldorado (until age 4), with mother, father, and brother, in the midst of a large family of Jewish immigrants, coming almost directly from a Polish shtetl. Like some other Jewish people and some Arab families in town, they were not agricultural settlers but owned small country stores and then ventured into the lumber business. My father, the youngest of many siblings, arrived in Eldorado in 1930, and my mother—his adolescent love from the same shtetl—arrived in 1938, almost by a miracle, when Argentina had already closed to Jewish immigration (Jelin 2009). I was born during the war, and while dreadful news was coming from Europe about the massacres and killings of grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, we were living in a community that embraced German nationalism and Nazism. Eventually, my family moved to Buenos Aires, and Eldorado became a minor part of the family tales. Until, more than ten years ago, Eldorado hit me in the face in a mixture of the personal and the academic, while I was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. An article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about German emigration to Argentina, “Buenos Aires war kein Sehn/suchts/ort,” (Buenos Aires was not a place to long for) referred to a special show in the Bremerhaven Auswandererhaus, on “A life in Buenos Aires: German emigrants and refugees during the 20th century.” To my surprise and in a totally unexpected way, I found myself reading the following paragraph: The never-ending stream of German immigrants to the United States has long eclipsed our view of Argentina as a land of immigration … Only beginning in the 1920s did tens of thousands of German immigrants seek their fortunes and establish agricultural colonies in the provinces, which until then had belonged solely to the Indios, with exotic names like “Colonia Leibig” and “Colonia Eldorado”. The exhibition shows pictures of young fellows wearing Lederhosen and Gamsbärte planting saplings; the yerba plant, used to make Mate tea, was the most important source of revenue. (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 28, 2008: 40)

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I decided to look into the issue, and since then, the story of Eldorado has accompanied me, personally and in my academic research. The question a colleague asked me contributed to my bewilderment: “Couldn’t a Jewish family find a more welcoming and friendly place instead of settling in Eldorado, a place where people wanted to break off from Argentina to establish a Nazi republic?” Memories and family stories were of no help in explaining the unexplainable, the enigmas of personal/political life. I did some research combining the history of the town with my own family history, through letters and photographs which my parents left and I cherish. I wrote a couple of papers (Jelin 2009; Chinsky and Jelin 2014), until I could incorporate the story of Eldorado into a more structured research project, of which this paper is an outcome. Impossible to separate the academic part and the emotional personal one. Mysteries and enigmas, old and new. I can be ironic at times, talking about romanticized stories, about silences that embody class, gender, and race relations. I can use my own family’s letters to learn a lot about life in Eldorado. Other times, irony is beyond my possibilities, and emotion invades. Why did they go to Eldorado? Why did my parents stay during the Nazi period? My body shivers when I think that at the same time as we were living in Eldorado surrounded by Nazi symbols and parades, the news of the family annihilation in Europe was reaching my parents. And in one field trip, I saw the photo in the museum, which caught my attention and hit my sensibility at first sight.

Some Closing Remarks That’s the story. Let me pose some questions that emerge from it. This is a story of embeddedness and embodiment. It is not the story of a peripheral exotic place. The people of Eldorado may be living in a remote area, yet they are traversed by global forces, part of the global human drama. The “locality” and the “local”—in this case as in others—are not what is left over or left out of the “center.” Rather, the “local” is part of an interrelated world. The “local” is a decentered center from which the world can be looked at, a base from which webs of connections with other places, peoples, and institutions are made and broken, shaped and reshaped. From this decentered center, the history of “Europe” becomes not a history of place but one of flows, interconnections, and webs/networks—of people, of political and institutional links, of economic

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interests, of personal and family ties, of traveling photographs. The story is also one of many silences to be uncovered. A second question has to do with personal, academic, and political involvement. Seldom do we reflect upon the personal routes that lead us to raise questions in our research. Academic ritual involves giving “scientific” reasons, pointing to gaps in knowledge, controversies about explanations or theoretical paradigms—rationales that are anchored in advancing disciplinary public knowledge. Almost always, we keep an absolute silence about our personal passions, experiences, ideological leanings, or political commitments. These are silenced, hidden, as if researchers were perfect knowledge machines without feelings and without passions/involvements. Yet we know that every question has an autobiographical twist. I have made explicit and visible the entanglements of the story with myself and my life, past and present. Yet the issue goes beyond myself. There is something in our lives that pushes us to explore certain issues and not others. It is a mix of feelings, personal experiences and sensibilities, ideological leanings, and accumulated collective knowledge and wisdom. Except when in old age people in the sciences write their memoirs or autobiographies, or later on, when biographers try to picture the people behind the ideas, what we find is silence about these passions and these drives. Why this silence? How to incorporate ourselves in the story we tell or in the explanations we give? At this point, the feminist critique of the binary partition between private and public life, between reason and emotion, has much to offer. The distinction or rift has been so ingrained in academia that it looks like a natural apartheid. Are there other ways of organizing paradigms of knowledge? I want to end this chapter reflecting on photographs. In one of his essays on photography, John Berger differentiates two uses of photography: in the private experience (to which family photography belongs) and in the public domain. The first contributes to a living memory, a memento from a life being lived; the latter (advertisement is the most extreme case) offers information, but information severed from lived experience, from “strangers,” a dead object torn from its context. I quote Berger: Photographs are relics of the past, traces of what has happened. If the living take that past upon themselves, if the past becomes an integral part of the process of people making their own history, then all photographs would reacquire a living context, they would continue to exist in time, instead of being arrested moments. It is just possible that photography is the prophecy

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of a human memory yet to be socially and politically achieved … The task of an alternative photography is to incorporate photography into social and political memory, instead of using it as a substitute which encourages the atrophy of any such memory. (Berger 1980: 57-58)

Isn’t it time to add to the sign in the photograph something that would allow us to “incorporate photography into social and political memory?”

References Azoulay, Ariella. 2015. Civil Imagination. A Political Ontology of Photography (Trans: L. Bethlehem). London: Verso. Berger, John. 1980. About looking. New York: Pantheon Books. Chinsky, Malena, and Elizabeth Jelin. 2014. La carta familiar. Información, sentimientos y vínculos mantenidos en el tiempo y en el espacio. Políticas de la memoria 15: 47–52. Jelin, Elizabeth. 2009. Rosas trasplantadas y el mito de Eldorado. Travesías en el tiempo, en el espacio, en la imagen y en el silencio. Revista del Museo de Antropología. 2: 75–86. Micolis, Marisa. 1973. Une Communauté Allemande en Argentine: Eldorado. Quebec: Centre International de Recherches sur le Bilinguisme. Rizzo, Antonia. 1987. Historia de Eldorado. Eldorado: Municipalidad de Eldorado, Misiones.

CHAPTER 7

[De]colonial Memory Practices in Germany’s Public Space Anke Schwarzer

In the summer of 2020, the debate about what to do with traces of colonialism in public space attracted an unusual degree of attention: thousands around the world marched against racism, colonial monuments and police violence. The trigger for these protests was the death of George Floyd, who died in the US city of Minneapolis on May 25 while being arrested because police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for several minutes. In many countries, these global protests rekindled long-standing objections to statues honoring the protagonists of colonial history and lent greater visibility to campaigns. From New Zealand and the United States, via Venezuela, Martinique, and South Africa, to Belgium, Britain, and Spain, many figures have been torn from their pedestals—not only during the protests of June 2020, but in previous years, too. In the United States alone, statues of Christopher Columbus (ca. 1451–1506) were pulled to the ground with ropes, decapitated, or ceremonially removed,

A. Schwarzer (*) Hamburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 U. Capdepón, S. Dornhof (eds.), Contested Urban Spaces, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87505-3_7

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and in the wake of the protests Confederate icons were sprayed and damaged as well.1 In Brussels, the statue of King Leopold II (1835–1909) fared no better. Suddenly the former monarch and personal proprietor of the “Congo Free State” had red hands—a reference to the countless hands severed from Congolese subjects who, in the opinion of their colonial masters, were not tapping enough liquid rubber from trees. Meanwhile, in Ghent, Antwerp, Ostend, and other Belgian cities, other statues were attacked with paint bombs. Here and there local councils reacted: some statues were quickly dismantled, and libraries and schools have been taking down portraits of the king. In the English city of Bristol, demonstrators threw the bronze body of Edward Colston (1636–1721) into the water. The statue, 125 years old, honored a human trafficker who, while serving on the board (known as the Court of Assistants) of the Royal African Company, was involved in deporting more than 80,000 people from Western Africa to plantations in America. Mostly local initiatives had, for many years, sought the removal of such monuments that glorified slavery and colonialism. The artist Jean-­ François Manicom, who curates the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, highlighted the importance of having a platform—such as his museum—to address the pain and frustration that come with the history of slavery and its legacies in modern life: “We encourage debate, conversations and difficult discussions. Unless we have these, nothing will change, and we have seen over the past few days that people are fed up of just hearing about change. They want to see it,” he told The Times (Manicom 2020). And in the Federal Republic of Germany? Not many people there had been bothered by colonial tributes until recently. But the debate about what should happen to these monuments, plaques, street names, and honorary citizenship is now well underway. It is fair to assume, nevertheless, that there have always been counter-voices and different forms of resistance to colonial tributes and memory practices, just as there have to slavery and colonialization (see, for example, Harding 2000; Adi 2013). In the early 1990s, the scholar and poet May Ayim (1960–1996) was already criticizing the preservation of colonial street names and statues 1  According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC 2019) there are about 780 of these, nearly half of them in the southern states of Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina. To these must be added almost 1000 streets, bridges, schools, military bases, and other structures named after proponents of slavery.

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because they “are still glorifying the colonialists, while those who were colonized are still being humiliated” (Ayim 1993: 206–220). In another example, back in 2002, the educationalist Louis Henri Seukwa drew attention to an uncommented war memorial in a church in Hamburg, the St.Michaelis-Kirche. As a guardian of social morality and peace among men and women, he argued, the Church had a duty and mission to foster critical memory (Seukwa 2013). The text of the plaque first placed there in 1912 begins “From Hamburg they died for Kaiser and empire.” There follows a list, decoratively framed in oak leaves and ivy, of soldiers from Hamburg who perished more than 120 years ago in colonial wars in China, and also in German South West Africa and German East Africa, colonial territories still in existence at that time. For all the interventions, letters, and public discussions, the plaque remains with not even a commentary attached, reinforcing and reproducing this colonial tribute (see Schwarzer 2011/2020; Stubbemann 2017). There are similar plaques in many other churches. Some parishes, however, have already chosen to go down a different route. One is the Garnisonskirche in Wilhelmshaven, which has covered the marble slab with acrylic glass, engraving the new layer with a text and photograph in memory of the victims of genocide perpetrated against the Ovaherero and Nama (1904–1908).

German Colonialism and the Coalition Agreement What is new is that this headwind is growing louder—and entering the radar of government, agencies, and institutions. Remarkably, almost 100 years to the day after the emperor (the Kaiser) was forced to abdicate and the German Empire (the Reich) ended its colonial rule, the topic was picked up for the first time in a coalition agreement between Germany’s governing parties, which states in print that processing Germany’s colonial history is part of the fundamental democratic consensus (Schwarzer 2018). It is noteworthy that the coalition agreement refers to consensus here, because there has been little awareness to date in the Federal Republic of Germany that the country has not only a Nazi legacy but a colonial one to put behind it. The traces of colonialism are not confined, after all, to Europe’s colonial territories abroad. They marred society back home as well. In Germany, however, there is no memory culture in relation to the victims in Africa, in China, and in Oceania, and no acknowledgment of early critics or those who resisted the broken treaties, the crimes against humanity, the violent or fraudulent land grabs, and the very processes of

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colonialization. Neither in museums, the armed forces, industrial associations, schools, or universities, nor in the media, the Church, the memorial landscape, or the urban space has there been an active, comprehensive, critically enlightening effort to inform the public about Germany’s colonial history, the resistance, and the present-day conditions to which all this gave rise. But times are changing—slowly. Both the public silence and the visible traces in urban space are gradually being questioned. Postcolonial campaign groups in Hamburg, Berlin, Munich, Cologne, and Bremen, but also in much smaller cities like Freiburg, Bielefeld, Aachen, Halle, Erfurt, Leipzig, Koblenz, Emden, and Augsburg, have for decades been devising tours, exhibitions, and events to cast light on these issues. Many of them have designed digital maps or set up mapping projects. The shifting perspective has drawn momentum in recent years from postcolonial studies and contributions by, in particular, the descendants of colonialized people, Black academics, and activists of color. NGO alliances like “Decolonize Berlin,” “No Humboldt 21!,” “Decolonize Bismarck,” and “Völkermord verjährt nicht!” [“No Time Bar for Genocide!”) have tenaciously confronted museums, local councils, and the general public with critique, demands, and a decolonization wish list.

A New Humboldt Forum on Old Foundations? One site of more than regional significance, where this issue has crystallized over the last few years, is the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, which was virtually inaugurated in mid-December 2020 after more than seven years of construction. In 2017, the art historian Bénédicte Savoy stepped down from the advisory board after two years in her position. She accused the Humboldt Forum of refusing to disclose the history of its collections and she identified a contradiction: “The architecture signals that the wheel of history can be turned back. But those who ask for stolen objects to be returned are told that the wheel of history cannot be turned back” (Savoy 2017) (Fig. 7.1). On the outside, the Humboldt Forum is a remake of the former royal palace, the Berliner Schloss, and even the monumental cross has been restored over the dome. On the inside, it is new. The prestigious structure is home to the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz (which manages former stately homes and aristocratic collections), the Stadtmuseum Berlin (which is the municipal museum), the Humboldt University, and the Humboldt

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Fig. 7.1  Humboldt-Forum Berlin. Photograph by Dirk Schäfernolte, 2020

Forum Foundation. On the same spot where the East German Palace of the Republic stood from 1976 until 2006, some 600 million euros have been spent to rebuild the seat of the Hohenzollern monarchs, demolished by the GDR in 1950, as a shell for the energy-efficient concrete complex within. The Berliner Schloss was originally built for the margraves and princes of Brandenburg, who participated from the late seventeenth century in the slave trade from West Africa. From 1702 it served as a royal residence for Prussian kings, and when Germany was unified in 1871 it became the Kaiser’s court, just as the new German Reich was beginning to colonize territories in Africa, China, and Oceania. This palace was home to Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941), the monarch behind the genocide of Ovaherero and Nama between 1904 and 1908. This building, with all its baggage of national and colonial symbols, is now intended as a stage for the “equality of the world’s cultures” (Parzinger 2011: 43). About 500,000 exhibits will be brought here from the non-European collections

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of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art. The African Collections alone contain about 75,000 objects, most of which arrived in Berlin during the colonial era. This accumulation of ethnographic items— cutlery, jewelry, burial gifts, masks, weapons, boats, garments, sculptures—derives from a specific system of appropriation that played a role in racist, colonial knowledge production, and it is an expression of European control and power. Behind these accumulations lie violent land alienation, looting, objects acquired in a context of asymmetrical power and then donated by their wealthy patrons to museums. These objects are still on display in these museums, where they underpin a colonial gaze. The civil society campaign “No Humboldt 21!” objects that the blueprint for the Humboldt Forum violates human dignity and property rights: neither are Berlin’s state museums the lawful owners of all their holdings, nor is research into non-European cultures sensitive to these problems. The campaign also laments that provenance research has not been granted the status it requires. Before any decisions can be made about whether and how an object should be exhibited, it needs to be clear where it came from and how it reached Berlin, and also what significance it has in its society of origin (AfricAvenir International 2017: 16–20). Moreover, in the light of recent “Humboldtmania,” these activists have questioned the image of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) as a humanist, cosmopolitan scholar and have subjected his South American expedition to a critical rereading (Ha 2017: 24–41). In 2013, the “No Humboldt 21!” campaign demanded a moratorium on construction—to no avail. Their objections and events did, however, help to publicize the issues more widely and prompted the curators of the Humboldt Forum to adopt a more critical tone. Under the heading “Shared Heritage,” the countries and societies once colonized are to be actively involved in memory work and partnerships will be stepped up. There is talk of “democratizing and decolonizing” (Parzinger 2016) the museum, of featuring Germany’s colonial wars, and of granting free admission to all. It remains to be seen whether and how these aims will be implemented. There are grounds for concern that the tussles and debates of many years about decolonizing the museums will be appropriated in order to market national cultural policy without breaking open the colonial weave.

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Bismarck Goes 2021 “No Humboldt 21!” was not the only campaign calling for an end to construction in the summer of 2020. In Hamburg, activist groups like “Intervention Bismarck-Denkmal Hamburg” and “Initiative Decolonize Bismarck” sought to trigger a broad debate and involve civil society in deciding the fate of the world’s biggest monument to Bismarck, which the city council was having cleaned and repaired at a cost of several million euros. They objected that Hamburg was giving the monument a pretty face-lift and ignoring its colonial links. This statue was not the standard tribute to Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) as the chancellor who united Germany. Instead, it expressed the gratitude of Hamburg’s merchant venturers for the “protectorates” created when the Berlin Conference carved up Africa in 1884/85, and for the expansion of the port and warehouses, where colonial imports could be stored free of excise duty and processed. The donors—wealthy traders, shipowners, bankers, and colonial lobbyists—unveiled their monument in 1906, at a time when major colonial wars were raging in what are now Namibia, Tanzania, and Cameroon (Initiative Decolonize Bismarck 2020). The campaigners at least provoked a public discussion about how to deal with the 34-meter-tall granite colossus. It now belongs to the Department of Culture in Hamburg, and like many colonial monuments it is under a preservation order. An international competition has been planned to provide the statue with context or else convert it into a counter-monument without heroic posturing (Fig. 7.2).

“Soft” Colonial Topographies The two crystallization points highlighted around the decolonization of public space in the Federal Republic of Germany were outlined briefly here as examples of two conflicts around central places in major German cities. Nevertheless, numerous smaller debates have also emerged over the years on the margins of major cities as well as in many small towns. Recent exhibitions in local history museums should be mentioned here, such as a documentation of the life stories of participants from German colonies at the Berlin Trade Exhibition of 1896, including the terms of their

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Fig. 7.2  Bismarck-Denkmal Hamburg. Photograph by the author, 2020

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contracts, which went on show at the Treptow District Museum,2 or debates around local monuments such as the Train Monument3 in Münster, Westphalia. Arguments about decolonizing public space by no means revolve entirely around a colonial heritage forged in stone, marble, and bronze. The colonial topography of German cities and communities is revealed in sites of knowledge production and transfer, including universities, botanical gardens, and museums. It emerges in the way the German colonial period is described in school textbooks, in the representation of racialized figures in children’s rhymes, in exhibitions, and in other products of culture and art. The decolonization agenda reaches well beyond this to examine the design of school curricula or discriminatory practices founded on racial attributions, racial profiling, and police brutality. Last but not least, there are issues around acknowledgment, apology, and compensation. In this respect, the debate about the public response to colonial statues is just the tip of a postcolonial iceberg that will not easily melt. It will be a long haul.

Who Belongs? The decolonization of public space is about far more than which statues we want to see and which we prefer to pull down, alter, or enhance with an explanatory plaque. In a modern immigration society, the debate about colonialism and racism also touches upon the practices of exclusion and inclusion applied by public agencies and state-funded institutions. The philosopher Seyla Benhabib argues that a “cosmopolitan vision of justice” cannot be confined to issues of fair distribution but must also address the justice of membership (Benhabib 2009: 15). Although, in analyzing the “rights of others,” she places a particular focus on the law and politics of 2  According to the museum website, the exhibition zurückGESCHAUT is the result of a partnership between the Treptow District Museum, the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland, and the berlin postkolonial association and has created “a permanent exhibition on the history of colonialism, racism and resistance” for the first time in Germany. The racist vocabulary of the colonial era was to be consistently avoided or flagged. See https://www. museumsportal-berlin.de/de/ausstellungen/zurueckgeschaut/ (accessed April 30, 2021) 3  The monument still commemorates the fallen soldiers of the Royal Train Division No. 7 in the First World War and colonial wars without comment. Soldiers of the unit were also involved in the colonial war in China in 1901 and in the genocide in former German Southwest Africa in 1904-1908.

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(supra-)nation states, she points out that civil rights can be detached from territorial definitions and the prerogatives of citizenship and extended to embrace the recognition by public institutions of different perspectives and historical experience. If we follow this logic, might we then—drawing on Hannah Arendt—speak not only of a right to (civil) rights, but also of a right to equal representation and participation in the public space, a right to see the diversity that has existed in Germany for centuries? In this sense, the debate about decolonizing public space might feed into the current debate around rights of membership in a modern democratic society. There is more to this than a culture of memory, the preservation of monuments, the freedom of art and opinion, the quest for historical truth, and more to art in the public space than democratic, anti-racist, and aesthetic policies. Mali’s former minister of culture Aminata Traoré pinpointed the issue in a debate about what to do with objects looted in a context of colonial injustice. In response to the idea that anyone in the world can admire these objects in the museums where they ended up after the colonial era, she wryly added: “So our artworks enjoy civil rights in places where none of us are allowed to reside” (Traoré 2017: 170). Questions of membership require us to differentiate and negotiate constantly, maintains Benhabib (Benhabib 2009: 27), and she calls for self-­ reflexive “democratic iterations” (Benhabib 2009: 31), partly in order to move closer to the objective of a postnational community and to develop “postnational solidarity” between citizens of the world (Benhabib 2009: 32). However, membership practices, which govern the synchronous and diachronous identity of a nation, are the result of historical contingencies, territorial struggles, cultural conflicts, and bureaucratic processes. In this sense, the debate about decolonizing public space that is now so voluble and visible is not only about the message conveyed in images and education formats, or about new decolonializing action that can inspire or disrupt. It is fundamentally linked to how the process of change is shaped. How are resources used, who sets the pace, and above all who participates in the process, and who does the inviting? Which groups and which perspectives have access to the debates and decision-making bodies in a postmigration society (see Foroutan 2019)? This is not just about outcomes, like a new street name or a counter-monument. The crucial factor from the outset is the design of the public process and the stage on which it takes place.

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Monopolization, Competition, and Relativization One question to ask in a radical democratic process with a polyphonous memory culture would be: When does memory start to become random, or where might the boundaries of public negotiability lie? Is the memory of crimes against humanity relative? Can it be negotiated? The political scientist Joshua Kwesi Aikins (2016) observes that, while the debates must be controversial, the underlying facts—not least the conclusion by the United Nations, still valid today, that colonialism was unjust—should not be undermined. The recognition of crimes against humanity cannot be subjected to the simple caveat of a majority vote. Nor is memory a contest. Memory of Nazi crimes and the Shoah should not compete with memory of German colonialism and Maafa. As Michael Rothberg (2009) argues, public remembrance of different monstrous acts does not inevitably have to follow the competitive logic applied to sharing out scarce resources. Understanding memory as “multidirectional” means seeing it as an ongoing process of negotiation, referencing, and weaving that can generate new forms of memory. Comparisons that oversimplify can result in inappropriate relativizations. In Germany, the interweave between colonialism and National Socialism is tight-meshed, and this must be reflected in the culture of memory.4 Germany has attracted much acclaim for its “Vergangenheitsbewältigung”—the processing of its history—and for a memory culture centered on the impact of the Nazi regime and on the Shoah, but not all that glisters is gold, and some aspects risk being forgotten, especially in the decolonization debate. For one thing, apart from being initiated by the victorious Allies who imposed it on a defeated country, this memory culture was (and sometimes still is) the result of hard, sometimes very protracted, battles by survivors and anti-fascists in the face of massive resistance, at least in the fledgling Federal Republic. Let us recall, for example, the culture of impunity. As we know, most of the Nazi criminals and those who aided and abetted them went unpunished. Many victims of Nazi injustice have still received no compensation. Not least because of that unwillingness to pursue criminal actions, the important analysis of Nazi and anti-Semitic heritage repeatedly risked being orchestrated as “memory theatre,” as the sociologist Y.  Michal 4  See, for example, the conflict in Hamburg about how to deal with a monument complex in Jenfeld, where colonial memorials and statues are displayed on the former site of the Lettow-Vorbeck barracks inaugurated during the Nazi period (Möhle 2007: 196–213).

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Bodemann called it in 1996. According to Max Czollek, the purpose of this memory theater is not to reflect Jewish plurality, but merely to “redeem the promise of reconciliation for German society” (Czollek 2018: 24). We no longer find busts of Adolf Hitler in public spaces or swastika relief on house fronts, and yet the list of contested monuments in Germany is a long one, especially in what was once West Germany:5 hundreds of Kaisers Wilhelm I and Wilhelm II mounted on horseback still watch over German streets and squares. The genocide of Ovaherero and Nama was perpetrated under the rule of Wilhelm II, sadly notorious for his “Hun Speech”6 in Bremerhaven when German troops were setting sail for China in 1900. These statues, one very much like the other, have been an integral, unchallenged part of the town and country backdrop for over a century. More than a hundred statues, towers, and busts honoring the monarchist and unifier of Germany, Otto von Bismarck, were erected during the German Reich, mostly on domestic territory but also in the overseas colonies. The chancellor played host to the “Congo Conference” in Berlin in 1884/1885. Its final document, the General Act, set out the terms for the colonial “Scramble for Africa.” Then there are all the streets named after slave traders such as Hinrich van der Smissen (1662–1737), Joachim Nettelbeck (1738–1824), and Heinrich Carl von Schimmelmann (1724–1782). Colonial soldiers are commemorated in churches, and museums display busts of donors and scholars who backed the racist, colonial enterprise. It was not unusual for these names to be closely associated with the rise of anti-Semitic National Socialism.

Prevalent Racist Knowledge in Society How is a modern democratic society to respond to such eulogies? Is it acceptable simply to topple, disfigure, or demolish them? Is it better to whisk them away quietly when nobody is looking? Should they be documented and stored away, shown in museums, or annotated with plaques? Should we double the number of statues so that each is joined by a counter-­monument? And above all, who should decide? 5  Zeller (2000: 271) reports that in the GDR, unlike the Federal Republic of Germany, colonial statues were removed. 6  Wilhelm II addressed his “Hunnenrede” to navy units dispatched to quell the Yìhétuán (“Boxer”) uprising in China in 1900/1901, urging the men to commit wide-scale brutality.

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Storming the icons and traces of colonialism and racism is not an easy task. The debates and conversions have been perceived as a threat to order and stability rather than as steps towards a decolonized democratization in postmigrant societies. How did the monument come about? Who donated money for the memorial plaque? What commemoration rituals are associated with it? Why do we want to keep it, or why not? Most Germans do not know that this selective, unidimensional memory of historical events and individuals causes pain to many people living here because of their transgenerational experience of colonialism. The many blanks in relation to colonial history and its traces in Germany are in part a reflection of the prevailing racist knowledge in society, which plays out regardless of individual attitudes. It does not merely derive from a culture of public amnesia, but also from a culture of impunity, of nostalgia that exalts or trivializes, and often even glorifies German colonialism and its crimes against humanity. One factor in this system of racist knowledge and public discourse is “Entinnerung” [“unremembering”] and the “unmaking of Black agency” in Germany (Lauré Al-Samarai 2005: 184).

Colonial Myths In this respect, decolonization can also be thought of as a decentralization of memory, as a deconstruction of powerful myths. Multifaceted participation in discourse and in the urban and museum space and a pluralization of voices, images, and representations are important if the center of memory is to expand and change. However, current activities around the decentralization of memory and the decolonization of public space and other spheres still have to contend with some powerful myths and defensive reflexes. Let us briefly examine four. One declares that German colonialism was just an adventure, a mere episode: “Germany’s colonial age was so short!” is a common assertion. It usually refers to the colonies maintained by the German Reich for about three decades from 1884/85 until 1918/19. Those thirty-five years were, for one thing, not that short, especially compared to the twelve devastating years of National Socialism. But more pertinently this view takes no account of German involvement in European expansion and colonization as far back as the fifteenth century. Merchants and bankers from the German principalities were on the scene very early, among them the Welser, Fugger, and Ehinger families. In the seventeenth century, the “Great Elector” Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg (1620–1688)

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participated in transatlantic slave trafficking. From 1682 until 1711, the fortress of Gross-Friedrichsburg, now on the Ghanaian coast, served the Brandenburgisch-Afrikanische Compagnie (BAC) based in Emden and its successor as a prison camp, torture chamber, and marketplace for goods and human beings (van der Heyden 2001; see also Ghana Museums and Monuments Board 2020; Perbi 2004). Another colonial myth follows on: “Germany had nothing to do with the slave trade!” However, apart from the direct involvement of bankers, shipowners, sea captains, sailors, and ships’ doctors from German lands and cities, major economic sectors played a part in the slave trade and plantation economy: iron for instruments of torture and chains, ropes, bricks, and clothing for slaves working on the plantations came from German factories. The market in the German hinterland included the textile regions of Westphalia and the linen industry around Osnabrück, in Saxony, Swabia, and Silesia, ironware from the Bergisches Land, copper from the Harz Mountains, glassware from Bohemia, and rifles from Thuringia. The output from these manufactories boosted purchasing power—not least for colonial imports such as tea, tobacco, sugar, cocoa, and mahogany (Brahm and Rosenhaft [eds] 2016; Weber 2009). The plantation economy and the enslavement of Africans also supplied German society with racist imagery and discourse, which exerted a broad and powerful impact (Hund 2017; Kuhlmann-Smirnov 2013). And the profits from banking and trade were reflected not only in fine buildings for Barcelona, Lisbon, Bordeaux, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Liverpool, but also for Altona, Bremen, Glücksstadt, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and other German cities, where prosperous merchants endowed museums, charitable institutions, and concert halls. German colonialism, runs another myth, was not as brutal as that of other European countries such as France and Britain. This idea was particularly promoted by the apologists for colonialism when German lost its colonies in 1919, and they liked to mention the purported loyalty of Germany’s askaris, African mercenaries in the colonial armies (Morlang 2008: 72–96; see also Moyd 2014). These claims were triggered by accusations about Germany’s colonial administrative practice that had been made by the (colonial) Entente powers, who insisted that Germany had “failed” in its mission of “colonial civilization” and that the recent war had “liberated” some 14 million colonial subjects (Poechel 1920: 87, quoted in Gründer 2000: 217). In Germany, these verdicts were dismissed as a lie devised to shift colonial blame (Gründer 2000: 217). Without dwelling

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here on any ulterior motives that the allied powers were no doubt pursuing, it is fair to say that all colonialization was associated with violence in one form or another. Aimé Césaire calls the link between colonization and civilization the “principle lie” that is the source of all the others (Césaire 2017: 24). Colonization is not a philanthropic enterprise, and nor is it born of a desire to redraw the boundaries of ignorance, disease, and tyranny (Césaire 2017: 25). Besides, it is true to say of German colonialism that the violence took different forms ranging from racist humiliation, the alienation of land, rape, enslavement, forced labor, medical experimentation, and displacement, to war and even genocide.7 There is widespread denial about these forms of violence in Germany, although a colonial style is nostalgically celebrated in fashion, furniture ads, and city marketing. Another myth holds that Germany’s colonial era is long since over and no longer relevant today. This, firstly, overlooks the fact that colonial objectives and discourse were by no means consigned to the archives when Germany lost its colonies. The public agency that succeeded the Reichskolonialamt (Imperial Colonial Office) gave money to the colonial associations that continued their propaganda and reconstruction loans to colonial companies. Besides, the colonial spirit was kept alive by decree in schools and in the army (Gründer 2000: 217–218). Many colonial street names and monuments actually originated later, in the Weimar Republic or under the Nazis. Secondly, anyone who looks closely can still find many colonial traces. Several centuries of colonization and the accompanying discursive constructs about white superiority have set their stamp on monuments, words, designations for places and people, Western philosophies and anthropologies, operas, and oil paintings. Moreover, economic power relations in the world today have their roots in age-old colonial structures. The consequences are manifold and deep. The recent struggle to achieve official recognition, an apology, and compensation for the genocide perpetrated against the Ovaherero and Nama has brought echoes of events long past back to the surface, with all their relevance for the present and future. There are, in the truest sense, still accounts to settle with regard to the colonial legacy, unlike the ancient monuments built by the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. 7  Including the war on Yìhétuán, the “League of Harmony and Justice,” better known in the Anglo-Saxon world as the “Boxers,” in China, 1900/01, Mau a Pule in Samoa, 1908/09, the Maji Maji war in German East Africa, 1905–07, the war on the Ovaherero and Nama in German South West Africa, 1904–08, and various colonial wars in Cameroon.

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Monuments from Pre-Democratic Times The question is not so much why the debates about decentralizing memory and decolonizing the public space have become more audible and visible again in Germany in recent years, but why there is such a stubborn will to cling to the colonial monuments. Why do so many people find it offensive to change a street name, withdraw an honorary title, or alter a monument, especially when so many of these things date back to pre-­ democratic times? It is also striking that the statues of Otto von Bismarck and Kaisers Wilhelm I and II, on horseback or not, are especially numerous in West German towns and villages, although there are few sites to remember democratic movements and the revolutionary events of 1918/19. Neither the transition from monarchy to parliamentary republic and the abolition of aristocratic privilege, nor the democratization of suffrage culminated in such a prominent culture of memory as the one that surrounds the monarchy, the armed forces, and colonialism. The indifference, but also the fears and the retentive forces, seem to be enormous in Germany. And yet most protest campaigns are not advocating a kind of damnatio memoriae in the manner of Ancient Rome, when the memory of an individual had to be stamped out by destroying every image, deleting the name from poetry, and melting down coins struck in their honor. In fact, many projects attach great importance to upholding a reference to the colonial age but reversing the perspective so that the resistance to racist and colonial structures can also appear. The artist collective Peng! and the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (ISD), a voice for Black people in Germany, have created a map, drawing attention to colonial tributes. The aim is not to forget or extinguish history, but to remember colonialism. “Germany’s colonial history cannot disappear from the cityscape. On the contrary. The brutality of colonialism needs to be visible, the victims should be remembered, the anti-colonial resistance and the ongoing fight against racism must be honored,” says the project website.8 Renaming Gröbenufer in Berlin May-Ayim-Ufer is a good example. The site is not just a place to learn more about the poet May Ayim. There is also a stele with information about Otto Friedrich von der Groeben (1657–1728), co-founder of the settlement at Gross-­ Friedrichsburg established by Prussians from Brandenburg in what is now Ghana. 8

 https://www.tearthisdown.com/de/

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Is the toppling of statues really as “barbaric” and “violent” as some of the media have described? Sometimes these protests do appear crude, and there is a danger of simplifying history that could backfire on the protestors. Nevertheless, figures like Vasco da Gama (ca. 1469–1524) and Christopher Columbus were responsible for widespread racist oppression, and yet monuments celebrate them in public. How heavily does this weigh compared with the “violence” of a spray gun? The historian David Olusoga draws a vivid historical comparison between the forced deportations to slavery by ship, when those who died were tossed overboard, and the drowning of the Colston statue in the River Avon. And he concludes: “This was not an attack on history. It is history. It is one of those rare historic moments whose arrival means things can never go back to how they were” (Olusoga 2020). Bristol’s mayor Marvin Rees said that, while he could not condone criminal damage, he could not pretend that the statue was anything but an affront to him: “Not just as a Jamaican heritage man but as a human being” (Morris June 13, 2020). The protests are not about censorship or “cancel culture” either, although that is sometimes asserted. Censorship requires action by the state. Some of these acts may be undertaken by vociferous pressure groups, but they are in no way a powerful force, as evidenced by long-drawn-out debates about such things as street names. Hamburg has not yet renamed a single street from the colonial context; in Berlin it took over fifteen years, until 2020, to agree to rename Wissmannstrasse, named for the Governor of “German East Africa” Hermann von Wissmann (1853–1905). Now the street will be named instead for the Tanzanian politician and resistance fighter Lucy Lameck (1934–1993). Nor can it be claimed that these protests were unleashed by revolutionary activity, and they certainly do not display the kind of victorious posturing in public space so often entailed by regime change. But then, who can be the judge of that? Did the sixteenth-century iconoclasts realize that their actions were part of a movement that would eventually lead to the Reformation and bitter wars? And would there have even been a Reformation without the iconoclasm? All that is being asked at present is that the principles of equality enshrined in the constitutions of many democratic societies should be manifest in the public space.9 9  Or, in the words of writer Kimberly Jones, whose video #HowCanWeWin went viral in June 2020: What Black people are looking for is equality and not revenge (Jones 2020).

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Preventing Atrocities The time is ripe for serious, controversial consideration of what message museum displays and statues are able to convey in a pluralistic and digital society and for coming to terms with the prospect that it is not enough to fit a contextualizing plaque to a monument—not, at least, if we share the view that colonialism was a crime against humanity. Of course, a decolonialized statue does nothing initially to change the racism in institutions, or racial profiling by the police, or stereotypical depictions of people with African or Asian roots in cultural productions and advertisements. A decolonialized statue would, however, send out an important signal about countering the racism that takes effect at so many levels of society. An active, multi-perspective memory policy combined with an intersectional search for truth could also, in the spirit of a rehabilitation and a guarantee that injustice committed will not be repeated, be seen as a component in the reparations that have now been placed on the agenda. It could set the course against misanthropic trends and the relativization of human rights. This does not make a case for frantically removing monuments of this kind. Many an approach calls for thought and discussion—but without postponing the matter indefinitely or until the excitement dies down. There is no blanket rule. It might make sense to preserve and look after a monument to an inhuman deed if the space is shielded off and information or education is available to supply context, or if the object is displayed in a memorial to the victims of colonialism. If monstrous monuments must be kept after being documented by different media, they can be stored in repositories, cellars, or museums. Or perhaps some way will be found to overturn their symbolic message of violence, to conceive fluid, imaginative, healing formats for remembering—and not necessarily a rigid counter-monument. A pre-school on the site of the colonial Lettow-­ Vorbeck barracks in Hamburg, for example, did not destroy the decorative relief placed under a protection order, but did, as a temporary solution in 2018, cover it with a painted banner. The most important thing about this process, apart from the outcome, will be the controversy, the enlightenment, the listening, and above all the involvement of experts from once-colonized territories. Implicitly, whenever the theme is a challenge to power, any postcolonial (re)design will produce results that are very sensitive to context and will respond allergically to blueprints or general principles that claim to be universally valid.

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Any concrete local process around decolonization and decentering memory will confront other big challenges, too. Must colonial clichés and depictions reappear in a new guise when the museums or school textbooks are rethought? Why, for example, did the bronze statue “Free Africa” in Halle, which honors Wilhelm Anton Amos (ca. 1703–ca. 1753), the first Black philosopher at the universities of Halle and Jena, have to show him barefoot and with a naked torso? How can colonial documents be made accessible, perhaps with the aid of digitization, while avoiding the dissemination of humiliating, dehumanizing images reminiscent of a human zoo? How can decision-making be organized so that experts from Germany and the former colonies have an equal voice? How can research into the colonial heritage adopt a multiple perspective when most archives are stuffed with documents that tell the history in the narrative of the colonizers? How can people once construed as objects lacking agency be rendered visible as subjects with their own stories, contradictions, and acts of resistance? How can a shared history be told that reflects different experience, knowledge, resources, priorities, and impacts? The participation of different stakeholders, artistic interventions, and public discussions are essential components in decentering and decolonialization processes that challenge power. However, in the context of a global society, the social and political transformations entailed by decolonializing public space and knowledge will also stir forces who perceive a threat to the privileges they have enjoyed in a racially structured world. Ideally, debates will help to ensure serious negotiation of the diverse approaches that can be adopted, so that people can learn together from a violent history and unlearn racist knowledge. In this way, spaces can emerge for decolonial, free forms of production that are artistic and political, and need no longer merely chisel away at the old patriarchal, colonial residues.

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Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland, ed. Maureen M.  Eggers, Grada Kilomba, Peggy Piesche, and Susan Arndt, 118–134. Münster: Unrast Verlag. Manicom, Jean-François. 2020, June 10. Museum gets to Grips with the Painful Legacy of Slavery. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/museum-­gets-­to-­ grips-­with-­the-­painful-­legacy-­of-­slavery-­82ntpbh0f. Accessed November 29, 2020. Möhle, Heiko. 2007. Kolonialismus und Erinnerungspolitik. Die Debatte um die Hamburger “Askari-Reliefs”. In Erinnern verhandeln: Kolonialismus in kollektiven Gedächtnis Afrikas und Europas, ed. Steffi Hobuss and Ulrich Lölke, 196–213. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Morlang, Thomas. 2008. Askari und Fitafita. “Farbige” Söldner in den deutschen Kolonien. Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag. Morris, Steven. 2020, June 13. Bristol Mayor: Colston Statue Removal Was Act of ‘historical poetry’. The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/uk-­ news/2020/jun/13/bristol-­m ayor-­c olston-­s tatue-­r emoval-­w as-­a ct-­o f-­ historical-­poetry. Accessed November 29, 2020. Moyd, Michelle R. 2014. Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press. Olusoga, David. 2020, June 8. The Toppling of Edward Colston’s Statue Is Not An Attack on History. It is history. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/08/edward-­c olston-­s tatue-­h istory-­s lave-­t rader-­b ristol-­ protest. Accessed November 11, 2020. Parzinger, Hermann. 2011. DAS HUMBOLDT-FORUM “Soviel Welt mit sich verbinden als möglich,” Krögers Buch- und Verlagsdruckerei GmbH, Wedel. ———. 2016, October 17. Gemeinsam geerbt: Das Humboldt Forum als Epizentrum des Shared Heritage. https://www.preussischer-­kulturbesitz.de/ newsroom/dossiers-­und-­nachrichten/dossiers/dossier-­humboldt-­forum/ shared-­heritage.html. Accessed November 29, 2020. Perbi, Akosua Adoma. 2004. A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the 15th to the 19th Century. Accra: Sub Saharan Publishers. Poechel, Hans. 1920. Die Kolonialfrage im Frieden von Versailles. Dokumente zu ihrer Behandlung. Berlin: Verlag E. S. Mittler & Sohn. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Savoy, Bénédicte. 2017. “Das Humboldt-Forum ist wie Tschernobyl” in Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 20, 2017, https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/benedicte-­ savoy-­ueber-­das-­humboldt-­forum-­das-­humboldt-­forum-­ist-­wie-­tschernobyl-­1. 3596423?reduced=true. Accessed November 29, 2020. Schwarzer, Anke. 2011. (updated 2020): “Kupfer ist treu”. Über den sorglosen Umgang der Kirche St. Michaelis mit der Kolonialvergangenheit. Webmap Hamburg Global https://www.hamburg-­global.de/v1.0/placemarks/12. Accessed November 28, 2020.

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———. 2018. Das verdrängte Verbrechen. Plädoyer für eine Dekolonialisierung der Bundesrepublik. In Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 63 (6/2018): 85–92. Seukwa, Louis Henri. 2013. Rede auf der Veranstaltung “Für Kaiser und Reich gestorben in China und Afrika”? Kolonialkriege und Erinnerungskultur am Beispiel der Gedenktafel im Michel (September 9, 2013) http://www. freedom-­roads.de/pdf/RedeLouisHenriSeukwaTafelMichel.pdf. Accessed November 29, 2020. Southern Poverty Law Center. (February 1, 2019): Whose heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy.63 https://www.splcenter.org/20190201/ whose-­heritage-­public-­symbols-­confederacy (accessed November 29, 2020) Stubbemann, Karen. 2017. Die Hamburger Hauptkirche St. Michaelis als postkolonialer Erinnerungsort. Die Gedenktafel für die in den deutschen Kolonialkriegen gefallenen Hamburger Soldaten. Unpublished M.A. thesis, Universität Hamburg Traoré, Aminata. 2017. So genießen unsere Kunstwerke Bürgerrechte dort, wo uns allen der Aufenthalt untersagt ist. In No Humboldt 21! Dekoloniale Einwände gegen das Humboldt-Forum, ed. AfricAvenir International e. V, 168–173. Berlin: Brandenburgische Universitätsdruckerei und Verlagsgesellschaft Potsdam mbh. Weber, Klaus: Deutschland, der atlantische Sklavenhandel und die Plantagenwirtschaft der Neuen Welt (15. bis 19. Jahrhundert). In: Journal of Modern European History 7, no.: Europe, Slave Trade, and Colonial Forced Labour (2009), 37–67. Zeller, Joachim. 2000. Kolonialdenkmäler und Geschichtsbewusstsein. Eine Untersuchung der kolonialdeutschen Erinnerungskultur. Frankfurt/M: IKO  – Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation.

CHAPTER 8

Splinters Between Memory and Globalization: Cosmic Generator Installation by Mika Rottenberg in Münster at Skulptur Projekte 2017 Susanne Mersmann

Introduction In a lecture in Münster two months before the international exhibition Skulptur Projekte 2017, the artist Mika Rottenberg, who was born in Buenos Aires and lives in New York, commented on her recent exhibition at the Palais du Tokyo in Paris: “Everything is in the margin and in the world”1 (44:46–44:48). In the same lecture, she further elaborated on the Paris exhibition’s structure, declaring, “The center is empty,” and spoke of her interest in techniques of “decentralizing.”

1  In the same year the American philosopher Edward S. Casey dealt with “The World on Edge.” Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.

S. Mersmann (*) Hamburg, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 U. Capdepón, S. Dornhof (eds.), Contested Urban Spaces, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87505-3_8

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On the basis of this conceptual starting point, I will examine Rottenberg’s installation Cosmic Generator, which she conceived for the almost-four-month-long Skulptur Projekte 2017 in the German regional metropolis of Münster. Since Skulptur Projekte 2017, Cosmic Generator has been presented in different variations in a number of exhibitions, recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. The artwork is thus site-specific on the one hand and nomadic on the other. In my contribution, the installation will be discussed with consideration given to the site for which it was created and where it was also partly developed.2 Skulptur Projekte is an exhibition in the public sphere of the prosperous West German city of Münster, which is located in an otherwise rather rural region. For her installation, Rottenberg chose an abandoned Asian shop outside of the old city center far away from the regionally famous baroque palace, where most of the works of art of Skulptur Projekte 2017 were on view. In addition to the Asian shop, the installation included a shop sign with light bulbs, plastic objects, and a nearly 27-minute video. With regard to the light bulbs, it is worth noting that the explanatory text on the website of Skulptur Projekte 2017 mentions the physicist and electrical engineer Nicola Tesla (1856–1943), who is considered the inventor of two-phase alternating current distribution. The figure of Tesla was also decisive for the choice of the title Cosmic Generator. The focus of the video, on the other hand, is on predominantly female service staff. The working women are shown at Yiwu Market (China), in Chinese restaurants in Mexicali (Mexico), and in a 99¢ store in Calexico (California). Referring to memory politics in Germany, Iman Attia, researcher in Critical Diversity studies in Berlin, commented in conversation with Michael Rothberg: “One such challenge is that more stories and memories demand entry into historiography and public memory. All of them are important, and yet, it is difficult for the hegemonic, overwhelmingly national perspective to accept that other perspectives question, contradict, revise, and provincialize the dominant perspective” (Attia and Rothberg 2018: 48). In analyzing the temporary art installation, this chapter follows the real traces of wear and tear on the former Asian shop, as well as the traces and path markings laid by Rottenberg. I am above all interested in 2  In an interview Rottenberg mentioned that she worked in situ (Rottenberg and Bryan-­ Wilson 2019: 25). For a distinction between a site specificity which alone fits “harmoniously” into the surrounding environment and one which intervenes, see: Deutsche (1992). See also Kwon (1997) and Demos (2013).

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how the artist, who came from outside the local regional context, brings not only a globally oriented narrative to the city of Münster, but how she introduces a polycontextual narrative about female service staff into the local framework over the course of several months. I will compare works by other artists in order to more precisely define Rottenberg’s aesthetic approach and to extract layers of meaning from Cosmic Generator. In particular, I will point to the significance of the installation in the discourse on neglected areas and themes of memory in the city.

The Asian Shop: Aspects of a Non-Lieu and Traces The abandoned Asian store that Rottenberg chose for the installation Cosmic Generator is located next to a much sought-after and high-priced Münster residential area, with historicist architecture as well as numerous cafés and restaurants. The Asian shop is situated in a main road, directly opposite a correctional facility now partly vacant. Along with the city’s baroque palace, the prison—which was built in the middle of the nineteenth century based on a London model—is, independent of its widely contrasting function within the city, one of the most important architectural monuments in Münster. By means of the shop sign, with its light bulbs in various colors, a motif repeated in Cosmic Generator, Rottenberg makes reference to the original Asian shop. She took the original shop sign and added the light bulbs and lighting from the inside (Peters 2018: 170). The wording on the sign contains the location “Garten Str. 29.” Its concrete place within the city can thus be understood worldwide. For an exhibition in Frankfurt, Anne and Patrick Poirier also worked in their installation Fouilles de Sauvetage. Mémoire avant Dispersion. Eschersheimer Landstraße 50 [Rescue excavations. Memory before Dispersion. Eschersheimer Landstraße 50] (2000) with a specific urban street address (see Wettengl 2000: 167). The Frankfurt example makes an allusion to the founding legend of mnemonics, the report by Simonides of Ceos (c. 557–467 BCE), who was able to identify the dead after the collapse of a house by remembering the seating order, highlighting the importance of architectural order for memory (see Schöttker 2000: 271). In contrast, the store sign accentuated by Mika Rottenberg that refers to the abandoned Asian shop can be read in terms of mnemonics as a marker which is activated while walking in urban space. Caiger-Smith (2018: 1064) has pointed out that Rottenberg’s current work is more attentive to architecture and its present and past use. In

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Fig. 8.1  Mika Rottenberg, Cosmic Generator, 2017, Asian shop, exterior view during the Skulptur Projekte 2017, Münster/Germany. LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster/Skulptur Projekte Archiv/ Henning Rogge ©Mika Rottenberg. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Münster (Fig. 8.1), the awning of the Asian shop is torn in several places, creating a hole in the upper part. Shreds of the awning hang down. The poster advertisement on the outside tiles proves to be unrelated to the Asian shop’s activities. It seems to have been placed there by third parties and now only partly survives. The scribblings on the tiles and on the shop window were apparently added by passers-by. According to Aleida Assmann: “As history takes place, it leaves its marks, scars and traces, which can be forgotten or highlighted, retrospectively becoming the focus of memory through acts of symbolization and the construction of narratives. The focus on places discards imperial and homogenizing master narratives to make room for multiple, fragmented, and contesting narratives” (Assmann 2015: 929).

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The Asian shop is certainly not a dominant presence in the cityscape. According to Schöttker (2000: 260), Walter Benjamin defined the process of remembering as an “intuitive making-present of images” (Benjamin 2019: 13). Aleida Assmann wrote in the exhibition catalog Das Gedächtnis der Kunst: “The majority of our memories slumber within us, waiting to be ‘awakened’ by an external incentive. Next, these memories suddenly become conscious, once again acquiring a sensual presence and under appropriate circumstances can be put into words and forged into the inventory of an available repertoire” (Assmann 2000: 21). An article published in a local newspaper illustrates that this remembering can also proceed alongside stigmatizations and degrading connotations: “On the shelves of the shop, which in its active days did not always stand out for its hygiene, lie what at any rate seem to be leftover wares”3 (Westfälische Nachrichten 2017, July 28). Initially apparent on the worn-out steps, the traces of wear and tear are evident inside the retail outlet, a semi-public space reserved either for the clientele or the art spectators.4 The objects/goods presented and an eye-­ catchingly arranged inflatable swimming ring are shielded from wear and tear by their plastic packaging. On the one hand, we are dealing with the remnants of a real place that has been found and, on the other, with interventions by the artist that cannot be precisely determined. The site already indicates that it is not to be understood in purely documentary terms. Land artist Robert Smithson had already dealt in 1967 with sites of work left behind in his photo essay “A Tour of the Monuments of Paissac, New Jersey” devoted to relics of industrial architecture. Smithson introduced the term non-site in two texts: “A provisional theory of non-sites” (1968), which is concerned with displacements between an “actual site” and an exhibition site understood as a “non-site,” and “Non-site number 2” 3  Translation from German. According to Walter Benjamin, we can speak of a “historical index” here: “What distinguishes the images from the ‘essences’ of phenomenology is their historical index … For the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only at a particular time. And, indeed, this acceding ‘to legibility’ constitutes a specific critical point in the movement at their interior. Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each ‘now’ is the now of a particular recognizability” (Benjamin 1982: 462–463). 4  Candida Höfer, for example, works with traces of wear in photography. See, for example, Hoffmann (2010). The photograph “Münzkabinett Bibliothek Dresden I” shows the Münzkabinett library after the flood in 2002. On the parquet floor, there is a rectangular, lighter area surrounded by more heavily worn parquet. The former positions of bookshelves are rendered visible, indicating the former use of the room.

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(1968), which talks about entropy. In a 1972 interview he commented: “And these places are not destinations; they’re kind of backwaters or fringe areas” (Flam 1996: 295). Twenty years later, the French anthropologist Marc Augé wrote his book Non-Lieux. Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (1992), in which he described, in a global context, airports, hotel chains, supermarkets, and cash machines on the basis of the de-individualized and uniform courses of action they prescribe, calling them non-places. Marc Augé (1992): 105–106) already problematizes the attribution of gender roles inherent to this commercial system, likewise referring to mostly female service staff. From an architect’s point of view, Rem Koolhaas expanded on the notion of non-lieu in 2002, coining the term “junkspace.”5 Corresponding works can be observed in the artistic approaches of the artists Andreas Gursky and Eva Grubinger.6 In the C-print Schiphol (1994), Gursky depicts a deserted window front overlooking a runway at Amsterdam airport. Eva Grubinger’s 2007 installation Crowd consists of painted “Tensabarriers,” which she exhibited in several rows. The Tensabarriers mark transfer areas. By contrast, the main area of the Asian shop alternates between a place and a non-lieu. As the location of the shop’s wares, in the temporary presence of customers/art spectators, it can be deemed a semi-public place where goods are exchanged. The traces, however, grant the Asian shop attributes of a place.

The Video: The Narrative Node as Kaleidoscope The sounds of Mika Rottenberg’s installation drew the viewer into a room further back, which would normally remain hidden from the limited public, the clientele. In this room, which is darkened and furnished only with seating, her video ran in an endless loop. In an interview, Mika Rottenberg declared (Mirlesse 2016: 66) that video is a time-based medium, but since the spatial dimension is more important to her, she therefore works with a loop.7 The room now entered can be considered a breakroom or place of retreat for those originally working in the shop. In the first scene of the 5   For a detailed comparison between the conceptions of Augé and Koolhaas, see Cruz (2018). 6  On Andreas Gursky see Schiphol, 1994: Gaßner and Roettig (2012: 40–41). On Grubinger, see https://www.evagrubinger.com/home/crowd. Accessed July 16, 2020. 7  Stöhr (2017: 255) refers to the loop as the eternal presence of the moving image.

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film, a hand lifts a matte metal lid, which reflects the light from a Chinese soup plate placed in the middle of a wooden surface that fills the entire frame. In fact, the edge of the plate extends slightly beyond the frame. Thus, the soup plate conceivably becomes, in the figurative sense, a real utensil in the secluded, non-public space of the Münster store. The film takes immersive effect. In the next scene, the light bulb motif appears again. In the inner ring of the soup plate, a tunnel system equipped with tracks and fitted with light bulbs comes into view.8 As the camera moves, creaking and hissing sounds can be heard. The sound changes into a bubbling, as if a dish is being prepared. A circular element, which refers to the Chinese soup plate, is surrounded by colored, apparently spherical small shapes that rotate around the central circle, and now different ingredients merge together. A first association is that of a melting pot. The “bubbling” also prompts thoughts of the second law of thermodynamics with its reference to entropy and the probability of heat escaping and dissolving. Then something like a signal disturbance occurs, before the storyline continues in another geographically distant location. At the end of the tunnel trip, the light bulbs are smashed with a small hammer. Once again, only the executing hand is visible, while the corresponding body and the individual face are suppressed. Processes can therefore not be clearly assigned. Since the glass of the bulbs is of different colors, the result is a polychrome ensemble that resembles an all-overpainting and evokes associations with a kaleidoscope. While in the USA the idea of a melting pot as a metaphor for the gradual merging of cultures had already found its way into migration discourse by 1908 through a play by Israel Zangwill, the kaleidoscope only gained importance later. In his 1990 book The American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity, and the Civic Culture, Lawrence H. Fuchs based his definition of the term kaleidoscope on an earlier work from 1975. A central 8  There are several portrait photographs and drawings, sometimes full-figure, sometimes half-figure, showing Tesla with a bright, cordless light bulb in his hand. See Ferzak (2016). In terms of composition, there are similarities to Mona Hatoum’s installation Deep Throat, from 1996, which shows a dining table with a white tablecloth and an empty wooden chair placed in front. On the tablecloth there is a plate with a knife and fork at the sides. A tunnel system is also projected onto the base of the plate, but of a very different kind; a human throat is shown that contracts repeatedly. Metzler (2006) says that this art installation is about identity constructions between object, abject, and subject. How Mika Rottenberg addresses identity constructions in terms of spatial distances and working conditions is part of the subsequent argumentation.

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difference to the concept of the “melting pot” is that the “kaleidoscope” is key to maintaining plurality. In this sense, the term can also be found in German-speaking discourse in 2013, as in the first chapter “Urbanes Kaleidoskop” (Urban Kaleidoscope) by the sociologist Erol Yıldız in his book Die weltoffene Stadt. Wie Migration Globalisierung zum urbanen Alltag macht [The cosmopolitan city: How migration makes globalization an urban everyday reality] (Yildiz 2013). Of particular note is the book, published in its sixth edition in 2019, The Kaleidoscope of Gender: Prisms, Patterns and Possibilities (Spade and Valentine 2019), which refers to the constructedness of social classifications, proceeding from the category of gender in intersectional relations to attributions such as class and ethnicity. For her 2018 exhibition at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, Rottenberg detached this scene, where the glass shatters into colorful pieces with the resulting kaleidoscope motif, from the rest of the video, creating an independent ceiling projection. The kaleidoscope seems to be of special importance to her. Destroying the light bulbs fractures the narrative; at first it appears as if the path through the tunnel is cut off, but it continues through the splinters of broken glass. There is an analogy to the “knot” described by Georges Didi-Huberman: the images—even of “actualité”—are very often the bearers of a combined memory and desire. This means that their present is crossed by past in one direction, future in another. It means that their present is a knot of tensions, a complex, dialectical thing, made of heterogeneous temporalities associating by rhyme or confronting each other by antithesis, to give rise to what we could call anachronistic montages arranged, not in linear narratives, but in constellations of our sensitive thought. (Didi-Huberman 2018: 163)9

Georges Didi-Huberman, however, is referring primarily to time dimensions, which have some affinity with the field of memories, the repertoire from which the artist draws her ideas. For the viewers of Rottenberg’s videos, however, whose memories or repertoire of remembered fragments differ from those of the artist, spatial juxtaposition becomes a central element in the film. Robert Smithson, to whom Mika Rottenberg (2018) refers, had observed in “Entropy and the New Monuments” in 1966: “If time is a place, then innumerable places are possible” (Flam 1996: 11). There are echoes here of Claude 9

 The text exists so far only in French. Translation mine.

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Lévi-­Strauss, who in “Race et l’histoire” (1952) distanced himself from Eurocentric evolutionism, first by championing the perception of the simultaneity of different cultures in different places (cf. Ott 2005: 17–18). In Michel Foucault’s 1967 lecture “Different Spaces,” first published in 1984, the idea of societies existing side by side was anchored in time and history: We are in an era of the simultaneous, of juxtaposition, of the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the scattered. We exist at a moment when the world is experiencing, I believe, something less like a great life that would develop through time than like a network that connects points and weaves its skein. (Foucault 1984/1998: 175)

Foucault is drawing attention to hierarchies between places, while at the same time acknowledging places and their rules which are otherwise not taken into account. The places in Rottenberg’s video installation, considered in the following section, can be viewed in a similar context.

Female Service Staff in Their Workplaces In Mika Rottenberg’s video, the locations of the narrative are now numerous small shops, shown in sequence and in cross-fades. In an interview, she reveals that this refers to the Chinese town of Yiwu, a major hub for small goods. In each cramped sales area, a salesperson, usually female, appears. Rottenberg accentuates the presentation of the first salesperson by means of a close-up portrait (Fig.  8.2). The woman is depicted in an upright posture, head slightly inclined, and stands out from a multicolored background with her bright complexion and sleeveless dress. Her facial expression is firm. She looks directly at the potential customers in the shop/art spectators. But at the same time, her gaze seems to look inward, with her face revealing no joy. There are points of comparison with a portrait from the end of the nineteenth century, the figure of the barmaid in Edouard Manet’s 1882 painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.10 There are similarities in the upright, frontal posture, the slightly tilted head, and the forward-­ facing stance. The resemblance in the gaze, fixed on a counterpart yet simultaneously introspective, is especially striking. This expression lies 10  https://courtauld.ac.uk/gallery/collection/impressionism-post-impressionism/ edouard-manet-a-bar-at-the-folies-bergere. Accessed April7, 2021.

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Fig. 8.2  Mika Rottenberg, Cosmic Generator, 2017. The first saleswomen in the Yiwu Market, video still (2:41); Battista, 2019

somewhere between apathy and fatigue. The face with its make-up, notably the lipstick, evokes the standard expression for service staff (Hochschild 2012; Grandey et al. 2013). The 2018 anniversary exhibition of the Coreana Museum of Art in Seoul dealt with the theme Hidden Workers (Park 2018). International artists contributed to the exhibition. Two South Korean female artists, Hye Jeong Cho and Sook Hyun Kim, produced a video based on interviews with female service staff in various occupations. In The Emotional Society on Stage: Can you endure? Relational Aesthetics of Service Labor (2015),11 actresses reenact a specific pose associated with each of these occupations, holding it for two minutes. This makes the expected posture seem partly unnatural, underlining the effort it takes to maintain these “consistent emotions” and drawing attention to a subliminal form of violence. 11  I thank the artist for the link to her video. See https://vimeo.com/157424380. Accessed April 7, 2021.

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Just as with the interviews used by Hye Jeong Cho and Sook Hyun Kim, there is an aspect of authenticity in the portrayals in Mika Rottenberg’s work. Rottenberg (see Rottenberg and Bryan-Wilson 2019: 30) did not work with actresses but with real employees of Yiwu Market, who made their own decisions to participate in the video. The fact that Rottenberg is also interested in physical presentation requirements for female service staff becomes particularly clear during two scenes in the video. In one, Rottenberg depicts a waitress putting on her make-up before starting work (20:16–20:25). In the other, a television screen in the guest room of a Chinese restaurant in Mexico shows a promotional film for Goicoechea—a leg lotion which, as the advertising makes clear, is targeted solely at women. From the advertising blurb for the product on the Amazon web shop a cynicism becomes clear: “Helps reduce the appearance of varicose veins, bruises, and imperfections.”12 The shelves in the storage rooms are overflowing with plastic products. As Katarina Veljovic itemizes: “They sell every variation and color of a specific item: long strips of tinsel, pre-decorated plastic Christmas trees, inflatable animal toys, pool toys, toy race cars, clear plastic bags, soccer and basketballs, glow-in-the-dark stickers, foam shapes, LED light strips, teddy bears with glowing bellies, plastic poinsettias, plastic tall grasses, plastic fruits and vegetables and gift wrapping bows, among other goods.” (Veljovic 2018: 301)

Some of the plastic objects in the film can also be found in the Asian shop in Münster. The levels of reality of the film and the Münster shop are intertwined, thus intensifying the immersive effect of the film. Rottenberg is partly credited (Rottenberg and Bryan-Wilson 2019: 28) with playing with a retro aesthetic. Roland Barthes had earlier written in 1957 about plastic in Mythologies: “It is the first magical substance which consents to be prosaic. But it is precisely because this prosaic character is a triumphant reason for its existence: for the first time, artifice aims at something common, not rare” (Barthes 1957: 89). He goes on to say: “The hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself since, we are told, they are beginning to make plastic aortas” (Ibid.). Jeffrey Meikle (1995: 1, 8) identified plastic 12  http s : //www. am azo n .d e/Go ico ech ea- Lo t io n- A r ni c a - F l ui d- Ounc e / dp / B011OW81E4/ref=lp_10497898031_1_3?srs=10497898031&ie=UTF8&qi d=1596439063&sr=8-3. Accessed April 7, 2021.

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as the material of the baby-boomer generation. In the United States, in 1979, the amount of plastic produced exceeded that of steel for the first time. In West Germany, the figure of 505,000 metric tons is recorded for the year 1956 (Westermann 2007: 7). Monika Wagner, Dietmar Rübel, and Sebastian Hackenschmidt (2019: 161–165) recall that in Germany the Nazis did not wish to see plastic in artistic contexts because they regarded it as material without a history, and their ideology privileged traditional materials. But the Constructivists had already introduced early plastics, such as celluloid, into their art by around 1915. For the artists of the Russian avant-garde, it was precisely because plastic was regarded as a material without a history that it was suitable for documenting the radical new departure in politics and art. In contrast to Mika Rottenberg, the German artist Swaantje Güntzel explicitly points out the environmental problems connected with plastic in her work Plastic Flowers/MSC Zoe (2019).13 Güntzel’s three-quarter portrait shows a woman in a simple but elegant dark-red dress, whose profile reveals a similarly dark-red plastic flower in her hair. The MSC Zoe was a ship that lost its cargo in the North Sea in January 2019, including containers of hazardous goods. The work’s description states that the plastic flower from the cargo was washed up on the beach on Langeoog Island. Rottenberg, on the other hand, puts the exuberant plastic at the center of the depiction, where its excessive dimensions make the rooms appear more cramped. In her two-channel video Sleepless Hours (2014),14 the Korean artist Lim Yoonkyung records women as they leave or enter the workplace. Saleswomen, cleaners, nurses, seamstresses are depicted, illustrating the repetitive character of these female occupations. Compared to the women selling plastic in Cosmic Generator, they execute meaningful tasks and ensure that a system is maintained. An interlocking of activities and a general movement emerge, whereas in Mika Rottenberg’s video we never see any of the working women leaving the room. Everything remains in the interior, which is viewed by the exhibition visitors as a video in the back of the Asian shop. A point of comparison arises with the video work Ramallah/New York (2004–2005) by the Palestinian-American artist Emily Jacir. In this work, 13  http://www.swaantje-guentzel.de/#/portrait-plastic-flowersmsc-zoe. Accessed April 7, 2021. 14  I thank the artist for the link to her video. See https://vimeo.com/153402928. Accessed April 6, 2021.

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as in a diptych, there are split-screen juxtapositions of everyday situations in shops, including a hairdresser and a shop selling various small goods, in both Ramallah and New York. Without the explanatory title, the interiors do not allow a geographical attribution. And even the title does not enable the spectator to clearly assign the interiors to one city or the other. In Mika Rottenberg’s Cosmic Generator, not even the title permits any geographical clarification. Rottenberg herself tells us: “I also try to play with confusing locations” (Rottenberg 2019: 23). In his essay “On Global Memory,” Homi K.  Bhabha (2009: 53) pointed out that Jacir captures the uncertainty that comes from not feeling clearly located. This aspect is also reflected in Mika Rottenberg’s installation: not only does she reveal an abandoned place, but at the same time we perceive a state of in-between, which can be related to migration.

“Subversive Affirmation” and “Entropy and the New Monuments” In 1991, the art critic Rosalind Krauss mocked the work of the consumer culture-oriented artist Jeff Koons because she did not recognize a critical subtext in his works (see Wood 2010: 52). Mika Rottenberg also starts from consumer culture in the video installation Cosmic Generator. In the article quoted from Westfälische Nachrichten, a newspaper with wide circulation in the Münster region, the impression the film leaves is summarized as follows: “The cinematic journey through this brightly colored globalization hell is a horror trip without blood or screams, but with bizarre-­ absurd jest” (Westfälische Nachrichten 2017, July 28).15 In an interview, Mika Rottenberg (2019: 29) says that she has incorporated Eastern European and Russian aesthetics in her work. In Cosmic Generator, there are proximities and overlaps with the artistic practice of “subversive affirmation.” Inke Arns and Sylvia Sasse (2006) have remarked that the concept of subversive affirmation was developed in the context of Russian conceptualism with reference to the literary technique of Vladimir Sorokin: “Ultimately, these novels and stories always collapse because of their own over-serious realism” (Arns and Sasse 2006: 445). They explain: “In subversive affirmation there is always a surplus which destabilizes affirmation and turns it into its opposite” (Ibid.). The response in the regional newspaper article underlines that Rottenberg’s art installation does not show the element of playfulness that plastic can embody—plastic lucky charms  Translation from German by Maria King.

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are also shown in one of the sales rooms—but instead makes a chilling plea for its rejection. It is obvious that the overflowing products in the Yiwu Market have no use whatsoever for human survival; even the food is made of plastic. Nor do they have any intellectual value. Among other things, the mass-produced Christmas trees with their flickering lights certainly do not inspire any reflection but only cause distraction. They are mere cheap merchandise and seem in certain scenes of the video to almost overwhelm the saleswomen. In the last sequence of the video, Mika Rottenberg (26:33) shows a painting with the caption “Restaurant Nuovo Gran Palacio.” The painting depicts an extremely idyllic landscape with deer on one side and a crane on the other. It now changes from a still to a moving image: the deer in front tilts its head forward and spits out a bright green liquid while the crane shits.16 A clear comment by the artist. A thought follows here akin to Smithson’s text “Entropy and the New Monuments.” Smithson began with references to science fiction, and Rottenberg’s video borrows from this by means of the spherical small shapes that rotate. With entropy he equates an “energy-drain,” which is expressed in the art installation “Cosmic Generator” by the sizzling represented both acoustically and visually. Smithson described artificial materials, listing plastic and electric light as key factors in the “New Monuments” (Flam 1996: 11) These new monuments have nothing in common with progressive thinking, but are linked on the contrary to the collapse of industrial progress, identifiable in the case of Mika Rottenberg in the overwhelming products that are a clear critique of growth and capitalism.

Conclusion: “Hidden Labor… bringing the front to the back and the back to the front”17 The buttresses of the prison wall in Münster (Fig. 8.1) are mirrored in the display window of the Asian shop. Neither the former Asian shop staff, whose traces are still there, nor the exhibition visitors were able to escape 16  Arns and Sasse (2006: 445), note 2, also refer to a similar concept by Foucault: “Michel Foucault, for instance, spoke of the ‘possibility of a non-positive affirmation’ that contemporary philosophy had discovered, an affirmation that affirms nothing, an affirmation without any transitivity—not a negation, but rather a direction to the border ‘at which the ontological decision is made’.” See M. Foucault, “Vorrede zur Überschreitung,” in M. Foucault, Von der Subversion des Wissens, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1991, 33. In contrast to this, Rottenberg makes a definite statement in the last sequence. 17  Rottenberg, M. (April 18, 2017): 1:12:03–1:13:22.

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these massive prison buildings. The fact that the battlements and the pointed cone-crowned towers indicate strength is immediately obvious when you approach the jail. Its construction, primarily of brick, has quarry stone at its base. The monument conservator Schäfer describes this material as “rugged construction material” (Schäfer 2015). While it is likely that Mika Rottenberg never visited the Münster prison, she will certainly be familiar with the structure of prison buildings, divided into cells. The repetitive structure of the sales rooms in the video, as well as the actual sales room in Münster, interconnected with the prison through the reflection in the shop window, can be associated with prison cells.18 Whereas Lim Yoonkyung shows the women entering and leaving the workplace, the workers in Rottenberg’s video never leave. In some sequences they are shown nodding off, always remaining physically isolated in their working environment. In Rottenberg’s video there are connections to remote locations through the tunnel, but at the same time the tunnel is difficult to pass through and the glass must be broken before the path continues. This does not change much in the everyday life of the saleswomen; rather, it makes it much clearer that they are part of global structures. In The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (2019), Michael Rothberg points out the importance of awareness of the structural involvement of the individual, even in contexts in which they initially do not perceive their agency (Rothberg 2019: 1). Visitors to the Skulptur Projekte exhibition were unable to escape the association between the prison and the Asian shop because of the reflection in the window. The immersive effects of the art installation, the lifting of the lid, and the embedding of objects shown in the film inside combine the physical reality of the Asian shop with the video. According to Mika Rottenberg’s statement at the beginning of this essay, “everything is in the margin and in the world”; the spectator is and becomes involved. With her art installation Cosmic Generator created for the four-month-­ long exhibition SkulpturProjekte 2017 in Münster—a prosperous city with 18  See the motif of the (Victorian) prison, which can also be found in “Prison Architect,” 2018, by the Chinese artist Cao Fei (both Mika Rottenberg and Cao Fei exhibited in Kiel, Germany, 2018–2019). Cao Fei, who deals with factory workers in the video “Whose Utopia,” created in 2006 in the Osram Light Factory in Foshan in the province of Guangdong in the Pearl River Delta region, said in an interview, see Hardt (2019), on “Prison Architect”: “The concept of the ‘prison’ is macroscopic, omnipresent, like our work and lives in a contemporary metropolis with nine-to-seven (or later) jobs. Such living patterns can be a certain form of imprisonment.”

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a strong, established service sector—Mika Rottenberg depicts a backdrop of global consumer behavior in an abandoned Asian shop outside the city center: a non-lieu turns into a place in a sense. In so doing, she directs attention to the working conditions of the service staff. The French painter Manet portrayed a French model as a barmaid in Paris in the nineteenth century; the expression on the face of the first waitress in Yiwu Market in Mika Rottenberg’s video resembles her. However, the perspective has changed. As an artist of the twenty-first century, Mika Rottenberg highlights global working contexts in small-town Münster as part of German history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In her artistic language, with stylistic links to art and monument discourse in the twentieth century the installation “Cosmic Generator” fullfills Iman Attia’s appeal to the politics of remembrance in Germany quoted in the introduction: starting from an external perspective, she goes beyond the national frame of reference and alludes to migration in global interrelationships. In so doing, she does not focus on the electrical engineer Nikola Tesla, a godfather of the lightbulb motif and of a nineteenth-century belief in progress, who can be described as a high-skill migrant (he was born in Smiljan in what is today Croatia and died in New York), but on migrant saleswomen working in hidden places.19

References Arns, Inke and Sylvia Sasse. 2006. Subversive Affirmation: On Mimesis as a Strategy of Resistance. In East Art Map. Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe, ed. IRWIN.  London: Afterall. Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, 444–455. Assmann, Aleida. 2000. Individuelles und kollektives Gedächtnis  – Formen, Funktionen und Medien. In Das Gedächtnis der Kunst. Geschichte und Erinnerung in der Kunst der Gegenwart, ed. Kurt Wettengl, 21–27. Ostfildern-­ Ruit: Hatje Cantz. ———. 2015. Memory in the City – The Future of the Past. In Bananen, Cola, Zeitgeschichte. Oliver Rathkolb und das lange 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Lucile Dreidemy et al., vol. 2, 926–938. Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau. Attia, Iman, and Michael Rothberg. 2018. Multidirectional Memory und Verwobene Geschichte(n): Ein Gedankenaustausch zwischen Iman Attia und 19  Janßen (2018: 113) reminds us that the urban space is itself a target destination for migration, wherein she explicitly mentions that migration refers not only to migration from other countries but also to migration from towns to cities.

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Michael Rothberg. Neue Rundschau 129 (2): 92–105. English Version: 2019. Multidirectional Memory and Verwobene Geschichte(n) [Entangled (Hi)stories]. A Conversation between Iman Attia and Michael Rothberg (trans. M.M.  Ledwon). Transit 12 (1): 46–54. https://transit.berkeley.edu/2019/ attia-­rothberg/. Accessed April 30, 2021. Augé, Marc. 1992. Non-Lieux. Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Paris: Éditons du Seuil. German Edition. Augé, M. 2014. Nicht-Orte. München: Beck. Barthes, Roland. 1957. Le plastique. In Mythologies, ed. R.  Barthes, 159–161. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. English Edition: Barthes, R. 1991. Mythologies (trans. A. Lavers), 97–99. New York: The Noonday Press. Battista, Anna. 2019. The Alienating Consciousness of Loneliness in a Globalised World: Mika Rottenberg @ MAMbo  – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Italy. Irenebrination: Notes on Architecture, Art, Fashion, Fashion Law & Technology. January 30, 2019. https://www.irenebrination.com/irenebrination_notes_on_a/2019/01/mika-­rottenberg-­mambo.html. Accessed April 30, 2021. Benjamin, Walter. 1982. Das Passagen-Werk. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag. English Edition: Benjamin, W. 1999. Arcades Project (trans. H.  Eiland and K.  McLaughlin). Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ———. 2019. Origin of the German Trauerspiel. Cambrigde and London: Harvard University Press. German Edition: Benjamin, W. (1928). Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. Berlin: Rowohlt. Bhabha, Homi K. 2009. On Global Memory. Reflections on Barbaric Transmission. In Crossing Cultures. Conflict, Migration and Convergence. Proceedings of the 32nd International Congress in the History of Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson. Carlton, VIC, Australia: Miegunyah Press. Caiger-Smith, Martin. 2018. Review: Mika Rottenberg. Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London 8th September – 4th November. The Burlington Magazine 160 (138): 1063–1065. Cruz, Bruno. 2018. De los no lugares al espacio basura: diseño de los espacios de globalización. Arte, Individuo y Sociedad 30 (2): 261–273. Demos, T.J. 2013. The Art of Emily Jacir: Dislocation and Politicization. In The Migrant Image. The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, 103–123. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Deutsche, Rosalyn. 1992. Tilted Arc and the Uses of Public Space. Design Book Review 23: 22–27. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2018. Aperҫues. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Ferzak, Franz. 2016. Nikola Tesla. Leben und Werk. München: FFWASP. Flam, Jack, ed. 1996. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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Foucault, Michel. 1984. Des espaces autres. Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5: 46–49. English Edition: 1998. Different Spaces (trans. R.  Hurley). In Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. J.  D. Faubion, vol. 2, 175–185. New York: The New York Press. Fuchs, Lawrence H. 1990. The American Kaleidoscope. Race, Ethnicity, and the Civic Culture. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press. Published by The University Press of New England. Gaßner, Hubertus, and Petra Roettig, eds. 2012. Lost Places – Orte der Photographie. Berlin: Kehrer. Grandey, Alicia A., James M.  Diefendorff, and Deborah E.  Rupp, eds. 2013. Emotional Labor in the 21st Century. Diverse Perspectives on Emotion Regulation at Work. New York: Routledge. Hardt, Johanna. 2019. Prison Architect: An Interview with Cao Fei. Berlin Art Link. Online Magazine for Contemporary Art and Culture, March 15. https:// www.berlinartlink.com/2019/03/15/prison-­architect-­an-­interview-­with-­ cao-­fei/. Accessed April 7, 2021. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2012. The Managed Heart. Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hoffmann, Felix. 2010. Anwesenheit des Abwesenden. Candida Höfers Ausstellung “Dresden” im Kupferstich-Kabinett 2002. In Hans-Ulrich Lehmann zum 65. Geburtstag, 42–43. Dresden: SKD. Janßen, Andrea. 2018. Die Stadt als Ziel von Migration und Ort der Integration. In Urbanität im 21. Jahrhundert, ed. N. Gestring and J. Wehrheim, 113–128. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Kwon, Miwon. 1997. One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity. October 80: 85–110. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1952. Race et histoire. In Le racisme devant la science, nouvelle édition, 1973, 9–49. Paris: UNESCO. Meikle, Jeffrey L. 1995. American Plastic. A Cultural History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Metzler, Jan. 2006. Mona Hatoum. Deep Throat. 1996. In Bildnisse in der Hamburger Kunsthalle, ed. F.  Krämer, K. von Oehsen, and C.  Quermann, 92–95. Hamburg: Hamburger Kunsthalle. Mirlesse, Sabine. 2016. Une conversation avec Mika Rottenberg. Les Cahiers du Mnam 137: 61–71. Ott, Michaela. 2005. Dimensionen des modernen Raumbegriffs. In Denken des Raums in Zeiten der Globalisierung, ed. M. Ott and E. Uhl, 12–23. Münster: LIT Verlag. Park, Hyejin. 2018. Hidden Workers. Seoul: Coreana Museum of Art / space*c. Peters, Britta. 2018. Mika Rottenbergs Cosmic Generator bei Skulptur Projekte 2017. Eine immersiv-informative Erzählung. In Mika Rottenberg, ed. T.D. Trummer, 164–174. Bregenz: Kunsthaus Bregenz.

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Rothberg, Michael. 2019. The Implicated Subject. Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rottenberg, Mika. 2017, April 18. Münster Lecture. Kunstakademie Münster. (I would like to thank Georg Imdahl, for a cd-rom burned version of the lecture.) ———. 2018. Questionnaire. Frieze: 197, 16 Aug. https://www.frieze.com/ article/questionnaire-­mika-­rottenberg. Accessed April 29, 2021. Rottenberg, Mika, and Julia Bryan-Wilson. 2019. In Conversation. In Mika Rottenberg. Easypieces, ed. M. Norton, 20–30. New York: New Museum. Schäfer, Jost. 2015. Denkmalwert der Justizvollzugsanstalt in Münster. Die Denkmalpflege 73 (1–2): 141–142. Schöttker, Detlev. 2000. Erinnern. In Benjamins Begriffe, ed. M.  Opitz and E. Wizisla, 260–298. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Smithson, Robert. 1968. A provisional theory of non-sites. In Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam, 364. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Spade, Joan Z., and Catherine G. Valentine, eds. 2019. The Kaleidoscope of Gender. Prisms, Patterns, and Possibilities. 6th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Stöhr, Franzioska. 2017. Never Ending ≠ Never Ending. Zu repetitiven Strukturen, Endlosschleifen und Variationen in der Film-und Videokunst. In Never Ending Stories. Der Loop in Kunst, Film, Architektur, Musik, Literatur und Kulturgeschichte, ed. R. Beil, 254–269. Berlin: Hatje Cantz. Veljovic, Katarina. 2018. Review: Mika Rottenberg, Cosmic Generator. SkulpturProjekte Münster, Germany, 10 June–1 October 2017. Journal of Curatorial Studies 7 (2): 298–301. Wagner, Monika, Dietmar Rübel, and Sebastian Hackenschmidt. 2019. Lexikon des künstlerischen Materials. 3rd ed. München: Beck. Westermann, Andrea. 2007. Plastik und politische Kultur in Westdeutschland. Zürich: Chronos. https://www.research-­collection.ethz.ch/handle/ 20.500.11850/183365. Accessed February 3, 2020. Westfälische Nachrichten. 2017. In der knallbunten Hölle. Westfälische Nachrichten, July 28. Wettengl, Kurt, ed. 2000. Das Gedächtnis der Kunst. Geschichte und Erinnerung in der Kunst der Gegenwart. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz. Wood, Catherine. 2010. Kapitalistische Echtheit. In Pop Life: Warhol, Haring, Koons, Hirst…, ed. J.  Bankowsky, et  al., 49–65. London: Tate Modern; Hamburg: Hamburger Kunsthalle; Köln: DuMont. Yildiz, Erol. 2013. Urbanes Kaleidoskop. In Die weltoffene Stadt. Wie Migration Globalisierung zum urbanen Alltag macht, 15–25. Bielefeld: Transcript.

PART III

Fallen Monuments

CHAPTER 9

The Empty Pedestal: Artistic Practice and Public Space in Luanda Nadine Siegert

Art and Urban Space in Luanda As the air traveler approaches Luanda, Angola’s capital, with its population of approximately 2.8 million in the city center and about 7 million in the wider conurbation, the first thing that catches the eye is the convex seashore with its peninsulas. As we draw closer, we see the small city center as an architectural collage: colonial buildings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tropical modernist blocs from the mid-twentieth century, and the hypermodern skyscrapers placed within this fragile inner-­ urban infrastructure. Beyond the center, huge peripheral and semi-urban Parts of this paper have been published previously as “Art Topples Monuments: Artistic Practice and Colonial/Postcolonial Relations in the Public Space of Luanda.” In Transnational Africas. Visual, Material and Sonic Cultures of Lusophone Africa, eds. Christopher Larkosh, Mario Pereira and Memory Holloway, Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies 30/31, 2018, University of Dartmouth, MA: 150-174. N. Siegert (*) Goethe-Institut, Lagos, Nigeria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 U. Capdepón, S. Dornhof (eds.), Contested Urban Spaces, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87505-3_9

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areas spread into the space, as well as newly built “monocultural” suburban structures that speak of the oil boom of the early 2000s. Starting with this “bird’s-eye view,” I seek to understand these spatial structures by seeing them as a heritage, one that is produced and contested in the negotiation of history in the postcolonial, postwar, and postsocialist context of the Angolan capital. From this perspective, I see the city as an urban archive—as an alternative source of knowledge embedded in the public space that carries the history of colonial memory. It can be reactivated and redefined through artistic enactment. In these practices, the city is more than just a neutral stage for artistic engagement. It is rather the specific history inscribed into the urban space, conceptualized as a script, an archive of collective memory, a palimpsestic carrier of the layers of history (Nuttall and Mbembé 2008). The urban space is, therefore, not a given reality, but one that is actively created by the artists’ imagination. These imaginative aspects can be utopian, phantasmagorical, or even irrational (Boeck and Plissart 2004; Donald 2005). The artworks that will be analyzed in this essay are reactivations and redefinitions of a very particular component of this urban archive: the monument, or rather the absence of it. Here, contemporary art is used as a form of physical replacement, occupying the supposedly empty space on pedestals that had previously supported monuments of Portuguese colonial power. I hereby aim to understand how art offers ways to engage colonial memory that are different from official commemorative practices. Can we consider them as a substitution that forms an alternative form of commemoration— remembering independence or the end of colonialism as counter-monuments? How do artists seek to subvert the colonial archive—also manifest in the urban space—and the historical order it implies? An analysis and interpretation of some selected artworks from two different generations of artists will explore these questions. I ask how artists relate to the urban space and what we can say about the artistic infrastructure of the city. In Luanda, engaging with the urban space is mostly a phenomenon of the post-civil war era since 2002. The history of over forty years of armed conflict—first against the Portuguese colonial power, then after independence in 1975 between several independence movements—is engraved into the city, even if Luanda has rarely been the actual stage for hostilities (Batalha 2006; Chabal and Vidal 2007).1  The city of Luanda itself has rarely been the site of violent armed struggle. One occasion was the failure of the Bicesse Accord and the first presidential elections in 1991, when government troops attacked the opposition party UNITA. 1

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Until late colonialism in the 1970s, there had been several urban planning initiatives, which are visible in the modern architecture still dominating the city center. During the 1950s and 1960s, the city was growing rapidly. It was mainly Portuguese architects, such as Vieira da Costa and Fernão Simões de Carvalho, who, following the modernist ideas of Le Corbusier, shaped the city at that time (Leiria Viegas 2015). The city was intended as a cosmopolitan counterpart to the old fascist Lisbon, and this is also reflected in the names of public and private landmarks such as Hotel Tropico, Cine Atlantico, or Hotel Globo. For Portuguese architects, the colonial capitals Luanda and Maputo were a kind of playground where they could develop and test their ideas of a modern city. Luanda became a utopia—another place somewhere else—a blueprint for everything that was impossible in the constricted urban space of Lisbon, where the weight of centuries of European history was engraved in stone. After independence, Angola became socialist, and the city center was left by the Portuguese and populated by its new Angolan citizens. The Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda describes this moment: November 1975, in a flash thousands of persons flee the city. The colony is over, the counting begins from zero. Luanda is now an empty space and waits, anxious, for its new tenants. New habitants, new freedom. Like “squatters” now inside buildings marked by old moments, memories, scents from another time, Luanda anticipates and receives the new occupants with open doors. (Kia Henda 2010)

Then, during the civil war decades from 1975 to 2002, not only was city planning neglected, but so was the cultural infrastructure. Once the civil war ended, a new wave of reconstruction tried to create a Dubai-like face with the “Marginal,” a restored and altered road that runs along the coast, showcasing palm trees shipped in from Florida. This trend brought the demolition of several buildings from the early twentieth century and the late colonial period in order to create space for shopping malls, hotels, and car parks. The new cosmopolitan metropolis is based on its booming economic sectors (Vanin 2015: 82). It was only after the end of the civil war in 2002 that walking the city became a common public practice, as did the appropriation of the urban environment through open-air sports and other leisure activities. But unlike in other African cites, such as Douala, Kampala, or Dakar, contemporary art in the public space is virtually nonexistent. For many years, due

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to the civil war, urban space was not considered as a space for the arts—be it in the form of state-sponsored public sculptures or in more ephemeral subcultural manifestations such as graffiti or street art. The city has become a site for the arts only since the first Luanda Triennial in 2005-6 (Hanussek 2004; Williamson 2005; Collier 2016; Siegert 2016). The organizers reconstructed empty spaces into art spaces, and young artists worked with and within the urban fabric (Siegert and Vierke 2013).

The Empty Pedestal This introduction serves to contextualize the artistic projects described later in the chapter, which have engaged with the city by negotiating its different historical layers. I will focus on modern and contemporary artistic practice that has marked absences and appropriated empty pedestals to install both permanent or temporary and ephemeral art. Works by both António Ole and Kiluanji Kia Henda—artists from two different generations—have been erected on pedestals that previously had displayed monuments of the Portuguese colonial power. They had been toppled in the context of the country’s independence in 1975 as an anticolonial gesture. As artworks, they produce a counter-visuality to official commemorative monuments of both the colonial and socialist past by redefining the pedestal as the carrier of historic representation in the context of coloniality and how it marks the urban landscape of Luanda. The city center hides and offers a number of historical layers of the urban space. During the colonial empire, monuments to historical Portuguese personalities had been erected all over the inner city. These included, among others, statues of the explorer Diego Cão, who arrived on the Angolan coast in 1485, created by António Duarte in 1948, and one of Paolo Dias de Novais, who founded the city of “Loanda” in 1576. These and other colonial monuments were toppled in the days of independence in 1975–76, when the new political power pursued an iconoclastic quest to not only make the old regime invisible but also to demonstrate its defeat (Jacob 2011; Mariz 2016). In contrast to many European countries, where former colonialists still have visibility in urban spaces as equestrian sculptures to represent history, the toppling of monuments beyond the Global North is a strategy often employed to mark political change. This happened with the colonial statues in the city space of Luanda, and most of the pedestals have been equipped with new figures.

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The empty pedestals as components of this urban archive grant us interesting insights into the role that aesthetic manifestations play in the context of political upheaval. The removal and later the replacement of symbols of power are part of this as a high-profile political performance. But the empty pedestal is also interesting as an aesthetic object. Is it a work in its own right that has its own meaning even without the work it is supposed to carry? Can it change this meaning when it becomes the carrier of a new, different monument? Or does it always carry the traces of things previously worn? Does it perhaps gain its own aesthetic power precisely because it allows the space formerly reserved for the colonial power to be “soiled” and thus disempowered by a new political system?

Reworking of the Empty Space on top of the Pedestal The metal sculpture Mitologias II2 (Fig. 9.1) by António Ole from 1985 is perhaps the only state-sponsored modernist artwork in a public space in Luanda to date. It is positioned in front of the German embassy on the Marginal. The Angolan state-owned petrol company Petromar commissioned this new contemporary artwork, which replaced the colonial sculpture of Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese navigator. The sculpture consists of four vertical figurative elements—two of them anthropomorphic, one zoomorphic, and one abstract—without any clear reference to a particular symbolic background. On the bottom, between the four figures, is an element in the form of a snake. The metal figures are painted in bright colors, such as yellow, red, blue, and white, and one of the anthropomorphic elements is brown. They are distributed equally over the pedestal, with the yellow and orange bird-like figure and the brown human-like figure facing outward on the two narrow sides. Between them is the smaller human-like figure in yellow and brown and the abstract figure that resembles a striped tower with a half round top in blue. There are also step-like elements that lead to some of the figures. Produced in the 1980s, it is still thematically and aesthetically embedded in the nationalist discourse on modern art in Angola that was at that time emphasizing the role of indigenous cultures. Following independence in many African countries, artists were exploring forms and subject matter connected to traditional arts. António Ole individualized this approach by embedding it in his very contemporary style. The work 2

 It is still unclear why the title was chosen and if there was also a Mitologias I.

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Fig. 9.1  António Ole, Mitologias, painted metal, 1985, photograph by the author

resembles not only the pop-art style of a number of his paintings from the 1980s, but also the surrealist art of the Portuguese artist José de Guimarães3 with its clearly distinct color fields and simple forms. The sculpture also anticipates the colorful installation of his later Township Walls that earned him popularity in the international art world.4 However, the sculpture plays a rather minor role in Luanda’s profile as a cosmopolitan African city (Vanin 2015: 84). Mostly overlooked by passers-by in contemporary Luanda, it sits on a dusty, noisy avenue that encircles the bay. Rather small in size, it underlines the absence, not the presence, of art in public space. Nevertheless, Mitologias II can be seen as a late modern response to the colonial city by replacing an empty pedestal with a new work embedded in the nationalist discourse on modern art in Angola that was circulating around definitions of “authenticity.” “Angolanidade” was a key term in  Guimarães served in the Portuguese military in Luanda in the late 1960s and curated António Ole’s first exhibition at the Museu de Angola in 1968. 4  António Ole has exhibited widely at the Biennials in São Paulo, Havana, Johannesburg, and Venice, and has had solo shows in Lisbon, Luanda, Salvador, Washington, and Bayreuth. 3

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the formation of the modernist aesthetics of the post-independence period as late as the 1980s (Siegert 2016a). The partly nostalgic motivation to reconstruct Angolan identity also had an impact on fine arts practice. Socialist modernity was combined with the idea of a rooted African culture, fueling the artistic imagination in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Mitologias II is one of the last manifestations of this period of “Angolanidade” in Angolan art-making and an important work that embraces this aesthetic discourse both formally and in its positioning in the public space. Different from more radical topplings and replacements, which we will look into in the next chapter, the replacement of a colonial monument with a modern metal sculpture is probably not so much a political but rather an aesthetic gesture, even if we cannot really separate the two from each other. I understand the placement of the modern work of art in public space as a recognition—which unfortunately remains unique—of the artistic expression of an Angolan artist, who here, as in his other works, succeeds in combining references to indigenous knowledge stored in symbols with a modern formal language. In the temporal context of the 1980s, shortly after political independence, this can also be understood as an aesthetic appropriation of urban space that goes beyond mere political gestures such as the erection of monuments representing political heroes. As an artistic manifestation in public space, this gesture is perhaps subtler, but it is still powerful. Fifteen years later, the contemporary artist Kiluanji Kia Henda proposes a quite different way to work with the empty space on top of the pedestal. In his photographic series Redefining the Power (2011) (Fig. 9.2), Kiluanji Kia Henda has created a new narrative of the past through his artistic practice. In this project, he works performatively with the pedestals of historical colonial monuments in Luanda’s cityscape that always carry—even if empty—traces of the former monuments they held. As a kind of invisible mold, they are still there and become manifest through photographs or in the memory of older people. As invisible yet still remembered traces, they are part of the urban archive, a palimpsest of shapes and forms that have occupied the space for quite a long time. Some of the pedestals have quickly been reappropriated by socialist monuments. Others have remained empty and almost invisible—a dysfunctional architecture in the urban space. The photographs form part of the series Homem Novo (New Man), which is a reference to the Angolan national anthem and reflects the nation’s aspiration to reinvent its identity following independence in 1975. The socialist notion of the “New Man”

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Fig. 9.2  Kiluanji Kia Henda, Redefining The Power IV (with Miguel Prince), from the series Homem Novo, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Fonti

conceptualized a modern “wo_man” on the way to a communist society (Cheng 2009). Based on the Soviet model, the concept was also applied to the post-revolutionary cultural politics of the former Portuguese colonies.5 This work may be interpreted as a next step for Angolan artists by moving beyond the visual and material traces of history to creatively redefine it. Ephemeral performances are translated into high-quality photographic prints and enter distribution within the art world and the art market. Monuments as official commemorations of historical events or personalities become an issue. Monuments reveal the complexity of official commemorations: on the one hand they manifest a will to remember, while on the other they freeze memory in stone. Kiluanji Kia Henda is tracing this frozen history of the colonial monuments in Luanda—an archive in itself—by working both with the empty pedestals in the city space, where former colonial statues were taken down in the wake of liberation, and with the removed statues themselves. In Redefining the Power, the artist stages new images with new “figures”—his “cultural heroes” (Knoppers n.d.)—thus filling the gap, the void left on top of the pedestals. He has worked together with other artists from different genres in the local 5  The concept has also been applied in a former French colony like the Republic of Congo (Greani 2013).

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cultural scene, such as the fashion designers Shunnuz Fiel and Didi Fernandes, and the dancer Miguel Prince, who posed as living sculptures on the pedestals in various costumes. These costumes partly resemble wedding dresses or ball gowns, injecting a queer aesthetic into the work. The ephemeral aesthetic of performance, enacted only for a certain moment, is a crucial aspect here. It creates a specific relationship with space and time that is also visible in the photographs. In this work, Kiluanji Kia Henda chooses one of the most ephemeral of media: fashion. By working with the textile creations of contemporary Angolan fashion designers, he proposes a new form and medium for the manifestation of power: a bright, moving, and queer body representing the new Luanda, the new postwar, post-socialist, and postcolonial Angola. He is also blurring the line between the body as a living human medium and lifeless mediating objects. The “new wo_men” on top of the pedestals are consciously ephemeral, fluid, and queer, but at the same time they perform an act of world-making (Goodman 1978: 106)—or even future-making. Optimistic hopes for a new future become reality in the very moment of the staged performance on top of the pedestals. Kiluanji Kia Henda uses the body to hint at an absence, a part of history inevitably made unseen in the course of establishing a new state and its ideology. His “new men” on top of the pedestals are performing the optimism of the postwar period and he actually argues that “every city should have empty pedestals that could be customized regarding our passions, instead of having representations in cold stone of dead people that no one really cares about today and most of them are connected with wars or political power” (Knoppers n.d.). In one photograph from the series, the artist reveals this history and his intervention. The new image with the staged living sculpture is juxtaposed with a picture of the empty pedestal, but also with a historical document depicting the colonial monument with its historical incumbent, the founder of the city, Paulo Dias de Novais. Kiluanji Kia Henda’s artworks can be understood as the creation of new images and narratives that speak about Luanda’s heterogeneous present, and at the same time they provide a critical rereading of the past through a performative intervention. Although it required performative action to stage a physical body on an empty pedestal for a moment, this was not meant to be a public event and the immediate audience participating by chance played no conceptual role in the work. Instead, the performative act is frozen in artistic photography, capturing a moment that is imaginative rather than quotidian.

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By questioning the symbolic power of monuments and introducing ways to undermine it, the artist is commenting on a postwar society in transit. Indeed, the work takes a step toward the future, for the new staged figures speak about a queer Luanda yet to come. The future is something to be envisioned while at the same time rewriting the past by toppling monuments and anticipating new heroes. Through this juxtaposition, Kiluanji Kia Henda uses the imaginary to reflect on numerous moments and perhaps versions of the history of the country, but also on a potential future for Angola. He provides an alternative to how history is perceived and comments on the (non)permanence, significance, and historical heritage of objects of history.

Rearranging the Remains from the Top of the Pedestal A more radical toppling took place in 1974 on the Kinaxixi Square, then called Largo Mario da Fonte, when the 1937 Victory monument by Portuguese artist Henrique Moreira was dynamited and replaced by a Soviet tank. It is said that it was the very tank on which Angola’s first president Agostinho Neto entered the city to proclaim independence with his revolutionary movement MPLA.6 The tank was later replaced by a statue of the historical heroine Njinga Mbande (Rainha Ginga) (1582-1663), which also marked victory over the colonial power. She is perhaps the most important symbol for the anticolonial struggle in Angola. Throughout her life she refused to acknowledge the imperial power of Portugal. From her local queendom of Matamba, she fought the colonial power in the interior. After independence, she became a national heroine. The statue was later removed from Kinaxixi Square when the modernist market building was demolished to make way for a new shopping center, and it was then transported to the Military Museum at the old colonial Fortress of São Miguel. This fort, built by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, was where Kiluanji Kia Henda produced his artwork Balumuka (Ambush) (2010). It 6  The MPLA (Movimento Popular Libertação de Angola) is a former independence movement that became the governing party after independence in 1975. Until 1991, it was ideologically geared towards Marxism-Leninism and acted as single political party. After 1991, the state officially became a multi-party system, but nevertheless the MPLA has been the ruling party until today.

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is a series of photographs taken among the dismantled, partly fragmented colonial statues of Luis Vaz de Camões, Dom Afonso Henriques, Pedro Ànvadres Cabral, and others jumbled together with tanks and cannons as if in a graveyard. The aesthetically very diverse sculptures manifest different periods in colonial art history. When the Military Museum reopened in 2013, the abandoned figures, with Njinga Mbande at their head, were lined up in the courtyard without any further explanation, silencing the colonial history of oppression and power. Here, the former monuments become traces of the colonial power, but stripped of that power. Without the pedestals under their feet, they are disabled. They rather become metaphors of what they have formerly represented. Their juxtaposition in the park of the Military Museum seems arbitrary, yet it is precisely in this arrangement that a particular decolonizing power lies. Since the figures of the former monuments represent different moments of the Portuguese colonial empire, the very idea of an empire that lasted several centuries collapses into one moment in the here and now. The representation of five centuries of domination is condensed indiscriminately here into a single moment and the figures become arbitrary and useless. The “castrated” heroes of Portuguese colonial history appear ridiculous and out of time. The figures seem engaged in a silent dialogue across time and space, stemming the flow of time. The artist Kiluanji Kia Henda manages to convey exactly this in his series, placing the disempowered heroes on his photographic stage and exposing them to inevitable postcolonial criticism. The artist sees “those monuments [as] clandestine citizens with expired visas: they should be deported to their place of origin after paying the fine for illegal permanence” (Knoppers n.d.).

Fictionalizing the Remains Let me finish with another example that occupies a very specific place in the urban setting and connects the recent history of socialism with contemporary geopolitical relationships and with the construction of national identity after the civil war. In formal terms, the mausoleum for Agostinho Neto is obviously a very different matter, but the practice of making it heritage within the urban space of Luanda is a further indication that Angolan society and its government have been relatively ambiguous in dealing with their socialist past. In the rather small core of the city center, one building stands out that does not resemble any other architectural artifact in Luanda. It is a high and slender structure, concrete gray with a

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futurist shape—reminiscent of a space rocket. It sits near the city’s seashore and occupies a vast empty space, unusual in comparison with the densely populated inner city. The concrete rocket is a mausoleum for Angola’s first president and is today not only a cultural center and commemoration site but, in its aesthetic and function, also a leftover of a past period within Angola’s history. In comparison with other African personalities of the anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggle, such as Amilcar Cabral, Patrice Lumumba, and Samora Machel, the commemoration of Agostinho Neto is not that heroic. He is a national hero of official heritage culture rather than a pan-African idol, perhaps because he lacked “struggle credibility” (Neto was not a guerrilla fighter in the same way as Samora Machel or Amilcar Cabral) or because his early death in 1979 did not leave him much time to prove his political abilities. Nevertheless, he is the only African president who has been honored with a mausoleum of this dimension. The mausoleum’s construction began in the 1980s with financial support from the Soviet Union. When Neto died in Moscow in 1979, the USSR decided to offer the new republic a monumental mausoleum to host the embalmed body of Angola’s first president and to symbolize his greatness, in line with the socialist tradition. Aesthetically very different from Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow, its genesis was nevertheless defined in central ways by connections to the USSR. The mausoleum is a good example of the Soviet impact not only on politics but also on artistic and architectural production on the African continent. Indeed, these cultural links were a key factor during the Cold War period. The USSR not only provided military and economic support but was also involved in cultural production that today forms part of the heritage culture in many countries. In 1980, a team of Soviet designers from the Design Institute of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics started work on the conception of the building to be erected in Luanda. Two years later, in 1982, the cornerstone was laid. A team of Soviet experts, also responsible for the maintenance of Lenin’s mummy in Moscow, embalmed the president’s body before it was placed into the Angolan mausoleum. Due to the protracted civil war, the economic and political crisis in Angola, and finally the fall of the USSR, completion was postponed for more than twenty years. In 1998, the Angolan government decided to restart the works, transforming the mausoleum into a cultural center. First with Brazilian architects and from 2005 with the North Korean company

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Mansudae Overseas Projects, the building was completed in 2011. This company has also been commissioned to construct other memorials and monuments on the African continent, such as in Namibia, Zimbabwe, and recently Senegal. In 2012, the building opened to the public as a heritage site, and today the mausoleum’s 120-meter-high concrete structure is a public venue and one of the most visible landmarks in Luanda. Today, the building could be seen as an architectural metaphor for a failed socialist utopia in Angola. As a manifestation of a late socialist modernist architecture, it reflected a Soviet modernism that drew on an aesthetic of space travel and extravagant futurity, a monument projecting a future that was already threatened when the mausoleum was built in the early 1980s. Now the memorial to Agostinho Neto is an ambiguous, almost schizophrenic object. Looking at it from a certain distance, the mausoleum is a completely abstract construction, a gigantic, beautiful landmark on the boundary between sculpture and architecture. Whereas the accessibility of the memorial is limited and highly predetermined, public approaches might offer another, alternative and maybe even counter-narrative, granting access to the mausoleum in other, more imaginary forms. The most popular nickname for the futurist building is not surprisingly the “space rocket” (o foguetão). Kiluanji Kia Henda built his multimedia work Icarus 13: The first journey to the sun (2007) around this vernacular appropriation of the site. Kiluanji Kia Henda often uses fiction to inscribe alternative narrations into collective memory (Siegert 2016b, 2017). In this work too, he transforms the mausoleum into a rocket named Icarus (Bould 2012). The work reflects the post-­ independence utopia when socialist countries strived to be as powerful as their Western antagonists. This “way to the stars” is also a reference to a poem by Agostinho Neto himself, published in his book Sagrada Esperança, one of the main texts that wrote independence into being (Neto 1979).

Intervention into the Urban Script The engagement by artists such as Kiluanji Kia Henda with sites of the aftermath of colonialism can be considered as a form of memory work and heritage-making that is fundamentally different from the narrative of official sites of commemoration. Reference points in the cityscape, such as the omnipresent mausoleum of Agostinho Neto, are reinterpreted and thus enable an alternative reading. Here the mausoleum—a monument and, as

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such, part of the cityscape—not only becomes a spacecraft, but is connected to a (post)socialist and even Afro-futuristic imaginary space—an imaginary city. In this work the artist plays with the heroic past and its political icons. Kiluanji Kia Henda’s preferred visual metaphor for the futuristic building is the space shuttle; and here it recalls the story of the African political leader who, in order to demonstrate the progress of decolonization during the Cold War, proposed to build up manned space exploration—to the sun. Like his Greek predecessor Icarus, he proposed traveling at night to avoid being burned. Combining the narrative of the mythical flight with the historical saga of the United States’ space-­ conquering mission Apollo 13, Kiluanji Kia Henda adds to this the narrative of an anonymous African political leader eager to challenge the space programs of the great powers. This outrageous ambition and overstatement are a blatant comment on the tussles for national power, the hypermania of the booming oil business, and similar exaggerated visions thrown up by the universalist, modernist utopia and its failures in Angola and beyond. The works of both António Ole and Kiluanji Kia Henda redefine colonial power structures embedded in the urban landscape by intervening in the urban script. The need for this artistic intervention is part of the growing demand for the removal of monuments that not only embody fossilized ideologies, but in which colonialist and racist world views are embedded. These can no longer be ignored as this text is being written. In recent years, monuments have been toppled in many places and the spaces thus freed up have been used for often performative and ephemeral statements. On the African continent, events such as the Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa might be mentioned, where monuments are toppled and streets connected to colonial history are renamed (Parekh 2016). In the seamless connections between fiction and non-fiction, history is told anew and thus reconceived. New heroes are created that are able to question the old narratives by reworking the monumental sites as carriers of history in the urban archive. These works—be it a metal modernist sculpture, ephemeral performances translated into a photographic print, or weaving colonial figures and architectural spaces into unprecedented yet powerful fabulations—fill a void created by the iconoclastic act of decolonization. But not really a void, since the colonial memories, even if invisible, still linger around in the archive of urban space. The supposed emptiness space is reinscribed with new images and narratives that address Luanda’s heterogeneous present. They creatively redefine (a certain)

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history’s visual traces, bringing them into the here and now and imagining a future that envisions new hero*ines for the city yet to come, which stand in radical contradistinction to yesteryear’s “heroes” cast in stone.

References de Boeck, Filip, and Marie-Françoise Plissart. 2004. Kinshasa. Antwerp: Ludion. Bould, Mark. 2012. Superpower: Africa in Science Fiction. Science Fiction Studies 39 (3): 559–561. https://doi.org/10.5621/sciefictstud.39.3.0559. Donald, James. 2005. Imagining The Modern City. London: Continuum International Publishing Group. Neto, António Agostinho. 1979. Sagrada Esperança. Lissabon: Livraria Sá da Costa Editora. Nuttall, Sarah, and J.-A.  Mbembé. 2008. Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Siegert, Nadine. 2016a. (Re)Mapping Luanda: Utopische und nostalgische Zugänge zu einem kollektiven Bildarchiv. Reihe: LIT Verlag. ———. 2016b. The Archive as Construction Site  – Collective Memory and Trauma in Contemporary Art from Angola. World Art, April, 103–23. ———. 2017. Art Topples Monuments: Artistic Practice and Colonial/ Postcolonial Relations in the Public Space of Luanda. Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies 30 (31): 150–173. Vanin, Fabio. 2015. Physical and Ephemeral Devices for Urban Security: The Case of Luanda. In Urban Safety and Security, ed. Emanuela Bonini Lessing, 81–92. Milano: FrancoAngeli.

CHAPTER 10

They Took Him Away but It Was Like He Was Still Around: Can New York City Move Beyond the Legacy of J. Marion Sims? Jill Strauss

The past is all that makes the present coherent. —James Baldwin

Introduction The figurative monument goes unnoticed by many, blending in with the rest of the cityscape. For others, however, the same site can be one of pilgrimage and affirmation or, conversely, a reminder of oppression and the status quo. Despite its seeming permanence, commemoration is continually reviewed, reinterpreted, and even challenged because “[h]ow we imagine ourselves in the present is intimately linked to how we remember ourselves in the past” (Alderman and Inwood 2013: 186), imbuing some sites with a resonant symbolism. The current processes of rewriting the

J. Strauss (*) Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 U. Capdepón, S. Dornhof (eds.), Contested Urban Spaces, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87505-3_10

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history of inequity and racism in the United States to include those silenced or misappropriated voices is, in effect, “turn[ing] the memorial landscape into a site for struggle and resistance” (Dwyer and Alderman 2008: 168). Therefore, the toppling of a statue by a marginalized group can be understood as both an act of resistance and as a way to (re)claim identity and agency. In the city, the concentration of urban design and people bring with them continued interactions between culture and politics, shifts in power relationships and contestation (Jordan 2006, p. 16; Self and Sugrue 2002, p. 20). Those pressures can be from national and international influences as well. This chapter describes how grassroots activism in New York City’s East Harlem/El Barrio neighborhood toppled a statue as part of the movement to reexamine existing memorials to individuals whose beliefs and behaviors are now recognized as discriminatory, unethical, or ignoble. The United States continues to experience a moral reckoning with slavery and the structural racism and systemic injustice it produced. Across the nation, the momentum to remove monuments and other representations of hate and discrimination intensified in 2015 after nine African Americans were killed by a white supremacist in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, while attending bible study. Then, northern as well as southern anti-racism movements benefited from the national attention paid to prominent cities like New Orleans when several of its more celebrated Confederate-era statues were removed two years later. As a result of successful community-based and local government efforts in the American south, discussion and engagement moved north to places like New York City, a city that imagines itself to be at the “crossroads of the world” where there is opportunity for everyone. However, this aspirational, if mythic, identity was increasingly at odds with many of the monuments to white supremacy throughout the city and actions to remove contested monuments were increasing. In East Harlem/El Barrio in northeast Manhattan, there was a grassroots movement to topple the statue honoring J. Marion Sims, the controversial nineteenth-century doctor known as “the father of modern gynecology.” Sims’ fame and infamy were based on discoveries made experimenting on enslaved and indigent women without consent or anesthesia. These women were not unlike the inhabitants of El Barrio/East Harlem, and the statue’s presence was a continual reminder of racial and socioeconomic hierarchy1 in the United States. After more 1  Mascots, Myths, Monuments, and Memory 12 – Monuments and Power: Memory vs. History https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y49wcxkwgPU&feature=youtu.be. Accessed August 13, 2020.

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than a decade of public pressure, in May 2017, the activists prevailed and the city removed the Sims statue from the neighborhood. Then, the community continued to demand a decision-making role in the selection of a monument honoring the women who suffered during the experiments that were integral to the medical advancements Sims took credit for. The impermanence of memory opens seemingly permanent monuments to contestation based on the “vernacular interests” of a diverse populace with their own issues and concerns (Bodnar 1992: 20–21). Olick and Levy maintain that collective memory is a continual interactive and relational process of “sense-making” in the present (1997: 922) in order to create a coherent meaningful narrative of the past (Dransart and Angela 2013: 317). In the twenty-first century, there has been a shift from honoring individual heroes to commemorating communal accounts of pain, trauma, and atrocity (Atkinson-Phillips 2020). One way to make meaning that has purpose is advocacy to right historical wrongs (Hooker and Czajkowski 2012) through a metaphoric witnessing of human rights abuses using memorials as a kind of symbolic reparation (Hamber 2004). It is through efforts to advocate for victims of past offences that those in the present can heal their collective wounds and reclaim agency. Bottom-up mobilization for memory- and meaning-making includes the creation of temporary memorials to mark an event. Alternatively, adding statues, often called counter-monuments, is meant to challenge the intent of the original sculpture (Stevens et  al. 2012). Other tactics include removing either the entire memorial or just the statue and leaving the base in situ as a symbolic way to dishonor. Meanwhile, there are those who argue that covering or removing monuments will not remove the injustice they represent, but will instead increase the resentment and antagonism of those who believe that their identity and heritage are under threat (Dumas and Piscolish 2018).

Background History Dr. James Marion Sims (also known as J. Marion Sims) was originally from South Carolina (where there is a monument in his honor at the state capital) but began his experiments on enslaved women when he lived in Alabama (where another statue stands in Montgomery). Sims moved to New  York City in 1853 and founded the first women’s hospital in the United States in 1855. Slavery ended in New York in 1827, so Sims began operating on indigent women (along with wealthy white women who did receive anesthesia). For over 100 years, Sims was called “the father of

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modern gynecology” for the surgical advances he made in the mid-­ nineteenth century to treat vesicovaginal fistula (a terrible condition that can happen in childbirth, making it impossible for a woman to control her bowels). Around the world, women (and men) continue to benefit from this and other of Sims’ scientific advances, including the invention of the speculum. However, these medical developments were the result of procedures carried out on poor, powerless, and uninformed enslaved and Irish immigrant women (Owens 2017). Even at the time, Sims’ indifference to these women’s humanity raised moral and ethical concerns for some of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, he was posthumously honored with a memorial in Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan in 1894, where it stood until 1934 before being moved to East 103rd Street and Fifth Avenue, across from the New York Academy of Medicine. The pedestal was built into the low stone wall surrounding Central Park, and engraved into the side facing the street are two large markers commemorating Sims’ birth and death, his medical achievements and international accolades, and two pictures of the Caduceus symbol (Fig. 10.1).2 Community-based efforts to take down the controversial Sims monument and those of other contested figures in New  York City had been under way for years, even though they received less attention than their southern counterparts. Prior to the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia,3 activist groups had made little headway with New  York City government. Then, in the aftermath of that devastating march, Mayor Bill De Blasio announced that he would be creating a commission to make a ninety-day review of all “symbols of hate” in New York City (Neuman 2017). By early September when De Blasio announced the Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers, he added the task of developing criteria to assess future monument commissions, as well as making recommendations on the controversial 2  The Caduceus symbol with its two serpents entwined around a winged staff is associated with the Greek god Hermes and symbolizes commerce. As in this instance, it is often mistaken for the similar Rod of Asclepius, the actual symbol of medicine, which has one serpent coiled around an unadorned staff. Asclepius was the god of medicine and healing. 3  In August 2017, the white supremacist nationalist “Alt Right” traveled from all over the United States to a rally in Charlottesville. They marched with their faces uncovered, while Klansman, carrying burning torches, swastikas, Confederate flags, and weapons, clashed with anti-racist counterdemonstrators. Many people were injured, and one person died. During their demonstration, neo-Nazis chanted anti-gay slurs, “Black lives do not matter,” and Jews will not replace them. This was an extreme but by no means isolated incident.

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Fig. 10.1  J. Marion Sims Pedestal, photograph by the author

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ones. The eighteen-member committee included an ethnically diverse group of historians, artists, museum administrators, activists, and educators with expertise in preservation, cultural heritage, diversity, and inclusion. The commission and the city professed interest in having input from the general public on what they thought about monuments and commemorative plaques. The seven-question survey was available online and at many of the area cultural institutions. This was also the opportunity for the public to suggest new monuments (Voon 2017). The commission stated in its report that decisions were based on insights from the collected questionnaires, the social and political impact of remembering, and erasure in the memory landscape for the present and future (MAC 2018). The Mayor’s Commission deliberated on four controversial monuments in New York City: the statue of Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle; the marker for Marshal Philippe Pétain on Lower Broadway; the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt4 at the American Museum of Natural History; and the Dr. J. Marion Sims monument at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street. The commission’s determinations on each public artwork reflect the perspective that removing commemorative works will not remove the controversy surrounding the work, but could result in missed opportunities to consider interpretations of history, how and what is remembered, for whom, and by whom. With this in mind, rather than take down contested monuments, the city decided to take “an additive approach committing to the construction of new works primarily in honor of women and people of color” (Finkelpearl 2019). The commission did, however, recommend altering one memorial, which was the only one of these statues to be removed: the bronze figure of J. Marion Sims, which stood life-size on a large stone pedestal in El Barrio/East Harlem. The commission decided that the city should remove the statue according to the first of the five principles; “reckoning with power to represent history in public.” Members based their decision on “what [Sims] represents to the history of medicine, the people of the nearby community and to the City as a whole” (MAC 2018: 20). Regardless of which side of the debate commission members were on, there was no question of Sims’ immoral behavior, and so the statue fell. 4  In June 2020, as a result of the resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests and the toppling of statues around the country, Mayor de Blasio agreed to the Museum of Natural History’s request to have the Theodore Roosevelt statue removed from its main entrance. The equestrian statue is flanked by stereotyped figures of a Native American and an African that have come to “symbolize a painful legacy of colonial expansion and racial discrimination” (Pogrebin 2020).

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The Fame and Infamy of J. Marion Sims It is for his medical advances in gynecology that J. Marion Sims is celebrated internationally, but it is the surgeries on enslaved and indigent women for which he is reviled locally. East Harlem/El Barrio is a neighborhood that has been home to waves of immigrants as well as African American and Latinx people. Although there is rapid gentrification in the area, this remains its collective identity. For these publics, the Sims statue is a continual reminder of similar kinds of medical research and testing on minority groups without informed consent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moreover, it is a symbol of how racism became so integral to medical science in the United States that there is still the prevailing myth that black women do not feel pain like white women do (Owens 2017). This untruth endures until today along with other legacies of racism in medicine. Despite the sacrifices enslaved women made under Sims’ knife, according to the Center for Disease Control, women of color are two to three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women.5 Furthermore, even before the coronavirus pandemic, inequities in health care and access and higher rates of underlying health conditions like diabetes, hypertension, or high blood pressure6 are understood to be legacies of a racist past and present (The Editorial Board 2020; Strings 2020). While Sims did not by himself create the attitudes and beliefs that built structural racism, he exploited them to his own advantage and at the expense of the poor and disenfranchised. For these reasons, neighborhood residents opposed honoring Sims. It was becoming increasingly evident that what Sims represented was not in keeping with how New York City imagined itself as welcoming to all and a place of opportunity. The following year, then Councilwoman and Chair of the Committee on Parks and Recreation, Melissa Mark-Viverito, who is Puerto Rican, supported her constituents’ efforts to remove the memorial. In a letter to the New York City Parks Department she stated that the monument was “a constant reminder of the cruelty endured by women of color in our 5  https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2019/p0905-racial-ethnic-disparities-pregnancy-deaths.html, Accessed March 1, 2020. 6  For a complete list, see https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/people-with-medical-conditions.html. Accessed August 11, 2020; https://www. nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMsa2011686; https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/ 2020/07/21/how-covid-19-has-disproportionately-affected-minority-communities-inevery-state/41764053/. Accessed August 11, 2020.

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country’s history” (East Harlem Preservation 2018).7 Fellow Councilman and Harlem8 resident Bill Perkins followed up stating, “[o]ne way or another, you can be sure [the Sims statue] will be coming down.”9 Finally, the attention brought to the controversial statue by various local actions and artistic interventions, including performance protests and petition campaigns, paid off and the Sims statue was included for deliberation by the Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers (Strauss 2020). The city then partnered with the local community board, East Harlem Preservation, medical students, and other advocacy groups to form the “Coalition to Remove the Dr. Sims Statue: Reclaiming Reproductive Rights of Women of Color” (East Harlem Preservation 2018). The J. Marion Sims sculpture was finally toppled in April 2018, with many New  Yorkers attending and documenting the event. However, despite activists’ demands that the entire monument be removed, the large, throne-like platform was left in situ. According to organizer Ngozi Alston of Black Youth Project 100, “they don’t want really to see anything, any remnant of his presence, and I think that does include his name, especially when you have eleven other unnamed women that he practiced on” (Putka 2019). That the information about Sims is engraved into the stone base rather than on plaques that could be removed, created further conflict. The Parks Department proposed adding a marker below the statue with the names of three of the enslaved women Sims experimented on, Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy (Sims never identified the other women). Advocates responded that this would both symbolically and literally perpetuate the racist hierarchy of white over black that they were protesting (Putka 2019).

Engaging in Issues of Race and Memory Neighborhood activists wanted to have continued input on taking down the pedestal and choosing the new commissioned artwork to be located on its site. They changed the coalition’s name to reflect their aspirations for the future, “Beyond Sims: The Committee to Empower Voices for Healing and Equity.” Alston pointed out that “[t]he artist selection plays  The web page cited in this chapter has since been removed.  Northern Manhattan neighborhoods to the west of East Harlem include Harlem and Central Harlem. 9  https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=melissa+mark-viverito. 7 8

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a huge role in … starting to heal this terrifying thing that’s been imposed as a fixture in this community for years” (Putka 2019). There were several requests that the commissioned artist be someone of color and that the theme of the work be about women of color. Even though the community had expected to play a role, Kendal Henry, of Percent for Art (which is overseeing the project), confirmed that the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs Tom Finkelpearl was creating a panel of invited judges from New York City government and cultural institutions along with independent scholars to select the artist. It seemed that the community-based organizations so instrumental in the removal of the Sims statue would be consulted but not included in determining a new public sculpture for the site. Meanwhile, Mayor De Blasio dedicated ten million dollars to the creation of new memorials in the city, but limited resources were allocated to publicize the call to replace the Sims statue, so East Harlem Preservation tweeted out the artist call and posted it on their Facebook page. Finally, after continued direct action, in September 2019, the pedestal was encased in paneling that hid the accolades to Sims while replicating the throne-like design of the stone base beneath. Importantly, in place of the inscriptions honoring Sims, passers-by could now read about Sims and the history of racism in medicine in the United States. Equally significant was that three of the enslaved women Sims operated on, Betsy, Anarcha, and Lucy, were finally honored as well. The plaque also told the story of the New York City activists like East Harlem Preservation and Black Youth 100 who fought to remove the Sims statue. The commemorative text concluded with the city’s commitment to commission a new artwork that “helps move beyond Sims’ legacy and affirms the rights of women and people of color” to be installed in 2021.10 Meanwhile, the Department of Cultural Affairs held two community meetings in 2018 and an open artist selection jury in February 2019 for a new artwork. The proposed designs were made available online so that the wider public could vote for their preferred work. Then, in October 2019, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs and Percent for Art convened a day-long public meeting for the four artist finalists to present their proposals to the public and a panel of experts. As varied in style and content as the finalists were, they shared an intention to portray the lived experience of a marginalized group (Atkinson-Phillips 2020). In addition, the 10  This text was written prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. Due to Covid-19, New York City, which was the epicenter of the pandemic, has delayed projects like this.

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finalists—Vinnie Bagwell, Simone Leigh, Wangechi Mutu, and Kehinde Wiley—are all artists of color, and three are women. Noting that Leigh, Mutu, and Wiley are internationally renowned scholar and advocate, Todd Fine (president of the Washington Street Advocacy Group) remarked that: “[New York City’s] Percent for Art process … is somewhat biased for famous contemporary artists. The city put [artists] in the pool who had not expressed interest in the matter” (Holmes 2019). This apparent lack of enthusiasm was conveyed to attendees by the absence of Leigh, Mutu, and Wiley at the meeting. “The whole point of the event was for the artists themselves to engage with the community, and the only artist that actually came was Vinnie Bagwell,” said Marina Ortiz, East Harlem Preservation founder and activist (Holmes 2019). Neither Mutu’s nor Wiley’s proposals were positively received by neighborhood residents at the meeting. Mutu described To Raise a Dead Giraffe as a tall bronze sculpture of a figure sitting on top of a murdered animal. In her artist statement, she said that she wanted to convey a “feeling of conquering, destroying and consuming what is African” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when Sims was operating on enslaved women. The accompanying rendering of an abstract silhouette in front of the pedestal, however, did not convey this clearly. Wiley’s plan to develop his Bound sculpture (2014) of the torsos of three black women with entwined braids into standing figures atop the pedestal likewise did not convey its proposed meaning. In his artist statement he explained that the armor-­ clad women were supposed to be doctors (Cascone 2019b), a reference to midwives and the considerable assistance the enslaved women provided Sims in his surgeries. However, this central acknowledgment was missed by viewers who were put off by the armor, which is associated with war, but not the violence experienced by medical racism. Simone Leigh, who was also absent, sent a video of computer renderings of her submission titled After Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, Henrietta, Laure, and Anonymous. In the narration she described where her monumental bronze sculpture of a clothed black woman with an afro, reclining atop holly hedges and bluebell flowers, fits in a racially gendered (art) history (Cascone 2019b). In her recorded presentation, Leigh referenced Ingres’ Grande Odalisque painting of 1814 and Olympia of 1865, the iconic response by the equally famous artist Edouard Manet, which was considered quite radical at the time. Leigh explained that her sculpture was, in turn, her response to both nineteenth-century French artists, who were contemporaries of Sims and shared the white male gaze. Furthermore, at

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the time, the Odalisque was known to be a prostitute, which raised questions for the viewer  of whether she is owned or rented (Davis 2011: 222–223) or liberated. The uncertainty of the women’s status might be disquieting in a painting, and similarly understood as representing oppression or exploitation in a sculpture. Unfortunately, the renderings in Leigh’s video did not present the monument clearly, and the subtexts were missed by many in the audience. Those in favor of this design pointed out that as black women have suffered the racialized gender stereotype of being able to endure back-breaking labor like the mule (Patton n.d.), honoring them with a black woman at rest was not only a fitting tribute but even subversive. I too found interesting the provocative questions Leigh’s figure raised on race and gender: “Who gives this black woman permission to recline? Who gives her permission to be monumental and therefore as noteworthy as a man?” Like Leigh, Vinnie Bagwell’s Victory Beyond Sims proposed a female figure as its focal point. Unlike the other proposals, Bagwell’s was a memorial with a clear narrative that proved easy for the viewer to interpret. In this design, the sculpture was of an eighteen-foot-tall bronze angel with wings standing on a pedestal of rainbow granite. Bagwell put an eternal flame burning in one of the seraph’s hands and the rod of Asclepius, the correct symbol of medicine, in the other. The figure’s dress included portraits of women sculpted in low relief that give the viewer the impression that they are emerging from the skirt. This technique is reminiscent of artist Alison Saar’s well-known Swing Low: Harriet Tubman Memorial (2008), honoring the nineteenth-century fugitive slave and abolitionist Harriet Tubman. In this thirteen-foot high tribute, Saar carved in shallow bas-relief depictions of the enslaved whom Tubman helped escape to the north.11 The large memorial stands on a traffic island at a major intersection on West 122nd in Harlem, and Bagwell was certainly familiar with it. I was also reminded of another work predating both of these by the African American artist Meta Warrick Fuller. Her small sculpture Mary Turner: A Silent Protest Against Mob Violence (1919) memorializes the torture and lynching of a young pregnant black woman by a white mob in Little River, Georgia, on May 19, 1918. She was hanged because she publicly denounced her husband’s lynching in the Jim Crow South.12 11  https://persimmontree.org/spring-2017/alison-saar-swings-low-in-harlem-the-harriet-tubman-memorial/. Accessed 1 March 2020. 12  Jim Crow laws were created in the southern United States to enforce racial segregation and oppression.

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According to Beach, Fuller’s portrayal of Mary Turner “is a work of activism in itself” (2015: 18) because it commemorated a racist murder when these events were not recorded, or at least not from the victim’s perspective. As the defiant and heroic figure rises up out of the swirling flames, the viewer can make out on the skirt a mix of tortured-looking faces and disconnected hands in bas-relief, that are meant “to be [the] less-human mob” (Beach 2015: 20). These three female artists use the bas-relief technique on the skirt to remember the larger stories that their figures represent. This continuity brings associations with each other across decades and an activist legacy. The symbolism of Bagwell’s monument resonated with the community who recognized the angel as “a warrior, a fighter, a healer, a savior” (Holmes 2019) and a counter-monument to what the Sims statue had celebrated (Fig. 10.2).13 Despite the conventional visual tropes in Victory Beyond Sims, or perhaps because of them, the symbolism was easily identifiable, making the work popular with the audience. Ortiz acknowledged that some objected

Fig. 10.2  Vinnie Bagwell, Victory Beyond Sims (rendering). Courtesy of the artist, Vinnie Bagwell, and BCT Design ©2019  http://ehp.nyc/dcla-statements/. Accessed March 13, 2020.

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to the angel as a Christian symbol but pointed out that many religions and cultures include depictions of seraphim. Then, a concern was expressed by the panel that the eternal flame’s proximity to trees, leaves, and branches was a potential fire hazard. There was a discussion about possible alternatives to the flame, which became heated when an older white male attendee suggested that the electricity necessary for a lightbulb turned on all day and all night would be wasteful. This seemed to imply that women are not worth the expense and the artist became indignant. Other questions included the impracticality and cost of her plan to break the stone wall at the place where the Sims pedestal had been located and installing a high ornate gate similar to the one at the main entrance to the Conservatory Gardens a few blocks north. The winged figure would watch over the gate on Fifth Avenue with benches on either side so that people could sit and look and reflect. Bagwell’s proposal was by far the most elaborate, and it was clear that she wanted this commission.

Moving Beyond the Legacy of J. Marion Sims? Those in attendance assumed that they were there to have a say in choosing the public artwork, and, for this reason, most stayed until the end. Late in the afternoon, the seven-member jury voted on the proposals and the attendees expected that their vocal preference for Bagwell’s Victory Beyond Sims would be taken into consideration. So, when the judges voted four to three in favor of Leigh’s design to replace the Sims monument, the audience, some of whom had been working to remove the monument for a decade, erupted in anger and frustration at what felt like disregard and disrespect for their preferred monument.14 As Maria Ortiz rightly pointed out, “[f]or ten years we struggled to get the Sims statue removed, and now another statue is being imposed on this community that we didn’t choose” (Holmes 2019). In an attempt to calm the uproar, Department of Cultural Affairs Commissioner Tom Finkelpearl reassured the audience that “[t]he opinion of this panel is advisory to the city … I have not signed off on this yet … Everybody is here because they really care about this, and the passion in this room is felt and understood, it is not going to be ignored” (Bishara 2019). In the process of assuaging the concerns of one group, 14  A recording of the community’s vocal refusal to accept the jury’s vote can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=WjUTTc-w45Q.

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however, Finkelpearl left the judges feeling similarly deceived. It seemed that they also had been under the impression that they were making this decision. After everyone had calmed down, panelist Antwaun Sargent described the situation as a series of ambiguous messages, “[f]rom [the judges’] perspective, we were asked to be on the voting committee … the community thought it was coming to the room to pick a sculpture. There’s a lot of confusion around what is the process, and what should have been the process.”15 Sargent, in particular, was unhappy with how events transpired and wanted to further clarify his perspective as a person of color. The writer and critic echoed Maria Ortiz when he tweeted later that day that “I’m frustrated and confused about how I was used to further disempower a black and brown community” (Bishara 2019). Historically, decisions about who and what will be commemorated have been an exclusionary process, and having a panel of experts chosen by the Department of Cultural Affairs, even if it was made up of people of color, marginalized the community in similar ways. M.  Ndigo Washington, a member of the Beyond Sims Committee, said, “[the city] continue[s] to ask for our opinion, [the city] continue[s] to ask [us] to participate in a process … that now feels rigged … We feel as though our opinion does not matter” (Bishara 2019). The Sims statue may have been removed but that did not mean the hierarchical decision-making process went along with it, and the community felt betrayed. The only difference was that in the past, this was an overt segregation based on race and class, and in the present it is based on class and education and so is much harder to see. I argue that Percent for Art tried to have it both ways by creating the appearance of inclusivity while preserving an elitist hierarchy of experts. This paradox was also evident in the disclaimer included in the online survey for the public’s ideas for the Sims monument site, “the City is under no obligation to pursue any ideas, proposals, or recommendations submitted here.”16 Perhaps activists should have protested this advertised contradiction early on, but they had been advocating for a decade and now wanted to see the process of a new monument installed through to its conclusion. They trusted their 15  A few days after the vote, Sargent wrote on Twitter that Department of Cultural Affairs Commissioner “[Finkelpearl] came over while the panel was deliberating and told us that this was not about the art world and that we should basically give the people what they wanted. I told him he was grossly overstepping his authority” (Bishara 2019). 16  https://www1.nyc.gov/site/monuments/survey/monuments-survey.page. Accessed 20 February 2020.

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city partners to include them in the decision-making, and when that almost did not happen, trust was destroyed. It remains to be seen whether the relationships can be healed. Following the well-publicized conflict between the Department of Cultural Affairs and neighborhood residents, Simone Leigh withdrew her winning design. In a public statement she said, “I greatly appreciate that my proposal was selected by the committee. However, I am aware that there is significant community sentiment for another proposal … Since this is a public monument in their neighborhood, I defer to them” (Cascone 2019a). Leigh’s honorable and gracious departure made it possible for the Department of Cultural Affairs to offer the commission to Vinnie Bagwell. From a city government online press release, “[t]he selection represents the culmination of a months-long process engaging local stakeholders in an intensive public dialogue about how to move beyond Sims’ legacy through commissioning a new work of permanent, public art that will endure in this community for generations.”17 Community activists and the public prevailed in the end and proved that with continued advocacy and solidarity, it is possible to move beyond a racist, classist, sexist system.

Conclusion Public memorialization is increasingly envisioned as spaces for active public engagement that are inclusive and potentially healing (Nienass and Alonso 2019: 157). This shift in approach is accompanied by a shift in focus from memorializing death to commemorating experience (Atkinson-­ Phillips 2020). These spaces are often where these struggles over who, what and how we remember take place. In this article, I have presented a dynamic and creative moment in a reckoning with a contested past in New York City. The El Barrio/East Harlem grassroots mobilization over a decade resulted in the eventual removal of a contested monument and the installation of one that they chose, despite many systemic hurdles. This case study demonstrates that hierarchical practices of “exclusion from commemorative spaces” (Nienass and Alonso 2019: 169) tend to be directly related to the very same discriminatory practices in society that need to be addressed. The Sims statue may be gone, but it will take much 17  https://www1.nyc.gov/site/dcla/about/pressrelease/PR-2019-10-08-Artist-VinnieBagwell-to-Design-Beyond-Sims-Monument.page.

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more work before the structural injustice that put him on a pedestal in the first place is deconstructed and the United States is a more equitable and just society. Toward that end, we see here a successful intervention in the public sphere by those who were and continue to be subjugated. It was continued collective engagement that was necessary to topple a monument to white supremacy and to demand a say in the counter-monument. For these activists of color, successfully spearheading the movement to remove Sims and then demanding the monument they wanted in their neighborhood acknowledged both their inherited trauma and their agency. Then, empowered by their victories, grassroots activists extended their struggle to pressure local government to stop excluding them from decision-­making processes about public space in New York City. As New  York City and the United States struggle to “move beyond Sims,” the coronavirus pandemic has revealed systemic exclusion and unequal allocation of resources among different communities across the country. While an in-depth analysis of the social and economic disparities laid bare by Covid-19 is outside the scope of this chapter, I have noted the historical connection between medical racism, which Sims helped create and benefited from, and its impact on the higher death rates of people of color overall until today. Evidently, covering or removing monuments will not necessarily remove injustice, and this is illustrated in the events leading up to the toppling of the Sims statue. Yet, some of the outcomes of the spring 2020 Black Lives Matter protests include the felling of white supremacist statues of Christopher Columbus and Confederate leaders across the nation,18 and the Mississippi state flag with its Confederate battle emblem is also gone.19 Likewise, the names of white supremacists have been removed from schools and university buildings. While the memory landscape may look different and the voices getting national attention are becoming more diverse, any real systemic social change will require continued public demand. This is what happened in this case study, though not without struggle. Moving beyond Sims will not happen overnight, but the transformations are under way.

18  https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/2020-next-wave-statue-removals-afootmap-n1230506. Accessed August 10, 2020. 19  https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/29/mississippi-lawmakers-vote-to-remove-confederate-icon-from-state-flag.html. Accessed August 17, 2020.

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References Alderman, Derek H., and Joshua F.J. Inwood. 2013. Landscapes of Memory and Socially Just Futures. In The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography, ed. Richard H. Schein, Jamie Winders, and Nuala C. Johnson. Wiley-Blackwell. Atkinson-Phillips, Alison. 2020. Remembering Experience: Public Memorials are not Just About the Dead Anymore. Memory Studies. https://doi. org/10.1177/1750698020921452. Beach, Caitlin. 2015. Meta Warrick Fuller’s Mary Turner and the Memory of Mob Violence. Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 2015 (36): 16–27. https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-­2914284. Bishara, Hakim. 2019, October 7. “We Feel Very Betrayed”: Community Protests Replacement for J. Marion Sims Monument. Hyperallergic. Bodnar, John E. 1992. Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cascone, Sarah. 2019a, October 8. Experts Picked Acclaimed Sculptor Simone Leigh to Redo a Monument. After a Backlash, a Little-Known Local Artist Now Has the Job. Artnet. ———. 2019b, October 1. Kehinde Wiley, Simone Leigh, Wangechi Mutu, and Vinnie Bagwell Are the Finalists to Replace NYC’s Controversial Monument to J. Marion Sims. Artnet. Davis, Whitney. 2011. A General Theory of Visual Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dransart, Castelli, and Dolores Angela. 2013. From Sense-Making to Meaning-­ Making: Understanding and Supporting Survivors of Suicide. British Journal of Social Work 43 (2): 317–335. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bct026. Dumas, Mary, and Marina Piscolish. 2018. Mindful Conflict: Trauma-Informed Tools for Highly-Charged and Structural Conflicts. Paper presented at the Association for Conflict Resolution Annual Conference, Pittsburgh, PA. Dwyer, Owen J., and Derek H. Alderman. 2008. Memorial Landscapes: Analytic Questions and Metaphors. GeoJournal 73 (3): 165–178. East Harlem Preservation. 2018. J. Marion Sims: Knocking White Supremacy Off Its Pedestal. http://ehp.nyc/beyond-­sims/. Finkelpearl, Tom. 2019. Memorials for People. Paper presented at the Traversing the Gap: Relevance as a Transformative Force at Sites of Public Memory, 9/11 Memorial and Museum, New York City. Hamber, Brandon. 2004. Public Memorials and Reconciliation Processes in Northern Ireland. Paper presented at the Trauma and Transitional Justice in Divided Societies Conference, Warrington, Virginia. http://www.brandonhamber.com/pubs_papers.htm. Holmes, Helen. 2019. Replacement of Monument Dedicated to J. Marion Sims Sparks Community Outcry. Observer.

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Hooker, David Anderson, and Amy Potter Czajkowski. 2012. Transforming Historical Harms. Harrisonburg: Eastern Mennonite University. Jordan, Jennifer A. 2006. Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond. Stanford: Stanford University Press. MAC. 2018. The Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers. New York. Neuman, William. 2017, September 8. Panel Will Devise Guidelines for Addressing Monuments Deemed Offensive. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes. com/2017/09/08/nyregion/columbus-­s tatue-­d e-­b lasio-­m onument-­ commission.html. Nienass, Benjamin, and Alexandra Delano Alonso. 2019. Mexico City’s Memorial to the Victims of Violence and the Facade of Participation. In Museums and Sites of Persuasion: Politics, Memory and Human Rights Museum Meanings, ed. Joyce Apsel and Amy Sodaro. Abingdon: Routledge. http://www.columbia. edu/cgi-­bin/cul/resolve?clio14559943. Olick, Jeffrey K., and Daniel Levy. 1997. Collective Memory and Cultural Constraint: Holocaust Myth and Rationality in German Politics. American Sociological Review 62 (6): 921–936. https://doi.org/10.2307/2657347. Owens, Deirdre Cooper. 2017. Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology. University of Georgia Press. Patton, Stacey. n.d. Mules of the World. Wellesley Centers for Women. Pogrebin, Robin. 2020, June 21. Roosevelt Statue to Be Removed From Museum of Natural History. The New  York Times. https://www.nytimes. com/2020/06/21/arts/design/roosevelt-­s tatue-­t o-­b e-­r emoved-­f rom-­ museum-­of-­natural-­history.html. Putka, Sophie. 2019, January 4. Opponents of Sims Statue Worry His Pedestal Will Remain in Honored Spot. City Limits. https://citylimits. org/2019/01/04/opponents-­o f-­s ims-­s tatue-­w orr y-­h is-­p edestal-­w ill­remain-­in-­honored-­spot/. Saar, Alison. 2008. Swing Low: Harriet Tubman Memorial. New York City. Self, Robert O., and Thomas J. Sugrue. 2002. The Power of Place: Race, Political Economy, and Identity in the Postwar Metropolis. In A Companion to Post-1945 America, ed. Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Stevens, Quentin, Karen A.  Franck, and Ruth Fazakerley. 2012. Counter-­ Monuments: The Anti-Monumental and the Dialogic. The Journal of Architecture 17 (6): 951–972. Strauss, Jill. 2020. Contested Site or Reclaimed Space? Re-membering but Not Honoring the Past on the Empty Pedestal. History and Memory 32 (1): 131–151. https://doi.org/10.2979/histmemo.32.1.07.

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CHAPTER 11

Disgraced Monuments: Burying and Unearthing Lenin and Lyautey Sarah Dornhof

Introduction Sergei Eisenstein’s film October (1928), commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, opens with a montage of close-ups of a Tsar Alexander III statue and images of a revolutionary crowd, climbing, rocking, and finally tearing down the Tsar on his throne. In Eisenstein’s dialectic montage, statues repeatedly appear as elements to mark decisive historical changes. Lifeless statues are awakened in a sort of spectral dance that triggers fascination, fear, power, or ridicule; through the montage they are exposed and decomposed as symbols of religious, aristocratic, or military power, aiming to affect and transform the viewer’s subjectivity. While Eisenstein’s film, in its opening credits, is dedicated to the proletariat of Petrograd (today St. Petersburg), the “heroes of the October Revolution,” it was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known as Lenin (1870–1924), to whom hundreds of statues were erected in socialist countries to honor

S. Dornhof (*) Humboldt Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 U. Capdepón, S. Dornhof (eds.), Contested Urban Spaces, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87505-3_11

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him as leader of the 1917 October Revolution. Unlike Stalin, Lenin himself opposed monumental statues and any cult of personality, to which he was, nevertheless, subjected after his death in 1924. In his decree “On the monuments of the Republic” of April 12, 1918, he called for the removal of monuments to the Tsars and for artists to design new monuments to the socialist revolution (Saunders 2018: 56). Under Lenin’s brief leadership of the new Soviet Union, revolutionary art schools were established and new artistic avant-garde movements flourished, most importantly the constructivist movement led by Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, and Vladimir Tatlin. Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, the “Tatlin Tower,” is perhaps the best specimen of this movement, both in terms of its use of modern materials, technology, and form, and in its utopian dimension: Tatlin’s tower was realized as a model but never built.1 Thinking about Lenin’s legacy in the late 1920s, Rodchenko spoke up for a monument of piled snapshots and archival material, distrusting the claim of a painting, a sculpture, or any other synthetic work of art to nail the essence of a person without falsifying it (see Spieker 2008: 132–133): “(W)ith the appearance of photographs, there can be no question of a single, immutable portrait. Moreover, a man is not just one sum total; he is many, and sometimes they are quite opposed. By means of a photograph or other documents, we can debunk any artistic synthesis produced by one man of another” (Rodchenko 1928). In Lenin’s sense, and in the spirit of his time, it was perhaps only logical that statues to him toppled after the fall of communism. Most Lenin monuments were dismantled or displaced; some of them disappeared; others were tidied away into monument parks (like Grutas Park in Lithuania, Memento Park in Budapest, or the Fallen Monument Park in Moscow), became objects in museums, or reappeared as works of art. In this chapter, I relate one of these fallen Lenin statues, once the most monumental of all in East Berlin, to practices of remembering, silencing, and artistically deconstructing a central figure of French colonialism, the Maréchal Hubert Lyautey (1854–1934), in Morocco. I take as my starting point the reappearance of Lenin’s head in a permanent historical exhibition of disgraced monuments in Berlin, and of Lyautey’s tomb in a contemporary art exhibition by the Moroccan artist Mohamed Arejdal in Marrakech. 1  https://musings-on-art.org/100-years-of-russian-art-avant-garde (accessed November 10, 2020).

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At first sight, the connection between these two cases might not be obvious, but they affect my thinking about contested memory from and into different directions—through biographical reflections and current research interests—as notions, roles, and transformations of monuments in a post-socialist and a postcolonial context create resonances and contrasts. On closer scrutiny, the problematic of memory in public spaces in the Moroccan and (East) German context shares several important features which can be summarized as a conflictual collective remembrance shaped by foreign dominating powers: by Russian and then West German memory regimes in the case of (East) Germany, and by French and Spanish colonial and then postcolonial formations of memory and forgetting in the case of Morocco. This intersecting of post-socialist and postcolonial memories, in which the temporality of “post” always implies a tension between the past as a preceding, finished temporality, and as a continuous transition, draws on Michael Rothberg’s conception of multidirectional memory (2009) as well as on perspectives on entangled histories in transcultural relationships (Mintz 1986; Conrad and Randeria 2002; IFAF 2014–2016). Central to both conceptions is a dynamic construction of memory and forgetting through contact, conflict, and friction between different collective forms of remembrance within and across hegemonic and minoritarian historical representations. The focus of this text on monuments and their afterlives in political discourse and artistic interpretation in Germany and Morocco also draws away from approaches based on multidirectional memory and entangled history. It offers instead a reflection on similarities and differences between memory discourses which are usually observed separately, but which have shaped and challenged European memory from different geographical and historical perspectives. My interest in monuments for Lenin and Lyautey that once symbolized colonial and communist powers but became disgraced, displaced, buried, and excavated objects after the end of colonialism and communism, lies in analyzing memory as decentered memory—a fragmented memory based on historical figures and events that played a major role in European centers and elsewhere, and that are today differently remembered in different places, connecting and detaching political, symbolic, and affective power differently on the level of subjectivity and contested urban space. Decentered memory accounts for collective narratives, but also takes into consideration affective, material, and aesthetic dimensions of remembrance which follow principles of (de)construction, montage, and (re)composition. This is an analytic approach to

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understanding ways in which hegemonic narratives are reproduced and disputed, not necessarily through other narratives, but rather through the aesthetic means of film, art, and exhibition. Eisenstein’s cinematographic deconstruction of the power of monuments and Rodchenko’s artistic proposal for an archival snapshot monument to Lenin’s legacy illustrate two directions that decentered memory can take. On the one hand, they show how art and politics connect and inform each other; on the other hand, they demonstrate—through artistic means such as montage and installation—the multifaceted construction of memory, assembling historical, but also personal and political, social and material, religious and military dimensions to the formation of histories. This chapter follows inspirations prompted by artistic approaches to memory. It moves between different times and places by following transformations of monuments which were once both erected and removed in symbolic acts manifesting political transition and have become contested objects within figurations of the “post”—postcolonialism and post-­ socialism—marking an ongoing tension between past and present as well as between history and memory.

Commemoration and Remembrance Tension between history and memory is evident in dealing with monuments that originally performed a commemorative function and are today historically questioned. The commemoration of controversial historical figures, which has often been hugely evident in urban space, thus becomes a political legacy and takes on a cultural, material, and artistic afterlife. Monuments to Lenin and Lyautey basically disappeared from public space in Germany and Morocco, but have left traces in contemporary urban memoryscapes often associated with foreign cultural dominance and contested (re)appropriations of memory. In Russia and France, both figures are officially commemorated as belonging to a disputed national history, and within this national frame are nevertheless buried and laid to rest. Lenin’s conserved body is publicly displayed in his mausoleum on the emblematic Red Square in Moscow; Lyautey’s mortal remains lie in a sarcophagus in the Dôme des Invalides in Paris, next to Napoleon Bonaparte. Previously, Lyautey’s corpse had traveled from France to Morocco only to be repatriated as a consequence of Morocco’s independence in 1956. As a historical figure, Lyautey was certainly the antithesis of Lenin in political theory and action. After

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military missions in Indochina, Madagascar, and Algeria, Lyautey played a decisive role in preparing and implementing the specific model of French colonial power (protectorat) in Morocco, based on both his conservative values and his modernist ambitions. He is known as the “architect” of Moroccan modernity, the “constructor” of modern cities, urban development, and infrastructure as well as of a specific form of colonial rule in Morocco.2 Far from being burial sites in the sacred sense, monuments to Lenin and Lyautey underwent symbolical burial, excavation, and new rendering as public artworks or museum objects. As such, the memory of Lenin and Lyautey not only detaches from their mortal remains and nationally ritualized memorial sites, but also connects to different technologies and perspectives from within entangled histories. Reactivated in this manner, nationally established memory constructions become dismembered and recomposed, connected to other memories and places, where they are reproduced, reappropriated, and circulated in new ways. As any contestation of memory, this kind of tempo-spatial reactivation is able to reproduce affirmatively as well as to transform memory critically; in any case, it sets off a dynamic at a point where memory might otherwise dissolve into mere oblivion. The “burial” and “excavation” of Lenin’s statue in Berlin and of Lyautey’s tomb in Marrakech in different ways question the shaping of post-socialist and postcolonial memory, including a West European hegemony in remembering political transition and in appropriating memories of the “others.” These monuments were implicated in defining transitions from socialism to post-socialism and from colonialism to postcolonialism, not only in the form of symbolic politics, but also as social technologies to recompose, readopt, or reinscribe disjunct memories into historical time and cultural space. The transformation of monuments therefore offers a way to analyze processes of memory reconstruction in the aftermath of political regime change, and to think through alternative ways of articulating and recognizing coexisting, often incongruent or disintegrating, memories. 2  Academic and biographical writing on Lyautey is clearly dominated by French and other European authors, see: Daniel Rivet (1996), Lyautey et l’institution du protectorat français au Maroc, 1912–1926; la biographie d’Arnaud Teyssier (2004), Lyautey, Le ciel et les sables sont grands; Guillaume Jobin (2016), Lyautey, le Résident: La France au Maroc: Tome 1: 1901–1925; and Pierre Vermeren (2006), “Lyautey, le ‘Marocain’,” in Histoire coloniale et postcoloniale: https://histoirecoloniale.net/Lyautey-le-Marocain-par-Pierre.html (accessed November 17, 2020).

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Monuments and Heritage The presence or absence of monuments, memorials, and museums in Germany and Morocco could hardly be more different. In Germany, especially in Berlin, monuments are everywhere; new ones are constructed, and old ones disappear or get reconstructed, most often accompanied by year-long controversial debate and complicated decision-making processes. Statues and monuments populate the city, more or less visible and their history more or less known, yet their silent presence accumulates countless stories, legends, connections, and associations, which weave a net of urban memory. Morocco, by contrast, has nearly no statues or monuments of historical figures,3 and only a few, rather small and often private, historical museums. The very idea of monuments and museums came to Morocco with the French and Spanish Protectorate (1912–1956). Hubert Lyautey, the first French Resident-General in Morocco (1912–1925), was particularly eager to “protect” Moroccan culture and traditions. In 1912, he created a department for fine arts and historical monuments (Service des Beaux Arts et des Monuments Historiques) with the mission to preserve historic sites and traditional material culture, much of which went into museum collections in France as exotic, timeless artifacts (Boum 2010: 56–57). Lyautey himself, and in close collaboration with the architect and urban planner Henry Prost, opposed the idea of an ahistorical and transcultural Orient and fought for the preservation of particularities, singular buildings and even built ensembles, believing that they should guide local policy (Rabinow 1989: 300). In the newly administrative center Rabat,4 the Casbah des Oudaya and the Mosque and Hassan Tower complex were among the sites to be protected (ibid.). At the same time, Lyautey and his team initiated major modernization and construction projects in various fields of political administration, urban development, transport, infrastructure, education, and so forth. They thus paradigmatically embodied the ambiguity of colonial modernism, comprising laboratories of modernity as well as social conservatism, racial segregation, paternalism, and dominance (see e.g. Rabinow 1989; Abu-Lughod 1980).

3  See Fanny Haza, “Monuments: zero statue à l’horizon, Telquel,” September 4, 2020: https://telquel.ma/2020/09/04/monuments-zero-statue-a-lhorizon_1694901 (accessed September 20, 2020). 4  In 1912, Hubert Lyautey relocated the country’s administrative center from Fez to Rabat. After Morocco’s independence in 1956, Rabat became its capital.

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This ambiguity also reflects in contemporary conceptions of postcolonial cultural heritage which, as Lauren Wagner and Claudio Minca demonstrate in the case of Rabat, comprises both the precolonial heritage that the French chose to protect and the (re)designing of the colonial city “as both a modern capital and a living museum” (the contrast between the medina and the ville nouvelle) (Wagner and Minca 2014: 3). From and for a European gaze, Morocco is thus perceived as a historically and culturally preserved “Morocco-for-Moroccans” alongside “a modern Morocco for the French” (ibid.: 4). This “laboratory of modernity,” built on the colonial “principle of association” according to which the diversity of peoples should be acknowledged and regulated within a spatially segregated order, became itself a historical model of cultural heritage that was, in the case of Rabat, recently added to the World Heritage list for the Modern Heritage Program of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre as a “modern capital and historic city: a shared heritage” (ibid.: 9). It can safely be argued, therefore, that the French protectorate in Morocco did not only turn historical sites and buildings into patrimonial monuments but also turned Moroccan cities into modern monuments—monuments to “modernity as shared heritage” that came into being through the “consuming gaze” of Europeans both during the French protectorate and today (ibid.: 3). It might not be surprising that Lyautey undertook considerable efforts during his lifetime to inscribe his own future legacy within the patrimonial and modern city of Rabat, as he himself had conceived and planned it. It was his wish to be buried in Rabat and to be remembered, almost as a saint, in Moroccan history. Years before his death he had designed his own mausoleum, its construction as a “simple little marabout,” its site, and the inscription on his tomb. Seemingly, Lyautey was not interested in being remembered as an army general and marshal in France, but very much hoped to remain in the memory of Moroccans as a “good colonialist” with bonds of love and admiration for the country. We can speculate that colonialist desire intersected in this kind of attachment with paternalistic protectionism and egomaniac projections, especially if we read the account of Jules Borély, a companion at the time and responsible for the construction of Lyautey’s tomb in Rabat. In his book Le tombeau de Lyautey from 1937, he recounts how Lyautey wished to be buried not only in a marabout, a tomb construction for saints or revered figures, but also in the sacred, historical necropolis of Chella, the burial site of Marinid sultans near Rabat. The mausoleum could not be erected there, but nevertheless the legend lived on:

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For many people the question didn’t matter: it was in Chella; and many of those who know what Chella is simply believed that the Marshal would rest among medieval Muslim saints and princes … The Marshal’s desire seemed to come out of his love of the country, his affection for Moroccans … Such an inclination from a Christian other than him would have been blameworthy and most French people would have regarded it as a betrayal, but from him it seemed natural and beautiful. (Borély 1937: 166)

How can such a self-constructed legend and such a self-­ monumentalization as part of Morocco’s patrimonial heritage be deconstructed? What does it mean for Moroccans to not only have mainly French sources to describe the early years of the protectorate but also a material framework in which French conceptions of modernity and heritage remain inscribed? The art project Répondre à Lyautey (Responding to Lyautey) by Mohamed Arejdal comprises a series of artistic interrogations of Lyautey’s heritage in Morocco which drive its decomposition. The artist reclaims a different memory, his own memory as someone coming from Guelmim in the south—the part of the country that Lyautey considered “the useless Morocco” (le Maroc inutil). “Responding to Lyautey” seems to be a confrontation, an appropriation, a shift in position, and a reburial all at once, questioning the very material substance, the subjective grounding, the personal involvement, and the necropolitics that can be sensed in this uncomfortable confrontation. Crystallize man not by a single “synthetic” portrait, but by a whole lot of snapshots taken at different times and in different conditions. Paint the truth. (Rodchenko 1928)

Mohamed Arejdal’s work began with an exploration of documents relating to Lyautey’s tomb and, based on that, a reflection about the material and imaginary conditions of his commemoration and forgetting. In a way similar to Alexander Rodchenko’s vision of a pile of photographs and documents as a true monument to Lenin, rather than a painting or statue, Arejdal collects and arranges divers visual and material traces of Lyautey’s presence in Morocco in order to deconstruct the monumental tomb that commemorates him today in France. These documents comprise historical photographs of Lyautey’s mausoleum in Rabat and YouTube videos showing the transfer of his coffin from Rabat to the port of Casablanca, from where it departed to France in 1961, five years after Morocco gained

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independence. These videos and photos show a silent farewell of crowds that gathered in the streets of Rabat and at the port of Casablanca; others depict the military ceremonies and official speeches under the Arc de Triomphe when the tomb arrived in Paris. Architectural plans indicate the dimensions and material details of the sarcophagus in the Dôme des Invalides. Photographs show a statue of Lyautey on horseback in Casablanca, and the Marshal next to his just-finished bust—a work of the sculptor François Cogné who also created busts of Mussolini, Clémenceau, and Marshal Foch, among others. The work “Responding to Lyautey” was part of Mohamed Arejdal’s solo exhibition in the Comptoir des Mines Galerie in Marrakech from December 2019 to February 2020. The central piece in this project was a reproduction of Lyautey’s sarcophagus in the Dôme des Invalides in Paris. The artistic recreation of this monumental coffin followed the original proportions and details by using architectural plans and photos of the Paris burial site. The ornamental leaves on the sides are partly reproduced on the sarcophagus and partly constitute a work apart, a horizontal installation that could be seen from above, where leaves and Arabic letters dissolve on half of the surface to form an area of unprocessed pieces or effaced memory. The original inscriptions full of pathos on the sides of the coffin, different in Arabic and in French, were reduced to a simple Adieu modernisateur. Similar to Moroccan mausoleums, the path toward and around the sarcophagus was laid out with carpets so that both of Lyautey’s burial places, Rabat and Paris, became associated, interconnected, and marked by dissolution, or signs of forgetting. Other elements of “Responding to Lyautey” connected to a Lyautey bust that Mohamed Arejdal found by chance in a flea market in Marrakech. In excavating this statue from the bits and pieces under which he found it buried, the bust was wrapped in plastic and tied up with colored ropes on the spot, decorated with old and more recent medals, and carried to the atelier. In the exhibition, the veiled bust is represented in a photograph and also present in an unveiled state but with one half of its face perforated and dusty, as if eaten up by time. Another photograph shows the artist face to face with Lyautey’s bust, once seen from its well-preserved side, and then from its destroyed side, marked by forgetting (Fig. 11.1). Recurrent motifs in Arejdal’s work are artifacts decomposing into differently mediated perceptions of them—temporal views that hold the object in a tension between visibility and invisibility, memory and forgetting, life and death. Monuments are not only decomposed and their views

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multiplied, but they are also de- and recontextualized in time and space, so that they find themselves robbed of their seemingly natural environment and torn from their apparent eternity. In these new appearances and snapshots, which have something bizarre or ironic about them, the recomposed objects enter new relationships with each other and with the spectator, relationships that open up multiple perspectives and thus allow for modifiable positions. “Responding to Lyautey” via a series of artworks therefore opens a space for recontextualizing Lyautey’s legacy and invites the viewer to experience different positions within the contemporary Moroccan context. Transforming Lyautey’s tomb into a work of art to be exhibited in a Moroccan art space not only reflects the constructed nature of memory artistically according to space, time, and power relations, but also reclaims agency over colonial and postcolonial memory, and their very transition, from different spatial and temporal positions.

Statues also Die When men die, they enter into history. When statues die, they enter into art. This botany of death is what we call culture. (Marker et  al. 1953: 01:34–01:45, original French5)

The film Statues also die (Les statues meurent aussi, 1953) by Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Ghislain Cloquet develops cinematographically

Fig. 11.1  Mohamed Arejdal, Face à Lyautey, 2019. Digital photographic print. Courtesy of the artist and Comptoir des Mines Galerie, Marrakech  5  Quand les hommes sont morts, ils entrent dans l’histoire. Quand les statues sont mortes, elles entrent dans l’art. Cette botanique de la mort, c’est ce que nous appelons la culture.

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the idea that statues die when they are torn out of their historical, sociocultural context of significations to be exposed as cultural artifacts in European museums: “An object dies when the living glance trained upon it disappears” (Marker et al. 1953: 02:22–02:26, original French6). This early anticolonial film, commissioned by the then young publishing house Présence Africaine in Paris, problematizes the showcasing of art objects removed from African contexts and “left to die” for a consuming European gaze in museums such as the British Museum, Musée du Congo Belge or Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Reflecting and also subversively orchestrating politics of race and gaze in relation to technologies of artifacts and museums, performances, and film, Statues also die ends by pointing to a mnemonic, vital force which the “dead statues” also preserve in the form of a promise to be brought back to life: a promise “common to all the great cultures, of a man who is victorious over the world. And, white or black, our future is made of this promise” (Ibid.: 29:29–29:41, original French7). The film was censored in France until the late 1960s. At the time of its release, France was still a colonial power and its last Colonial Exhibition in Paris in 1931—organized, of all people, by Hubert Lyautey and including life performances by groups of people from the colonies—was not that long ago. Today, the film is a kind of anti-monument of anticolonial critique, just as Sergei Eisenstein’s film is an anti-monument of the Soviet Revolution, because it deconstructs the functioning of seemingly timeless, eternal monuments and turns around the regimes of gaze and agency regarding statues. In Germany, the most memorable anti-monument of Lenin today also relates to a film, in this case the feature film Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) by Wolfgang Becker. Toward its end, a Lenin statue flies over East Berlin’s Karl-Marx-Allee (formerly Stalinallee, and later Frankfurter Allee). Carried by a helicopter, it connects to the Jesus statue flying over Rome in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). Or, with one arm reaching out and nearly touching the protagonists on the street, an angel in Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire (1987). Or, allegorically, the angel of history that Walter Benjamin (1968) saw in Paul Klee’s drawing Angelus Novus (1920):  Un objet est mort quand le regard vivant qui s’est pose sur lui a disparu.  (…); au-delà de leurs formes mortes, nous reconnaissons cette promesse commune à toutes les grandes cultures: d’un homme victorieux du monde. Et blanc ou noir, notre avenir est faite de cette promesse. 6 7

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His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Benjamin 1968: 257–258)

In Becker’s film, the flying Lenin looks back at the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and, with it, the end and the sellout of “real existing socialism” as well as of communist dreams. In 1990, communism seemed to be nothing but a pile of debris, overwhelmed and to be left behind as quickly as possible, to be replaced by capitalist dreams of ever-ongoing progress. Lenin’s statue in East Berlin was soon to become debris itself, dismantled into more than a hundred pieces and buried in a nearby forest. Becker’s film ends with a utopian vision of history, one that the film’s protagonists and spectators alike knew was impossible, yet a possibly existing desire to steer the unstoppable events of the time in a different direction. In a manipulated, “fake” television newscast, Sigmund Jähn, the first German “Kosmonaut”8 to journey into space in 1978, replaces Erich Honecker as chairman of the State Council and declares the Berlin Wall open for all West Germans who choose to escape the miseries of capitalism, welcoming them into the more egalitarian and human German state. The newscast shows the “real” images of people climbing up the wall and celebrating their new freedom. As it is October 3, 1990, the day of German unification, fireworks light up the sky. At this time, in October 1990, a 19-meter high statue of Lenin was still standing on the square named after him (Leninplatz, today United Nations Square). Shortly afterward, in 1991, the Berlin Senate decided to remove the colossal red granite statue. Lenin was no longer to be part of a German memorial landscape and had to disappear quickly from the list of protected monuments and consequently from his pedestal. The early 1990s records were broken for demolishing and renaming monuments on East German territory, especially in Berlin, which was to become the capital city of the newly united Germany. A number of monuments were dismantled, altered, 8

 Kosmonaut was the East German word for astronaut.

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or relocated on political orders before a commission was formed in March 1992 to investigate the future of the city’s memorial landscape (Saunders 2018: 65–66). The Lenin statue in Berlin-Friedrichshain was among the most prominent examples of such monuments, contested from various points of view, and highly symbolic for attempts to quickly reshape a unified memory culture. A little more than twenty years before its removal, the statue had been commissioned by the East German government in commemoration of Lenin’s centenary; it was designed by the Russian sculptor Nikolai Tomski and inaugurated in April 1970. In this year, two exhibitions in Berlin were dedicated to the founder of the Soviet Union: “In the spirit of Lenin— bound inseparably in friendship with the Soviet Union” (Altes Museum) and “A new man—master of a new world” (Akademie der Künste).9 These exhibition titles speak volumes about what Lenin represented at that time in East Germany and thus what his statue stood for. On the one hand, he signified the achievements of socialism, the new socialist “man” and a new socialist city. The enormous statue depicted Lenin upright and determined, looking sternly over the city, his coat open, on his back a symbolic flag, and his view directed toward the West and the future. Apart from the size, his attitude had nothing heroic, perhaps something paternalistic. The statue was part of a large urban development program around the spacious square created in the process. The statue stood in front of the new housing that towered high above it. Lenin faced ahead, down on to one of the city’s central streets and tramways. Walter Ulbricht, chairman of the State Council at the time, ceremonially inaugurated the monument in the presence of a crowd of 200,000 people. Alongside this spirit of socialist construction, the Lenin statue stood for the German-Soviet friendship that paraphrased, on the political level, the power relations between the Soviet Union and the GDR. In the 1970s, these were marked by power demonstrations by the Soviet government under Leonid Brezhnev,10 parallel to a diplomatic appeasement in Cold War politics and East-West relations. Memories relating to the Lenin statue certainly were more complex, embracing the commemoration of Lenin as a radical communist thinker 9  “Im Geist Lenins—mit der Sowjetunion in Freundschaft unlösbar verbunden” and “Ein neuer Mensch—Herr einer neuen Welt.” 10  The Brezhnev doctrine pursued Soviet hegemony among socialist states and limited their sovereignty, retroactively justifying the Soviet military interventions in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Hungary in 1956.

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who spent years of his life in exile, and who became the leader and intellectual head of the Russian October Revolution 1917, which led to the foundation of the Soviet Union. His ideas had entered the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, a compulsory part of every academic education in the GDR. Lenin was clearly in favor of repression as a means to consolidate the revolution, and thus he prepared the way for the great terror of Stalinism that followed his leadership. In the aftermath of Lenin’s premature death in 1924, his dead body became an effective political symbol, accumulating emblematic capital and acquiring what Katherine Verdery calls a “cosmic” dimension by symbolizing people’s entire social and moral meaningful worlds (Verdery 1999: 33–35). In East Germany, in particular after Stalin’s death and following the de-Stalinization period, the icon of Lenin accumulated most of whatever was politically associated with the Soviet Union: the revolution, the Communist International, state terror, the Red Army’s part in the liberation of Nazi-Germany, subsequent German-Soviet and Cold War relations, and Soviet hegemony over its so-­ called fraternal states. The Lenin statue in Berlin-Friedrichshain certainly stood out because of its size and monumentality, but it was also part of the surrounding built environment and a dense landscape of monuments. East Berlin alone had 600 of them, including seven of Lenin (Schubert 1990, cited in Saunders 2018: 62). Anna Saunders distinguishes five categories of GDR monuments: to the victims of fascism and the communist resistance movement; Soviet memorials (Ehrenmäler), often on sites of mass graves of fallen soldiers; monuments to hero figures and ideological fathers of communism, most notably Lenin, Marx, and Thälmann; to the “progressive” historical heritage of the GDR, such as the revolutions of 1848 and 1918 as well as the International Brigades fighting in the Spanish Civil War; and finally to collective groups and events in the GDR (Saunders 2018: 58–59). Most of these monuments were based on the idea of an international socialist and anti-fascist cause to be continued into the present, an idea that was also reflected in the relationships of monuments to one another and to the urban space, including the history of sites and buildings, names of streets and places, and commemorative rituals. Against this background, the rushed dismantling and complete erasure of the massive Lenin statue in East Berlin was not only a symbolical demonstration of the political defeat of communism in 1989, but also an intervention in the urban fabric of memory and commemoration that implied moral judgment and surgical operations in this fabric of East German narratives. To remove Lenin

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from the cityscape helped to reduce communism to nothing more than a failed utopia, a short period in German history best forgotten.

The Afterlife of Fallen Statues Why did the Lenin statue seem so offensive or disturbing to the construction of a new German memory culture that it had to disappear hastily in 1991 and be buried symbolically in an unknown grave, despite ongoing protests by a citizens’ initiative for its preservation and proposals for artistic reinterpretations (see Saunders 2018: 63)? Throughout the fall of 1991, there were protests against the dismantling of the Lenin statue and actions on the site. Complicated and costly, the massive monument was nevertheless disassembled and deposited in a remote area on the south-­ east edge of Berlin, in a former part of East Germany. Images of the removed head, carried by a crane, circulated through local, national, and global media. To protect the parts from vandalism and trophy hunters, they were silently buried soon after in a sandpit and nearly forgotten for almost two decades. Following years of negotiation and practical difficulties to solve,11 the head of the statue was dug up again in 2015 to be shown, from 2016, in a permanent exhibition of disgraced monuments in the Spandau Citadel at the other, far north-west end of the city, in former West Berlin. How are we to understand its reappearance and the new contextualization of the statue’s head among other socialist, fascist, and Prussian statues that had once been part of the city? Unlike the Berlin Wall, which was also dismantled during that time and became a monument only after its destruction, the Lenin statue did not stand for a divided city but for a different ideological system and political regime in which part of the German population lived after the German defeat in the Second World War. The memory attached to the Lenin statue in Berlin did not fit the narrative of the time, which was focused, under the name of reunification, on the incorporation of the East into the system of the West. This narrative was based on the idea that East Germany was a repressive dictatorship under the dictum of the Soviet Union, the second German dictatorship after fascism. For East Germans behind the wall, 11  After some back-and-forth concerning the readiness of the city administration to support and finance the statue’s excavation, and supposedly lost maps about its location, the last obstacle to digging up of Lenin’s head was the sand lizard, a protected species that had settled in the area and had to be evacuated first.

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according to this narrative, the reunification therefore amounted to liberation and new opportunities, a caesura after dark times. The divided city, symbolized by the many wall monuments in today’s Berlin, neatly fits this narrative, but not so the Lenin statue, which carried memories of revolutionary upheavals, socialist convictions, and complex German-Soviet as well as German-German relations. The remains of the Lenin statue, tons of buried pieces, and an excavated head appear in a different context today. The 3.5-ton head was dug up in 2015 and brought to the Spandau Citadel to be a highlight of the new permanent exhibition, “Unveiled: Berlin and its Monuments,” about the history of fallen statues and monuments in the city. It is an unusual and fascinating exhibition in which statues that were once discarded seem to be brought back on stage. They form a strange collection of ghosts from another time in unlikely combinations. Most of the rooms have interactive media stations that inform visitors about the monuments’ history in relation to their political context. The chronological display begins before the founding of the German Empire in 1871 with statues of Friedrich Wilhelm III and his wife Louise, juxtaposed to a large interactive map of Berlin’s monument landscape marking spots where monuments were erected before the Second World War, after 1945 in the East and in the West, and following 1990 in the reunified city. The majority of exhibits are statues that once stood along Siegesallee, also known as Puppenstraße (Doll Street) because so many Prussian kings and counts and princes of Brandenburg lined its sides. After this gathering of nobles, disgraced by the Allies in the 1950s as symbols of German militarism and visibly damaged by time, the exhibition leads briefly through the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era, and ends in East Berlin. The head of the Lenin statue is displayed at the very end of the museum space, as if to symbolize the end of history. It is the only object that is displayed, not in its original position but horizontally, as if lying on one side, just as it was found in the sandpit, as the exhibition director Andrea Theissen explains (Fig.11.2).12 The Lenin head is surrounded by other dismantled East Berlin monuments, such as a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky (founder, under Lenin’s leadership, of the Cheka, the first Soviet secret police) and a monument to East German soldiers guarding the Berlin Wall. It is turned toward two 12  Interview with Andrea Theissen in “Sehenswert! Enthüllt. Berlin und seine Denkmäler” (Part 1): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohp9OoWrczI (accessed November 10, 2020).

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Fig. 11.2  Head of the monumental Lenin statue (by Nikolai Tomski) in Berlin-­ Friedrichshain, erected in 1970, dismantled in 1992. View of the exhibition “Unveiled. Berlin and its Monuments” in the former Provisions Depot at Spandau Citadel, Berlin. Photograph by the author, 2020

large stelae with citations by Erich Honecker, chairman of the State Council of the GDR from 1976 to 1989, and Ernst Thälmann, leader of the Communist Party of Germany from 1925 to 1933, arrested by the Gestapo in 1933, and murdered in the concentration camp at Buchenwald in 1944.13 Both stelae were originally part of the Thälmann monument in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg, framing a massive bronze bust that is still in place, despite ongoing debate about its removal or redesign. The reason for bringing all these historically and politically quite different figures together in one exhibition seems to be that they all shaped Berlin’s public space as symbols of certain political ideologies and that they all, as fallen monuments, today represent turning points in the city’s history. Nevertheless, this curatorial decision carries the risk of blending historical periods featuring complex political shifts and struggles into one ideological regime, thereby reducing heterogeneous and ambivalent biographies to cultural stereotypes. It also creates a non-explicit normative viewpoint from where to “unveil” the horrors or curiosities of the “other,” 13  Thälmann was a charismatic leader who helped to make the German Communist Party an important mass organization. However, he supported Stalin’s reorientation of the party after Lenin’s death and adopted Stalin’s policy of “Social Fascism,” which saw Social Democracy as the main political enemy, thus contributing to the rise of the Nazis.

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sited accordingly outside one’s own culture. The exhibition’s media stations allow for comparison between East and West, and a video installation Haut, Stein (Skin, Stone) by Jakob Ganslmeier juxtaposes traces of Nazi symbols in public architecture and those of Nazi tattoos on the skin, which both remain visible despite attempts to remove them. Even if these sections of the exhibition trigger a reflection on monuments as objects and media of contested memory, its impetus seems to derive, above all, from revealing generalized historical truths which, in an unmarked West German gaze, are supposed to emerge out of this collection of dead monuments, this tamed parade of historically disgraced and today somehow curious but also spectral statues.

Conclusion The Berlin exhibition of disgraced monuments shows well that “statues also die” when they are taken out of their urban surroundings and cut off from the history of which they are part. Monuments are no wanderers— they cannot easily adapt to change. They are, on the contrary, phlegmatic and conservative, bound to the past and anchored in place, as if synthesizing the past, the urban space, and its material body. Removed from their environment, monuments become something else; they become either buried or mortified artifacts, or copies of themselves, like shadows or ghosts that, without the burden of materialized history, can move on in different forms and media. Lenin’s head in Berlin Spandau is relieved of its body and original place, and thus of much of its history as a monument. Within the exhibition, the head becomes charged with other ideas of history and authenticity. Lying “as it was found” in its “grave,” the ear bearing the marks of trophy hunters, it postulates the authenticity, uniqueness, and aura of the object. The history of its afterlife—its dismantling, burying, and re-excavating—makes it spectacular. The exhibition functions on the basis of this idea of authenticity and the ability of a statue to tell history on its own terms, set within a new spatial choreography and the associations it makes between objects. The chronological order suggests a walk-through history, and the choice of objects conveys a certain coherence for each stage. The media stations are somewhat distant from the objects and monuments; they are discrete, horizontal showcases where visitors can dig into information. Without these information points, the statues stand uncommented, like characters on a stage. Lenin’s head is in company with Dzerzhinsky, Thälmann,

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soldiers guarding the Berlin Wall, and the glass prism cube for an eternal flame that, from 1969 onward, stood at the center of the Neue Wache in Berlin-Mitte. In 1960, the Neue Wache became the “Memorial to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism,” and in 1993 it was renamed the “Memorial to the Victims of War and Dictatorship.” In this way, the central terms by which East Germany is commonly remembered today are all present: Communism, the secret service, the Berlin Wall, Soviet dominance and terror, and a monument to victims of fascism but not of the Holocaust. As I mentioned earlier, this scene generalizes, from a non-self-­ reflective West German perspective, the struggles and experience of more than one generation of East Germans and reduces them to negative connotations of a failed regime. In contrast to this, in Mohamed Arejdal’s exhibition in Marrakech, Lyautey’s legacy is deconstructed and reworked, rather than newly essentialized. The artist reproduced the monumental tomb displayed in the Dôme des Invalides in Paris as part of his project in Marrakech, thus demonstrating a power to copy something impossible to copy—for its monumental dimensions, its many ornamental details, and, most of all, the quasi-sacred character of the tomb as the resting place of Lyautey’s mortal remains amid quasi-supernatural military pomp. At the same time, the artist makes very clear that the tomb is a copy, recognizable but not quite the same. His version of the tomb is made not to commemorate but, on the contrary, to be detached from its commemorative function in France in order to be exposed, reflected, and negotiated in Morocco, leading eventually to a final symbolic reburying. The ensemble of works in Arejdal’s Lyautey project carries the history of a contemporary encounter with this central colonial figure in Marrakech; it comprises different positions, relations, and openings, refusing to accept any one single truth, let alone the truth constructed by the colonial regime and Lyautey himself. Arejdal’s “Responding to Lyautey” can be seen to join the piles of snapshots, counter- or anti-monuments, and ephemeral performances that, today, carry heterogeneous and fragmentary memories in many different ways and directions. Reproducing, multiplying, and spreading monuments is one way among others to contest memory in urban space. Lyautey’s monuments were recently questioned and attacked by Black Lives Matter activists. His statue in Paris, together with one of Voltaire,14 14  During the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, activists attacked Voltaire for his involvement in the slave trade (he personally invested in the French East India Company, founded

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was attacked in June 2020 and doused with red paint.15 At about the same time, a petition was launched in Morocco demanding the removal of his remaining statue in Casablanca from Moroccan soil.16 The contestations of colonial and racist statues in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement not only call for the removal of statues from public spaces, but usually also function as performances that turn the monument into something else: a reminder of colonial crimes, commemoration of victims, and designation of responsibilities. Accounting for these different forms of protest, performative acts, ephemeral monuments, urban redesign, films and artworks, literature and theory through which meanings get deconstructed, recomposed, and circulated in different media would provide enough material for another exhibition of disgraced monuments—not a closed museum space or funeral temples where the old ghosts of the past are assigned their place and role, but an open platform for discussing how inappropriate monuments can be reappropriated in ways to contest the memories attached to them, turning monuments into decentered contemporary practices of remembrance. Postcolonial and post-socialist memories live on in decentered contemporary practices, often contradicting and conflicting with political forces that keep them centered around hegemonic representations and modes of forgetting. Cultural analysis and artistic practices of decentering memory today call for decolonization and reconfigurations from multiple perspectives of knowledge, urban space, and memory, not only in order to draw attention to entangled and multidirectional memories, but also to contest, deconstruct, and recompose political dominances and cultural hegemonies of remembering and forgetting colonial and socialist legacies.

References Abu-Lughod, Janet L. 1980. Rabat. Urban Apartheid in Morocco. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Becker, Wolfgang. 2003. Good Buy Lenin! Feature Film, 121 min. X Verleih AG. in 1664, which also exploited people from the African continent who were bought and sold as commodities) and for holding racist and anti-Semitic views https://foreignpolicy. com/2020/08/31/voltaire-spread-darkness-not-enlightenment-france-should-stop-worship-paris-statue-racism-black-lives-matter/ (accessed May 23, 2021). 15  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8446749/Statues-philosopher-Voltairecolonial-military-figure-vandalised-Paris.html (accessed November 3, 2020). 16  https://telquel.ma/2020/06/18/faut-il-deboulonner-la-statue-de-lyautey_1687922; https://www.change.org/p/ambassadrice-de-france-au-maroc-pour-le-retrait-de-la-statuedu-maréchal-lyautey-du-sol-marocain (accessed November 3, 2020).

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Benjamin, Walter. 1968/1940. Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, 253–264. New York: Schocken Books. Borély, Jules. 1937. Le Tombeau de Lyautey. Paris: Éditions de Cluny. Boum, Aomar. 2010. The Plastic Eye: The Politics of Jewish Representations in Moroccan Museums. Ethnos 75 (1): 49–77. https://doi. org/10.1080/00141841003678742. Conrad, Sebastian, and Shalini Randeria, eds. 2002. Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Eisenstein, Sergei, and Grigori Alexandrow. 1928. October: Ten Days That Shook the World. Silent Film, 104 min, Sovkino (USSR), Amkino Corporation (US). IFAF (Institut für angewandte Forschung Berlin). 2014–2016. Erinnerungsorte. Vergessene und verwobene Geschichten. https://www.ifaf-­berlin.de/fileadmin/docs/Projekte__Dokumente_und_Bilder_/Erinnerungsorte/25_ Erinnerungsorte_WEB.pdf. Accessed May 12, 2021. Marker, Chris, Alain Resnais, and Ghislain Cloquet. 1953. Les statues meurent aussi (Statues also die). Documentary Film, 30 min. Paris: Présence Africaine Editions et Tadié Cinéma Production. Mintz, Sidney. 1986. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Rabinow, Paul. 1989. French Modern. Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rodchenko, Alexander. 1928. Against the Synthetic Portrait, for the Snapshot. Novyi lef N°4: 14–16. https://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/09/19/from-­ painting-­to-­photography-­aleksandr-­r odchenkos-­r evolution-­i n-­v isual-­a rt/. Accessed December 2, 2020. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Standford: Standford University Press. Saunders, Anna. 2018. Memorializing the GDR.  Monuments and Memory After 1989. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Schubert, Peter. 1990. Kunst? Oder doch nur monumentaler Schrott? Berliner Morgenpost, October18, p. 9. Spieker, Sven. 2008. The Big Archive. Art from Bureaucracy. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Verdery, Katherine. 1999. The Political Life of Dead Bodies. Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press. Wagner, Lauren, and Claudio Minca. 2014. Rabat Retrospective: Colonial Heritage in a Moroccan Urban Laboratory. Urban Studies 51 (14): 3011–3025. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098014524611.

PART IV

Traces of Violence

CHAPTER 12

Urban Memory After War: Ruins and Reconstructions in Post-Yugoslav Cities Gruia Bădescu

Introduction As war damage has continued to affect cities in Syria, Yemen, and beyond during the last decade, the question of postwar reconstruction returned to the forefront for many architects, planners, and local communities. During these ongoing wars, some communities started repairing and rebuilding, while knowing that destruction could come again. City-makers have debated about the best possible ways to approach reconstruction. Architects in Aleppo and Homs started exploring the experiences of European and Middle Eastern cities in the twentieth century. Lebanese architects saw an opportunity to join the debate and share their experiences, just as in the 1980s German and Polish architects went to Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War and spoke about the lessons from their own post-Second World War reconstruction for the devastated Lebanese capital (Ragette 1983). Recent decades witnessed the emergence of

G. Bădescu (*) Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 U. Capdepón, S. Dornhof (eds.), Contested Urban Spaces, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87505-3_12

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organizations like “Architects without Frontiers” and discussions of toolkits and best practices (Charlesworth 2006). Meanwhile, reconstruction in the wake of previous wars continues to this day. In Germany, debates on rebuilding urban landscapes destroyed eighty years ago still rage, and new “old quarters” emerge, such as Frankfurt’s Dom-Römer project. In the former Yugoslavia, reconstruction of buildings destroyed in the wars of the 1990s is still ongoing. Ruins endure in urban landscapes: some traces of the wars have become monuments and memorials of these events for local populations. In one recent debate in Belgrade about rebuilding the emblematic General Staff Headquarters of the Yugoslav Army, bombed by NATO in 1999, one architect proposed a solution inspired by the reconstruction of Cologne Cathedral after the Second World War and by Lebbeus Woods’s model of radical reconstruction for Sarajevo. However, to what extent can approaches to ruins and reconstructions be replicated and circulated between different contexts? This chapter argues that urban reconstructions and ruins have to be situated in  local, contested memory landscapes. While architectural approaches usually circulate between a variety of urban situations, this chapter highlights that reconstruction is not only an architectural problem, but also one dealing with the past. Contested memories of war make it essential to situate understandings of reconstruction in relation to the narratives of war. The chapter shows that reconstructions of war-torn cities function in complicated, and often contested, memory landscapes that see no easy fix or models. By focusing on two former Yugoslav cities that experienced wars in the 1990s, it underlines the relational and situated nature of reconstructions and ruins as traces of war. The Yugoslav experiences of destruction and reconstruction are recent enough to relate to contemporary debates on warfare and memory, yet provide enough distance to reflect on how the process of reconstruction and memorialization unfolded. I examine two distinctive urban situations, which reflect two particular configurations of contested memories of war. The first is that of Belgrade, a city where there is one dominant memory narrative of a direct war experience, that of the NATO bombing of 1999. Belgrade’s memory of war is thus connected to an external attack on the city. The second one is the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, which underwent a three-year-long siege during the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The war blended actors from BiH and neighboring republics and was marked by ethnic cleansing and identity-related violence. Sociologist of violence Mary

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Kaldor (2007) called it a prototype for the “new wars” which mark the post-Cold War era.1 The subsequent Dayton Peace Agreement reshaped Sarajevo into two cities: Sarajevo proper, in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH), and East Sarajevo, in Republika Srpska (RS), with FBiH and RS as two entities with significant powers within BiH. The overall memory landscape in BiH is fragmented between multiple collective memories, competing narratives, and memory practices of the three main ethnic groups: the Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Bosnian Serbs, and Bosnian Croats (Moll 2013). Sarajevo mirrors what urban studies categorize as “divided cities in a contested state,” or “contested cities” (Rokem and Boano 2017; Bădescu 2017). According to Bakshi (2017), divided cities, affected by divided official memories, amplify the capacity of place to embody memory. Therefore, Belgrade and Sarajevo reflect two different types of war and two different constellations of official remembrance narratives. However, official or politically sanctioned narratives of war in both Belgrade and Sarajevo are just parts of a complex canvas of contested memories. I will introduce some of this local complexity and show how idiosyncratic memory landscapes recontextualize approaches to ruins and reconstruction. In discussing the connections between postwar architectural reconstruction and contested memories, I will analyze the traces of wars in both the material and the social fabric of the city. According to historian Carlo Ginzburg (2012), material traces provide an authenticity that makes them “testify.” Traces of war destruction in a city are not only physical relics of the past (i.e. produced by history) but also condensed, spatial narrations of events (i.e. embodied memory) (Mazzucchelli et  al. 2014: 6; Mazzucchelli 2017: 178). Moreover, I examine architects and city-­makers, as well as urban space, as mediators of multiplicity and complexity between people’s collective memories and the official narratives and state strategies.2 After briefly exploring the relationship between urban space 1  According to Kaldor, new wars involve actors which are internal and external to the state, blur the distinction between “classic war” (organized violence for political ends), crime (organized violence for private ends, usually financial gain), and violations of human rights (violence against civilians), being often centered on articulations of separatist identity-politics. 2  This chapter is based on fieldwork conducted in Sarajevo (2009, 2013–2014, 2019) and Belgrade (2012–2015), in which I traced the trajectories of buildings (“place biographies”), interviewed architects, planners, and local authorities, and was immersed in everyday life through participant observation.

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and the contested memory of war, I move on to discuss the different contested memories embedded in urban space in Belgrade and Sarajevo. By highlighting several ruined sites and reconstruction projects, the chapter problematizes how urban reconstruction relates to distinctive contexts of contested memory.

Urban Space and the Memory of War The destruction of cities and architecture plays an important role in the reconfiguration of memory. Connected with experiences of violence, memories of war are also marked by the replacement of the “familiar” by the “extreme.” Daily routines and familiar places thus become different, uncanny, confusing. Destruction of physical environments is part and parcel of these transformations. For Martin Coward (2009), annihilating the built environment and the places of common life is not just a background of human suffering, but a form of specific political violence: urbicide. As architect Bogdan Bogdanović (1993), former mayor of Belgrade, wrote during the war, urbicide is a way of destroying the common life that cities enhance by targeting buildings and public spaces where people of various backgrounds congregate and practice urban civility. The destruction of architecture unsettles those who see it as a materialized form of collective memory. Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulić interrogates the significance of destroying architectural heritage in her Mostar Bridge Elegy. Discussing a photograph of the ruined old bridge at Mostar and another of a murdered Bosniak woman, she asks: “Why do I feel more pain looking at the image of the destroyed bridge than the image of the woman?” and replies: Perhaps it is because I see my own mortality in the collapse of the bridge, not in the death of the woman. We expect people to die. We count on our own lives to end … The bridge was built to outlive us … It transcended our individual destiny. A dead woman is one of us—but the bridge is all of us.

The destruction of the built environment triggers this reaction because it is connected both to the meaning of the place and to its memory. As Aleida Assmann (2011) highlighted, place is a repository of memory. Paul Connerton, in his How modernity forgets (2009), emphasized that it is such loci, places, that embody the memory of communities, that imbibe the past, and that connect the present day with previous generations.

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Conversely, the destruction of places becomes, as Robert Bevan put it, a destruction of memory. Through its “enduringness of materials” (Ricoeur 2004: 150), urban space acts as a mediator in the translation of events into memory (Halbwachs and Coser 1992; Bakshi 2017). Urban space, as a subject of violence—physical destruction—or a mere witness of human suffering thus becomes a mnemonic device. It sustains the memory of war, as it can trigger reminders for urban residents who recognize its alterations through destruction (i.e. ruins, voids) and reconstruction, through memorial acts, or simply through its presence. Decisions by political actors and institutions to remake urban landscapes—be it profoundly politically motivated or narrated as “technical decisions”—have an impact on the reconfiguration not only of the built environment, but also of memory (Lowenthal 2015; Hoelscher and Alderman 2004; Pavlaković and Bădescu 2019). In the particular case of divided cities, architectural reconstruction, and even preservation, have to face contested, competing memories; design decisions can sustain conflict (Calame and Charlesworth 2011; Bollens 2012; Pullan and Baillie 2013; Bădescu 2014, 2017). Nevertheless, while architecture has the potential to communicate messages, it is the urban residents who can project (or not) memory tropes onto the transformed cityscape. As I have argued elsewhere, the difference between the intentionality of reconstruction and memorialization on the one hand and their reception on the other is key to understanding the relationship between reconstruction and memory (Bădescu 2019b). Urban dwellers perceive architecture and its reshaping through preexisting narrative frames (Jameson 1997), which are shaped in relation to the memory landscape. Consequently, to situate how the traces of war and reconstructions impact the memory landscapes in cities, it is crucial to unpack the narrative threads of local memory and all their complexities and contestations.

Contested Memories of the 1990s Wars in Two Post-Yugoslav Capital Cities Belgrade and Sarajevo are two capital cities of former Yugoslav republics that had direct experiences of war, albeit very different ones. The 1990s wars of the Yugoslav dissolution started after Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia, but the greatest human costs and destruction were incurred during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Sarajevo

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underwent the world’s longest siege of a capital city in contemporary history (April 1992–February 1996). In the aftermath of the declaration of independence of BiH from Yugoslavia, following a referendum boycotted by Bosnian Serbs, the city was besieged initially by the National Yugoslav Army, then by the Army of the Republika Srpska, the self-­proclaimed Bosnian Serb state. Shrapnel and bombs killed civilians and pockmarked buildings; the Bosnian Serb forces bombed or set on fire landmarks such as the Bosnian Parliament, museums, and the National Library. While some managed to escape early on, the population was trapped in a city where no infrastructure was working, food was scarce, and park trees were felled for heating in the winter. At the time, in neighboring Serbia, news about the Bosnian conflict was allegedly reported as if from a remote country (Subotic 2009), while Belgraders were facing economic collapse and an authoritarian grip by Slobodan Milošević. In 1999, NATO bombed Yugoslavia, including Belgrade, for three months. The declared aim of the military organization was to avoid a second Bosnia situation in Kosovo, a province of Serbia which lost its autonomy under Milošević, and where the Serbian government encroached on the rights of the Albanian majority. The attack targeted government buildings, but led also to the death of civilians. However, the impact on the city, both in terms of destruction and civilian lives, was a small fraction of the one brought to Sarajevo by the three-year siege. The NATO bombings rallied most people, including previous Milošević opponents, against the Western powers who had decided to bomb cities. In 2000, the Milošević regime collapsed after a popular uprising. The Belgrade memory of war is focused on one episode of direct engagement, the NATO bombing of 1999. While the wars in the former Yugoslavia started in 1991, they did not affect Belgrade directly until 1999. In fact, the collective memory of the 1990s is not one dominated by war but by economic crisis, rampant inflation, and rising poverty (Clark 2008). However, a few ruined sites still standing in Belgrade—the former General Staff Headquarters of the Yugoslav Army (Generalštab), a number of ministries on Kneza Miloša Street, as well as the Air Force Headquarters in Zemun, a northwestern district of the city by the Danube—are uniquely positioned as spatial signifiers of the memory of the 1999 NATO bombings. The memory of the bombings is connected to the tropes of victimhood and the injustice of the attack, echoing the 1990s narratives about Serbia

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being the victim of an international conspiracy (Gordy 2013), but also disgruntlement with the military intervention by opponents of the Milošević regime. This is connected to a third trope, one of resistance. The collective memory of the resilient, resistant, heroic city begins with Belgrade as the stage of major demonstrations against the regime in 1996–1997 (Jansen 2001). Many Belgraders will point out that as a majority of the city’s population was opposed to the regime, the attack on a city that resisted Milošević was paradoxical and unjust. The memory threads of resilience and resistance thus rest on the 1999 bombing itself, when around 15,000 people demonstrated almost daily against it, defying the bombs by attending concerts in the main square or on the Branko’s Bridge, a possible target (Lavrence 2005). The collective memory of injustice, however, totally bypasses the link between the NATO attacks and the atrocities in Kosovo, or previous ones waged or sponsored by Milošević in Croatia or Bosnia (Fridman 2016). It also portrays a general attack on the city, instead of the selected targeting of mostly military objectives. Although there are voices that point out the responsibility of the Serbian government for the wars in Yugoslavia, the framing of the NATO bombing as a just war remains very rare. Nevertheless, despite Belgrade not being a “contested city,” the memory of the 1990s wars accounts for a contested memory in the city, divided between obfuscation of history, victimhood tropes, and rare occasions of actively dealing with the past (Bădescu 2016; Fridman 2016; David 2014). Victimhood and resilience alike were also tropes in the collective memories of Sarajevo. Nevertheless, these memory threads functioned in the city within a very different context. Sarajevo’s war experience was marked by the specific nature of its conflict between in-state actors, with the involvement of new neighbors and the passive presence of the international community, a longer time frame, a much higher number of victims, a generalized level of destruction. In Sarajevo, collective memories of war are dominated by the long siege, when the city was shelled from the surrounding hills, with more than 5000 civilians killed and two-thirds of the building stock damaged, compared with just seventy buildings destroyed in Belgrade. The end of the siege brought a period of intense reconstruction, but the population make-up had also changed—once a city inhabited by a diverse population of Bosniaks, Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats, and many mixed families, postwar Sarajevo had a pronounced majority of Bosniaks. Bosnian Serbs (almost 30 percent in 1991) were almost gone, and 100,000 internally displaced Bosniaks sought refuge in the city. At its

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periphery, a new East Sarajevo in RS became home to some of the Bosnian Serbs who had fled the city in the valley. The divided city featured differentiated memories in their spatialization. In Sarajevo “proper,” remaining ruins or pockmarked walls abound and enact the collective memory of victimhood and suffering, while reconstructions and new buildings emphasize discourses of resilience. In East Sarajevo, the “clean slate” feel of a newly built urban conglomerate signals both the resilience of those who started anew and a victimhood narrative of expulsion. The memory of the 1990s wars remains contested in BiH and is articulated by different political groups along ethnic lines (Moll 2013). Competitive and contested memory threads clash with one another or remain features of parallel, non-interacting memory worlds in Bosnia’s divided present. The urban memory of the siege and destruction in Sarajevo highlights the specificity of violence against the city. Many Sarajevans contest the story of the siege told through the ethno-national lens and center their memory on a city assaulted by rural paramilitaries who attacked the city exactly because of its urbanity, cultural mix, and cosmopolitanism (Bădescu 2015). The urbicide narrative explains the war on the city as a concerted attack against the mixed nature of Sarajevo by those who advocated for ethnically and/or religiously separated living, and for whom Sarajevo’s motley ways were Sodom and Gomorrah, as Radovan Karadžić, the leader of the Bosnian Serb paramilitary, reputedly described it (Chaslin 1997). The attack on libraries, museums, and public spaces, alongside mosques and churches, is understood by this narrative as an attack on urbanity itself, or to echo Bogdanović (1993), urbicide. Sarajevo is thus a locus of contested memory threads, like other cities that were divided and experienced war (Bădescu 2017), but it also constitutes an idiosyncratic memory landscape, all of its own.

Dissonant Memories: Monuments and Memorials in Postwar Urban Space Groups, states, and institutions, as Aleida Assmann (2006: 216) argued, “do not ‘have’ a memory—they ‘make’ one for themselves with the aid of memorial signs such as symbols, texts, images, rites, ceremonies, places, and monuments.” Before examining the broader architectural engagements with ruins understood both as traces and as monuments, let us

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discuss the most direct spatial engagement with memory by city-makers: the erection of memorials. In post-siege Sarajevo and post-Milošević Belgrade, memorialization through monuments reflected the contested nature of official memory narratives. While community memorials or those sponsored by civic associations blossomed, the construction of official memorials was stalled by debates and contestations, reflecting the fraught nature of finding a common voice. Recent war memorials in the region have tended to promote the official version of the past—reflecting either national or local political agendas—and have usually obstructed the rebuilding of relationships and trust between groups (David 2014; Bădescu 2019a). In Sarajevo, the process of erecting official memorials to commemorate victims was slow. It took more than ten years after the war ended for one such memorial to be inaugurated in 2006. Placed on the city’s central avenue, in an abstract form, it was dedicated to the children of Sarajevo who had been killed. As such, it was intended as a memorial that would not contradict the narratives of any of the groups, with children as a category of victims that no one could contest. Nevertheless, it was criticized in Republika Srpska, as well as by certain Sarajevo NGOs, because the dedication is limited to “children in occupied Sarajevo,” excluding child victims in Serb-held territory during the war. Another criticism was that a “Sarajevo rose,” a symbol of the bottom-up memorial initiatives in Sarajevo, was removed during construction (Musi 2021). The Sarajevo roses, painted in red on the asphalt, marked the places where grenades killed people during the war. They have become one of the most recognizable memorial features in Sarajevo, on sidewalks and streets. Another ubiquitous feature are plaques indicating names of victims, while also mentioning that the crimes were committed by “Serbian criminals” (Junuzović 2006; Moll 2016). These have been criticized by several voices in Sarajevo’s memory work landscape, who point out that such ethnicization might be conducive to prolonging animosity against those associated with the perpetrators (Bădescu 2019a). The situation in Sarajevo underlines the predicaments of memory in conflict situations, rekindling questions about how conducive memory in such contexts is to healing or to keeping wounds open (A. Assmann 2018; David 2020). While the Sarajevo case reflects the predicament of spaces where competing collective memories exist, the situation in Belgrade, with a dominant collective memory narrative, was by no means simpler. This is because in Belgrade the collective memory of the bombing, or of the 1990s in

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general, did not translate into a coherent official memory narrative after the departure of Milošević, unlike the situation of the three memory narratives in BiH, mobilized by ethnic-based parties. In the first year after the bombing, the Milošević regime built the Eternal Flame monument by the Sava and Danube river confluence in New Belgrade, in a park next to important Yugoslav state buildings. It revealed the official discourse on the NATO bombing, celebrating Serbia’s “victory over NATO,” which was Milošević’s rhetoric on the outcome of the 1999 bombing campaign. A vertical obelisk-like monument to victory and heroism, it echoed the socialist-realist aesthetic of the 1940s and thus departed both from New Belgrade’s modernism and from contemporary memorial aesthetics, where such triumphant phallic structures are generally avoided. Yet the monument is also one of victimhood, with inscribed poems mentioning the attack (in the official narrative “the NATO aggression”) and a list of incriminated countries (Bădescu 2016). The light on the Eternal Flame was switched off after the uprising of October 5, 2000, which ousted Milošević. After a decade of debates, Belgrade City Hall, held by a party that opposed Milošević in the 1990s, placed another monument close to the central station. It addressed a very broad group of war victims, veterans, and heroes. The original aim of the monument—to memorialize the victims of war—changed with the incorporation of other mnemonic groups in the various incarnations of the monument, reflecting the lack of a strong coherent memory narrative in Serbia (David 2014). The simple plaque brought together victims of wars waged by Serbia or by Serb paramilitaries in other republics, victims in Serbia of the NATO bombings, Serb victims elsewhere, and Serb refugees from Croatia or Bosnia with veterans, all conflated into the resulting nondescript monument, which became, in David’s terms, “a monument to no one.” It did not satisfy any group, and was more an indication of the efforts to obfuscate the memory of the 1990s than to deal with Serbia’s difficult past (David 2014; Bădescu 2016).

“Violent Reconstructions”: Intentional Monuments and Contested Memories in Belgrade and Sarajevo Cities after war experience various forms of monument and memorial building, but they are first and foremost places of recovery and reconstruction. Rebuilding in Sarajevo and Belgrade was mostly seen in a

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functional framework of infrastructural repair rather than as a question of memory work. The protagonists of these processes emphasize the challenges of reconstruction, ranging from technical to social issues. Most of the architects and planners I interviewed stated that the overwhelming majority of their profession, including themselves, hardly engaged with threads of memory or dealing with the past. They saw the process of reconstruction as a purely functional one, and themselves as technical professions and not “memory actors.” Yet reconstruction was not only deeply linked with the contested memory landscape, but also contributed to the dynamics of memory politics in the postwar context. Reconstructions of buildings connected to particular groups were directly related to the memories of the 1990s mobilizations of identity politics. As such, the reconstruction of mosques in Sarajevo, targeted in the siege specifically as symbols of the Bosniak population, functioned as an act of repair and related to the memory of war. Robert Bevan (2007) argued that “unintentional monuments”—places for everyday life, including houses of worship—become through their reconstruction “intentional monuments,” as the decision to rebuild carries the intentionality to mark not merely the group’s presence, but also its resilience. The reconstruction and the new construction of religious buildings in the postwar city create new spatial markers, connected to the memories of conflict. Mosques in Federation Sarajevo and Orthodox churches in East Sarajevo, as well as a more recent wave of Catholic churches, can thus be seen as more than simply catering to a religious revival after the war. The geography of reconstruction and newbuild correlates with the new majorities. While the old religious buildings surviving side by side in the old city center tell a story of coexistence and multiculturalism, the new ones seem to tell a different one, of separation and homogeneity. Selective reconstruction combined with the construction of new structures that enhance the predominance of a particular group has reshaped the symbolic landscape. Using Johan Galtung’s concept of cultural violence (1990) and Slavoj Zizek’s discussion of violence (2008), Dacia Viejo-Rose (2011) argued that reconstruction after a violent conflict can itself be violent. While the reconstruction of heritage can help the process of repair after war, it can also engender new, symbolic forms of violence by extending hegemonic discourses over space. Local and international actors take part in these forms of symbolic violence. One notorious example is the rehabilitation of certain mosques in Sarajevo through Saudi-funded projects

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that whitewashed the colorful interior decorations specific to Balkan Muslim practice, to the outcry of local conservationists (Bevan 2007). While sacred spaces in Sarajevo are directly connected to identity formation, the analysis of seemingly “unintentional” architecture can reveal other perspectives on the connection of reconstruction and memory. Let us take, for instance, the reconstruction of Hotel Europe in Sarajevo, which consisted of a Habsburg-era building with a socialist-era modernist annex. After its severe damage in the siege, Bosnian architect Sead Gološ was appointed to reconstruct it (2006–2009). He chose to restore the Habsburg-era part of the building, and to revamp the socialist-era functionalist wing with a contemporary makeover. Gološ justified this approach in terms of architectural aesthetics, suggesting that the new version related better to its surroundings. However, he also stated that: “I see architecture in Bosnia as having a long tradition until 1914, and then reborn after the war. Yugoslavia was a parenthesis, was a break in the evolution of Bosnian architecture” (Interview, September 4, 2014). The socialist-era modernist wing served as a reminder of a period that the architect considered to be an unnatural discontinuity in the nation’s narrative. Reshaping the modernist wing removed not only the ruin as a trace of war, but also the embodied memory of socialist Yugoslavia. Reconstruction acted as a form of erasure of a part of history and created a place of amnesia. Similarly, in Belgrade, most buildings affected by the NATO bombing were rebuilt either as restorations—the pre-1945-era buildings, seen as heritage—or as contemporary makeovers—the socialist-era buildings. For instance, the conversion of the building that once housed the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (CK) into an office building and a shopping mall transformed the site from one emblematic of socialist Yugoslavia into one representing the new capitalist economy. The fact that modernism was eliminated could well be just an aesthetic preference. However, regardless of its intentionality, this act also removed a reference to socialist Yugoslavia, thus altering the materiality of memory in the city, and constituted a place of amnesia.

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Ruins: Between Realms of Memory and Places of Amnesia Ruins in the postwar city play the role of both traces and monuments, as they showcase the interplay between memory and forgetting. While they trigger memory, they do so in an ambiguous way, as the remnants and the voids highlight parts of the past and obfuscate others (Huyssen 2003). As traces of war, they are disjointed and difficult to assemble in a coherent narrative (Edensor 2005). Making sense of ruins depends on the frame of reference of the readers, and this can generate a multiplicity of memory threads, but also forgetting (Bădescu 2019b). For architects and city-­ makers, dealing with urban ruins after war often becomes an arena for competing visions not only about the future, but also about the past (Fig. 12.1). Such tensions are illustrated by the debates about the ruin of the Generalštab in central Belgrade, one of the few visible traces of the 1999 NATO bombing in the city. The public debate has focused on visions of reconstruction, while the meaning and the reading of the ruin have remained in the background. In the view of the Ministry of Defense, which owns the ruined complex, the site should be redeveloped by a private investor in a similar fashion to other makeovers. Nevertheless, the demolition of the complex was resisted by many in the architecture and heritage communities. The Institute for Protection of Cultural Monuments of Belgrade even declared it a monument in the aftermath of the announcement of its imminent clearance. Many architects I interviewed were also against the redevelopment idea. Their opposition stemmed from the fact that this is the only building in Belgrade built by Nikola Dobrović, the most celebrated Serbian modernist, and deemed by many as his magnum opus. Some called for the building to be restored to its original design to ensure the survival of Dobrović’s legacy. However, neither the restorative approach nor the commercial redevelopment addresses the memory of the NATO bombings or the memory of the past conflicts that are associated with the Yugoslav army’s headquarters. Only a few architects and planners I interviewed spoke about the building in terms other than Dobrović’s masterpiece. For Isidora Amidzić, an architect who authored an art project on how the Generalštab relates to the concept of a wound, the building is fascinating partly because multiple histories intermingle on this site: “Here was Prince Milos Obrenović’s house in the 19th century, the first leader of independent Serbia, here was

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Fig. 12.1  The Generalštab complex, destroyed in 1999 by the NATO bombings. Photograph by the author

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̵ was assassinated. There are the Generalštab, here was where Zoran Đindić so many layers of history here. This is why the site, the building is very important.”3 The different threads of memory prompt questions: What past should be remembered and engaged with in a critical, memory-responsive reconstruction of the building? On the one hand, this was the headquarters of a Yugoslav army, which was seen as the most Yugoslav of all institutions, where men met during their military service and forged bonds across the borders of constituent republics. On the other hand, in the 1990s, this was the headquarters of an army that has itself become a contested realm of memory. For many Serbs, this army meant a defensive force for an undermined Yugoslavia. For many in other republics, the army was reinvested with the meaning of a bully, of an aggressor which destroyed cities like Vukovar and Dubrovnik and started the siege of Sarajevo. Furthermore, the building is remembered as a closed site, not one that people had access to. While the shape and exterior became the object of fascination and desire for architects, its interior remains shrouded in secrecy. The Generalštab illustrates Vidler’s interpretation of the Freudian uncanny (das Unheimliche): a site of a familiar institution from Yugoslavia’s past but haunted inside by uncanny, uncomfortable, unsettling actions. It is the place where the Yugoslav heimlich (homely) becomes the unheimlich (unhomely, uncanny), where collective memories coalesce and compete, where the nation and Yugoslav identity are shaped and dissolved. Instead of being reconstructed, the building could well remain a ruin,  echoing memorial approaches in Berlin (the Kaiser-Wilhelm-­ Gedächtniskirche), London (Christ Church Greyfriars), Hamburg (the St Nikolai site), or elsewhere. A number of my interlocutors in Belgrade underlined the importance of keeping the ruins as a material testimony to the collective memory of bombing (Bădescu 2019b). In contrast, the political establishment shied away from discussing this issue, as part of the general obfuscation of memory associated with the reluctance to debate responsibility. Serbian Patriarch Irinej, however, did openly voice this possibility, published on Fakti.org on May 21, 2014: “Those ruins which are located in the center of Belgrade should never be repaired. Let there be a testimony of our time, a testimony of cultured Europe, testimony of a democratic Europe who cared about freedom and democracy.” While the  Focus group/workshop, Belgrade, October 2014.

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ruins can sustain the memory of the NATO bombings, the framework for understanding the historical event—victimhood, responsibility for the 1990s wars, guilt, shame, or resentment—will still be projected onto its material presence by those who see it and by their own narrative. Consequently, keeping the Generalštab as a ruin-memorial may trigger stories of victimhood, or of the haunting guilt and responsibility plaguing Serbia, or simply melt into the background of urban life. One of the proposals for the reconstruction of the Generalštab made reference to the Lebbeus Woods plans for Sarajevo. The American architect, who spent time in Sarajevo during the siege, was against rebuilding Sarajevo as if nothing had happened. He considered a full return to the past in the shape of restorative reconstruction to be no more than a civilized parody (Woods 1997). Similarly, he believed that totally new construction would fail to engage with the past, with the existence of conflict. Instead, his vision for Sarajevo was what he called a “radical reconstruction” of the city, with new buildings emerging out of the ruins, the latter suspended and propped up by pillars as a constant reminder of the war. For instance, Woods proposed using this approach to reconstruct the Elektroprivreda building by the celebrated Yugoslav architect Ivan Štraus (Woods 1997). Woods’s project involved preserving original administrative functions for the areas left intact. For the damaged parts, Woods wanted them transformed into “free spaces,” a concept he originally developed for his 1991 Berlin Free Zone project, meaning functionally ambiguous structures built within buildings, void of purpose, forcing their occupants to reinvent modes of dwelling or using the space. He talked about the need for Sarajevo’s buildings to feature such traces of the war, to which he referred as “scars” and “scabs.” The reactions to Lebbeus Woods’s scheme in Sarajevo were ambivalent. Many pointed out that the permanence of war traces in urban space would be overwhelming for Sarajevans who had already experienced trauma. For some architects, this was an interesting thought exercise and utopia, but could not be applied in practice. “We admired his utopian views, but it was not what we wanted for the city. We wanted the city to be the way it was. To have it back” (Nihad Cengić, architect, Sarajevo, interview September 5, 2014.) On the one hand, people wanted to move on, but on the other they wanted to move back to the times of a seemingly harmonious socialist Yugoslavia. Reconstruction thus became an embodiment of recovery, and also of nostalgia for the lost era before the war. Collective memories of the

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war were to be suspended until some time in the future when it would be bearable to engage with the past. After the siege in Sarajevo, as the city embarked on comprehensive reconstruction projects, the question arose about whether at least one ruin should be preserved as a memorial to the destruction inflicted in the war. ̵ This debate centered on the ruins of the Oslobodenje office building. The ̵ newspaper Oslobodenje was a lieu de memoire itself, as it was the resilient provider of news in the besieged city. Thus, its ruins symbolized both the attack on the city and the resilience of the institution and of the residents as a whole. Furthermore, located in Sarajevo’s western periphery, it did not condemn the traumatized residents to perpetual sightings, while its location on the city’s main access road would ensure its visibility. The ̵ Oslobodenje site was deemed an “informal and authentic monument of the war” (Imamović Pirke 2011). Nevertheless, it was bought and rebuilt as an office building, later a hotel, by the owner of the newspaper that ̵ replaced Oslobodenje in popularity, Dnevni Avaz. The nondescript generic glass-and-steel building replaced the ruin and canceled its memorial potentiality, symbolizing the shift in political economy, not only with the investor urbanism of the neoliberal transition triumphing in urban space but also with the replacement of one media voice by another. The radical reconstruction approach and the possibility of keeping a ruin-memorial need to be contextualized within the two urban situations of Belgrade and Sarajevo. Given the long duration of the war and the extensive damage it caused, the scheme devised by Woods would be a ̵ painful reminder for the traumatized population. The Oslobodenje idea, with its message of resilience expressed by a singular building outside the center, could have served as a reflective reconstruction for the city. In Belgrade, however, a ruin-memorial could become just another monument to victimhood: it faces the challenge to incorporate the multiple layers of meaning conveyed by the Army building in the context of the 1990s wars in general and the NATO bombings in particular. These ruins have the potential, through a reflective reconstruction (Bădescu 2019b), to constitute mnemotopoi (Assmann 2007), places of memory in the city. Yet to do so, their designers and curators have to grapple with the complexity of locally specific memory threads. The discussions about making ruins a site of memory contrast with another relationship of ruins to memory, what Buchli and Lucas (2001); González-Ruibal et al. (2008) called places of abjection. While mnemotopoi celebrate the connection of memory with place, ruins as places of

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abjection are those obfuscated by memory practices. Places of abjection become places of amnesia. One example of how ruins become abject places is the Vraca Memorial Park in Sarajevo, which embodies how even a memorial park can be a place of amnesia. The Vraca Memorial Park was a site dedicated to the common Sarajevan struggle against fascism in the Second World War. The Austro-Hungarian fort was part of a larger memorial complex opened in 1981 to commemorate partisan struggle and the resistance of the city during the Second World War, when the fort also played an important role. Until 1992, the fort hosted an exhibit about the anti-fascist struggle during that war. During the siege, Bosnian Serb paramilitaries shelled from the hills where the fort is located—according to some accounts, from the fort itself (Fig. 12.2). Ravaged during these operations, Vraca is now an abandoned, derelict, desolate site, with vegetation growing amidst the walls of the museum and the large plateau unkempt and trashed. There are seemingly no plans to reconstruct it and the place seems forgotten in between the two Sarajevos, as the border between these two territorial entities runs through it. Vraca thus plays a double memorial role—as a creation, it is a spatialized realm of memory to commemorate one war, and as ruins, a reminder of the second. Yet, these ruins did not become a mnemotopos; instead, they were redefined by a lack of care and a lack of commemorative practices as a place of abjection. This recalls Ricoeur’s (2004) “being no longer,” pursued in contested or (post)-conflict environments through the imposition of new official histories that ban or neglect entire sets of memories (Bakshi 2017). Nevertheless, the sheer existence of such a place, even in ruins, expresses Ricoeur’s “having been [which] makes forgetting the immemorial resource offered to the work of remembering” (2004: 443).

Conclusion While city-makers usually frame urban reconstruction as a technical process of repair of the urban fabric, this chapter has underlined the connection between the act of urban rebuilding and the processes of dealing with the past. Moreover, it has highlighted the importance of the local canvas of memory processes, generally a contested landscape of competing memories, often with ambivalent and ambiguous undertones. Only in the case of Milošević’s Serbia, with the dominant memory narrative of the NATO bombing enhanced by its authoritarian grip over society, was the memorialization in space direct and unambiguous. The Eternal Flame supported

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Fig. 12.2  Vraca Memorial Park, Sarajevo, used for shelling the city and then destroyed during the Siege of Sarajevo (1992–1995) by Bosnian Serb paramilitaries. Photograph by the author

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the regime’s victory claim and the dual victimhood-resilience trope, which marked that narrative. In post-Milošević Serbia, however, despite the existence of a collective memory of the NATO bombing, the politics of memory has been one of an obfuscation of the past, deflecting questions of responsibility for conflict in the former Yugoslavia and violence in Kosovo. This resulted in weak and tardy memorial acts in space, but also in indecision about how to make sense of the ruins of official buildings. The ambiguity and contestations of memorialization in space reflect the heterogeneous and conflicting nature of collective memories, even where there is a dominant collective memory, as in Belgrade, and not only, as we might more intuitively expect, in Sarajevo, where there are a number of competing memory narratives. Ruins have stepped in at times to perform the role of memorials. In Sarajevo, despite the larger scale of destruction, the presence of ruins and traces of conflict are arguably less central today than in Belgrade. The predilection in Sarajevo for reconstruction, and not to memorialize ruins, could be connected with the attempt to remove actual traces of the traumatic experience. Some rejected memorializing schemes such as the one by Lebbeus Woods out of nostalgia for prewar times, while others were motivated by a desire to rebuild a city in relation to various national narratives. Both stances are seemingly removed from the collective memory of war, but they relate to different understandings of national identity—a harmonious, multicultural, Yugoslav Sarajevo versus a nationally defined Sarajevo for which multiethnic Yugoslavia was an aberration. In contrast, the persistence of ruins in Belgrade embodies and performs discourses related to the memory of war—they are traces of war both in the sense of historic relic and condensed narration. Ruined buildings like the Generalštab continue to act as a mnemonic device of war and connect to tropes relating to national identity, such as victimhood. We have explored how city-makers—local authorities, architects, and planners—have selected and reassembled particular spatialized collective memories to produce urban environments. At times, reconstruction incorporated a symbolic violence which fed from the memories of war and carried new discourses of group identity. The reconstruction of religious buildings in Sarajevo highlighted differentiated memories and national identities competing over space. The makeover of destroyed socialist buildings in both cities reflected the marginalization of the Yugoslav past, which became abject heritage and a place of amnesia. The debates surrounding the reconstruction of bombed buildings in Belgrade revealed

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the centrality of the memory of the NATO bombing and of the trope of victimhood for Serbian national identity, highlighting challenges to coming to terms with the past after Milošević. The reconstruction of cities after war is thus not only a challenge for societies to recover, to provide housing, infrastructure, and livelihoods for people, but also an occasion to engage with the process of dealing with the past. The act of reconstruction needs to be finely aware of local meanings and memory processes: imported scenarios could be misplaced, if not finely tuned with the local context. Including the concern for memory complicates the act of design, as the reception of intended meaning by urban residents is not something to be taken for granted. Nevertheless, it is key to ensure that design decisions do not threaten the possibility to work with memory, do not produce further erasures or amnesia, and do not engender the continuity of conflict through symbolic violence.

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CHAPTER 13

Monumentality, Forensic Practices, and the Representation of the Dead: The Debate about the Memory of the Post-­Civil War Victims in the Almudena Cemetery, Madrid Ulrike Capdepón

A first version of this contribution was presented at the international conference Bodies out of Place: Mass Violence, Mass Graves and Necropolitics organized by the research project “Below Ground: Mass Grave Exhumations and Human Rights in Historical, Transnational and Comparative Perspective” (CCHS-CSIC) in Donosti, Spain, in July 2018. I thank all the participants for their feedback and fruitful discussion. I am also grateful to Tomás Montero Aparicio, Fuen Benavente, and artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo for the personal interviews, conversations, and generosity in sharing their thoughts.

U. Capdepón (*) Universität Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 U. Capdepón, S. Dornhof (eds.), Contested Urban Spaces, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87505-3_13

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Introduction Memorials fundamentally shape the historical layers of a cityscape. Commemoration—a central element in forming the collective memory of a certain group (J. Assmann 1992; Winter 1995; Baines 2019)—is often accompanied by debates on who to remember and how that should be done, bearing on the way a society conceives its contested past. This chapter engages with the debate around the creation of a memorial honoring the victims of the post-Spanish Civil war repression (1939-44) who were shot at the Almudena cemetery (previously known as the Cemetery of the East)—Madrid’s biggest necropolis and one of the largest in Europe, which, like many other cemeteries during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and the immediate postwar period, became the scene of mass executions. The current City Council of Madrid stopped the construction of this memorial in July 2019 which was on the verge of its inauguration when, following municipal elections, the new mayor José Luis Martínez-­ Almeida announced that the memorial project was not to go ahead. Its construction, already at an advanced stage, was immediately halted, and its recently installed name plaques were taken down and for the most part destroyed shortly after. By reconstructing the controversy that erecting this memorial sparked, one aim of this chapter is to analyze the symbolic meaning of names and bodily remains, the close links between them, and how they relate to memorials, more specifically, their presence or absence, based on research in the intersecting fields of memory politics, forensics, and transitional justice, where exhumations, reburials, and victim memorialization are seen as truth-providing, dignifying, and therefore potentially healing mechanisms. The aim of this chapter is to insert the political debate sparked by the installation of the memorial into a broader perspective, contextualizing it in flows of globally circulating memorial aesthetics of symbolic victim recognition that is informed—in part—by Holocaust memorialization practices (Huyssen 2003: 105; Schindel 2014). The key questions guiding the following analysis are as follows: from a forensic perspective, what is the added symbolic value that derives from including human remains in a memorial? And what does it mean, by contrast, if the bodies are absent, particularly in a cemetery? How does the material afterlife of the bodies relate to the memory of the dead to which they refer? Furthermore, how does the presence or absence of human remains change the relationship of the living with the memorial site in

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commemorative practices, especially if it is a testimonial or authentic site where the crime occurred? And finally, what commemorative conflicts and public disputes did the construction—and later destruction—of this memorial provoke? To discuss these concerns, this contribution describes the commemorative history of the site—particularly the firing squad wall in the Almudena cemetery—where, after the Republican defeat, nearly 3000 persons were shot as part of the revenge strategy carried out without any judicial protections in the early years of the Franco regime (1939-75), especially in Madrid, which had been the capital of Republican resistance. The first part contextualizes the current debate both within global monumentalization practices, by attempting a transnational genealogy of memorial walls, and within the Spanish memory landscape, where after the dictatorship, and especially since 2010, memorials have been constructed in cemeteries to commemorate victims of the Civil War and the Francoist repression. The next section places the debate around the memorial in the context of the progressive memory politics of the Ahora Madrid (AM) administration, elected in a surprise victory in May 2015 after the conservative Partido Popular (PP) had controlled local government for twenty-four years. After a further political shift in May 2019, the city once again acquired a conservative town hall, now governed by the PP in coalition not only with the liberal-conservative Ciudadanos (C’s), but also for the first time with the support of Vox, the new ultra-right populist party. The halt to construction at this memorial was a direct consequence.

Topography of Victim Memorials: Between Local Mnemonic Designs and Global Aesthetic Circulations While the commemoration of the dead is a basic anthropological principle that has been generally regarded as the origin of human memorial culture (J. Assmann 1992), cemeteries can be considered as privileged spaces of urban memory: burials and graveyards constitute sites of mourning that symbolically keep the memory of loved ones alive when they pass away. At the same time, as places where the memory of the dead is expressed, acknowledged, and honored, their history is safeguarded as a form of collective memory for the urban community. Since collective memory is rooted in bringing the past to the present, the places where the dead are

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buried constitute exemplary sites of memory and commemoration (Laqueur 2015). At cemeteries, then, we remember and commemorate the dead not only privately in personal grief, but also publicly and observably (Vanderstraeten 2014). But how do we remember the dead in cemeteries? How are material objects, such as tombstones, monuments, and memorials, designed and linked to central moments and persons that provide meaning to urban culture and history? Who is included and who is excluded from the local memory culture in this ritualization of commemorating the deceased? The commemoration of the dead becomes especially contested when it relates to victims of political violence and state repression. Therefore, debates about cultural memory in the Spanish post-­ dictatorship era cannot be understood without considering these mnemonic spaces. It is important to bear in mind that under the Franco regime there had been severe restrictions on mourning, and remembrance of the defeated was a clandestine act. During the Spanish transition process after the dictator Francisco Franco died in November 1975, memorials and pantheons had already been established in many cemeteries with inscriptions paying tribute to Republican victims of the Civil War (Aguilar Fernández 2017, 2018). However, it was only in the new millennium, after fundamental changes in Spanish memory politics and the emergence of an active memorial movement with roots in civil society, and a first cycle of exhumations of exhumations at mass graves dating back to the Civil War (Ferrándiz 2014), that the continuous construction of numerous memorials to victims of the Francoist repression began in cemeteries throughout the Spanish memory landscape (Mir Curcó and Gelonch Solé 2013; Palacios and Saqqa 2019). In this process, the dynamics of memorialization have often followed internationally established aesthetic models. One of the tropes of these deathscapes or funerary landscapes on a global scale is the presence of long walls detailing the names of the victims. Most commonly, the names are engraved on walls of solid stone, designed to personalize and solemnly acknowledge “what otherwise would be an abstract number of those who died or disappeared” (Schäfer and Buckley Zistel 2014). The twentieth century witnessed a growing monumentalization to honor soldiers as victims of war. Historian Reinhart Koselleck, who studied the political cult of violent death in the history of collective commemoration in depth, described the significance of war memorials to the “fallen,” the Kriegsdenkmäler (war memorials) and Ehrenmale (honor

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memorials) in modern Europe following the French Revolution, especially after World War I (1914-18) (Koselleck and Jeismann 1994: 10), and how they spread throughout the continent (see also Winter 1995: 78-116), with the added difficulty of having to commemorate soldiers who either had not been buried, since their corpses could not be found, or remained unidentifiable and therefore nameless. The rhetoric of these monuments often testified to the strength and glorification of the nation, with a heroic narrative of “brave, fallen soldiers,” but also, increasingly, an acknowledged pain of loss reflected in the “unknown soldier” (Kattago 2015: 185-187). After World War II (1939-45), however, a paradigm shift set in, emphasizing the senselessness of violent death (Koselleck 2002, 2011): in response to revelations about the horrors of Nazi Germany’s Holocaust, memorial projects increasingly adopted the aesthetic format of extensive walls with the names of civilian victims. Publicly displaying the names of the dead thus became a way of keeping alive the memory of millions and giving them a permanent presence among the living. By exposing their names (and thereby preserving their identity), victims emerged from anonymity and were rescued from oblivion. As Andreas Huyssen (2003) has pointed out, these forms of victim commemoration often draw on an already-established global circulation of aesthetics and memorialization practices for how to remember victims of repression and mass violence publicly. Yad Vashem, meaning “a monument and a name,” built in Jerusalem with the mission to commemorate the “martyrs” of the Holocaust and inaugurated in 1957, is perhaps the best-known memorial that introduces at least two new elements, designed to safeguard the memory of Holocaust victims with the Hall of Names created in 1967: first, a photograph, that is, secondly, accompanied by an identity card. In addition, the memorial extends the conventional format of the wall of names by offering an extensive biographical archive, now accessible online in digital form through the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names. In the twenty-first century, many initiatives have paid similar tribute to the victims of atrocities and genocide, turning the wall of names into a canonical form of monumentalization and a universal language of grief. A more recent example of this aesthetic among many others is the Shoah Memorial in Paris, inaugurated in 2005, which dedicates a long wall of names to the 76,000 Jewish victims who were deported from France and murdered during World War II.

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As reflected in the wide dissemination of victim memorials, and with the global proliferation of a strong human rights discourse in the 1990s, the demands of memory and justice have become more prominent as a universal imperative for the commemoration of mass atrocities and genocides. Some of the most emblematic memorial walls in cemeteries (among many others) articulated in these aesthetic terms globally are the Potočari genocide memorial in Srebrenica erected in 2005 to honor the victims, mostly Muslim Bosniaks, of the 1995 massacre, and the victim wall memorial in Kigali from 2004, inaugurated on the tenth anniversary of the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, where the relationship between relatives and the human remains is fundamental (Viehbach 2014). Following the dictatorships and violent internal conflicts in many South American countries that had shaped the continent in the second half of the last century, memorials linked to state violence of the recent past have multiplied in the last two decades. An example of this is the Memorial to the Detained Disappeared in the General Cemetery of Santiago de Chile, built right after the end of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-89) in 1991, consisting of a massive stonewall engraved with the names of disappeared and executed victims. As it is located in the cemetery, it also contains niches with the bodies that have been found, and has empty spaces for those who are still missing (a feature that was not included in the conceptualization of the Almudena Memorial in Madrid). Another emblematic example is the “wall of names” commemorating the 30,000 disappeared, victims of Argentine state terrorism (1976-83), in the memory park in Buenos Aires, with the difference that, being located in a park, it is explicitly not related to human remains. Yet, one more example in the regional context of the Southern Cone countries is the memorial dedicated to the disappeared victims of the dictatorship in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo, a glass construction with the names of the victims engraved. As in the previous example, this is not located in a cemetery, but in Vaz Ferreira Park.1 In both cases, the question that arises is whether—as Estela Schindel has pointed out (Schindel 2009)—the repressive method of 1  Another important example in Central America is the memorial wall located in the Cuscatlán park in San Salvador, built in 2003 with the names of more than 25,000 victims, civilians murdered and disappeared during El Salvador’s armed conflict and the Civil War (1981-82), providing a space for families to mourn founded on the aesthetic design and purpose of symbolic reparation. The construction was based on the 1993 report of the Truth Commission for El Salvador, and was erected at the initiative of the Committee for the Monument of Civilian Victims of Human Rights Violations.

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enforced disappearance fits into the traditional practice of commemorating deaths in cemeteries. In Argentina and Uruguay, the advocates who pushed for the creation of this memorial to the disappeared victims made it clear that such memorialization does not aim to restore or replace their grave, as their remains were still missing and that would amount to accepting their death. There is a tension here compared with the memorials in Santiago’s General Cemetery or Madrid’s Almudena, where the victims are commemorated in a burial ground, in the latter case without a direct link to the human remains but on the authentic site where the crimes occurred. Since the emergence of a widespread active memory culture in recent years, several examples of similar memorial interventions have been created in the Spanish context, which are framed by those universal aesthetic clues of victim commemoration. For example, there is the mausoleum in the Andalusian town of Málaga, a pyramid in the former San Rafael cemetery, built in 2014 to remember the Republican Civil War victims, which houses a total of 2840 human remains. The names of all the identified victims, more then 4100, have been engraved on its white marble surface. In this way, the memorial proceeds by metonymy, where a smaller number of bodies expands through a larger number of names and, finally, is projected onto the entire community of anonymous victims. Another example, inaugurated in October 2010, is the memorial in the cemetery of Torrero in Zaragoza. This has a somewhat different aesthetic, consisting in small vertical metallic plates, but also incorporating the names of the more than 3500 victims who were shot there or who disappeared, indicating the dates of their deaths and their age, where these are known. Or there is the memorial in the Catalan town of Lleida, erected in its cemetery in the same year to commemorate the 547 Republican victims buried there in a mass grave, or the memorial in the cemetery of Granada (Andalusia), inaugurated only in 2017, which consists of a metal wall memorial structure engraved with the names of the at least 3969 executed victims, with references to almost 600 victims who could not be identified.2 2  There are numerous other examples of memorialization efforts in Spanish cemeteries as authentic memory sites. One of the most recent commemorative initiatives is the Camp de la Bota in Barcelona, where the 1706 persons executed during the postwar repression until 1952 have been commemorated since February 2019 with a memorial bearing the names of the victims. The large stonewall is the work of Francesc Abad and emulates the wall where the firing squad executions took place. Other memorials that stand out are at the mass grave in Almansa (Albacete) built in 2005 that displays the names of more than a hundred victims

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It is in this context, as political consensus apparently emerged in Spanish society and politics about the need to commemorate Republican victims, that we must place the work of Madrid’s civil-society memorial activists, and above all the efforts of the association Memoria y Libertad (Memory and Liberty). Since 2005, the association has been demanding a memorial to honor the victims of the postwar executions that had taken place in the Almudena cemetery. The association was founded by the grandson of Tomás Montero Labrandero, a peasant executed there, who built up a wide community-based network of descendants with an important online presence, including a database of the executed victims containing extensive contextual documentation.3 It is important to note that a mnemonic activist cult has already been taking place at this space in the Almudena cemetery. For a long time, the relatives have improvised a memory site at what is believed to be the execution wall, installing photos and objects such as flowers, candles, or photographs of their murdered relatives, and other personal artifacts—commemorative practices that can be qualified as performative and ephemeral. In the absence of a permanent memorial, this cemetery wall has a long history of commemorative interventions, expressing the desire of relatives to establish a place to mourn their loved ones. Every year on April 14, the anniversary of the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931, relatives and memory activists hold a commemoration there, framed by a musical and artistic program in the presence of family members, memorial activists, and local politicians, as well as participants from all over Spain. In addition to these constant planned, spontaneous and more-or-less improvised interventions, several commemorative plaques have been placed on the old wall of the Almudena cemetery. The first, installed in 1988, was dedicated to the “Thirteen Roses,” the thirteen young women members of the Unified Socialist Youth (Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas, JSU) who were executed there on August 5, 1939. In 2009, seventy years from the postwar period, and the one in Tarragona set up in 2012 with 711 names (García Funes 2020: 137). 3  Memoria y Libertad’s web page can be accessed at: http://www.memoriaylibertad.org/ Additionally, a recently published “memorial book,” an edited volume (Hernández Holgado and Montero Aparicio, eds. 2020) that brings together contributions dealing with different aspects of the memorial, including a commemorative database of the victims’ names and its exhaustive documentation, has been coined a “paper monument,” alluding to its function as a temporary replacement for the actual material memorial, the stone wall bearing the names (El Diario.es 2020).

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later, the “13 Roses Foundation” placed a similar plaque there; this led to some controversy as the previous plaque was removed in the process, but was later reinstalled (Corrales Morales 2015), indicating conflicts between different memory associations and their differing mnemonic interests. One particularity of the memorial erected in the Almudena cemetery compared to other memorials mentioned before lies in the funerary history of the place. In addition, while many memorials deliberatively installed in cemeteries offer the possibility of linking the name of the victims with human remains, the apparent lack of human bodies in the case of the memorial in the Madrid cemetery further complicates the situation. As I will argue, the absence of human remains in the memorial installation, especially in a cemetery, is an element of great symbolic value, highlighting the importance of naming the death instead. In this context, the question is whether there are any human remains that serve as relics for family members in cases where the bodies are absent. Or, as we saw in the case of the memorials in Montevideo and Buenos Aires, whether the commemoration of deaths through their names is consciously and explicitly dissociated from the physical space of the cemetery because the victims are still regarded as missing persons—or at least the human remains are absent— and therefore should not be memorialized in the cemetery. Conceptually, the paradigm of transitional justice offers a global framework for victim recognition that is intertwined with national and local dynamics. In this way, international norms take shape according to the interests, values, and needs of each specific local context. With the aim of exploring the different initiatives of victim commemoration from a transitional justice perspective, Judy Barsalou (2014: 49) differentiates three forms that memorialization can take. First, there are constructed memory sites, such as museums, monuments, walls with names of victims, and virtual online memorials; second, she defines “found sites” in the sense of authentic places in the form of “gravesites, locations of mass killings, torture centers and prisons,” to which, among others, cemeteries can be added; and finally, she considers commemorative activities like symbolic acts or performances and mobilizations, for instance “demonstrations or vigils, walking tours or parades […] or place re-naming and apologies” (Ibid.). In our analysis of the memorial in the Almudena cemetery it becomes clear that these three conceptual layers that Barsalou distinguishes converge, as they only serve in heuristic terms. They are intrinsically related and overlapping, since the wall in the Almudena cemetery is

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an authentic site where a memorial is being built as a consequence of strong civil-society activism, while performing commemorative acts.

The Memory Site at La Almudena: The Controversy Over the Memorial There has been intense controversy over the memorial since 2017, when the local administration announced its creation and the need to complete the lists of names and dates of the victims for that purpose. The city council sought to provide a space and context for the memorial that the relatives and the memorial associations had been claiming for years. The concrete idea for the memorial project presenting the names of the victims goes back to 2008, when Memoria y Libertad first submitted a letter to Madrid’s city hall (that received no response) requesting a space for memory in the cemetery where the executions had taken place. In 2015, after the political shift to the more responsive AM administration, the association repeated its request, and this time it was acknowledged (Montero Aparicio 2020b). This culminated in the involvement of the Memory Commission, a local government body in Madrid, created precisely to advise the city council on issues of memory politics with members appointed by all political parties, which was to hire a team of experts to compile the list of names. Through its Human Rights and Memory Office, the AM-led city council, headed by the then mayor Manuela Carmena, proposed a memorial that was to be part of a larger program, with the aim of creating fifteen official memory sites throughout the Spanish capital. The installation of this memorial was based on the measures adopted by the council to ensure effective compliance with state regulations, particularly the nationwide “law of historical memory,” in force since 2007 but often ignored by local mayors, thus responding to international recommendations on the acknowledgment of victims of human rights violations. The aim was also to establish an alternative narrative on the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship in the urban space, since the Francoist symbolic framework had largely endured after the Spanish transition to democracy, with the long dominance of PP administrations in the Spanish capital. A group of historians, coordinated by Fernando Hernández Holgado at the Complutense University, was commissioned to compile the name list, and the research team issued a report in February 2018. While a first

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exhaustive study, conducted by Mirta Núñez Díaz Balart and Antonio Rojas in 1997 (Núñez Díaz Balart and Rojas 1997), had compiled 2663 names, the new report ended up with almost 3000: 2934 in total—271 more than previously known (to which two names were added later on)— of whom eighty were women. The interments of the executed victims included a diverse variety of profiles, ranging from day laborers, teachers, nurses, and doctors to politicians like ministers or mayors, mostly affiliated to trade unions and Republican parties (Montero Aparicio 2020a: 99). As described in this report (Hernández Holgado 2018, 2020), the process for the interments had been as follows: the order for burial was issued automatically for each executed person. They were buried in the so-called “charity” tombs, that is, common graves that are free of charge. The bodies interred in this way remained in these improvised graves for up to ten years. During this time, relatives could claim them for exhumation and rebury them in a paid-for tomb. If no family member claimed them, the human remains buried in common graves in the cemetery were taken to the Carabanchel cemetery to be cremated. According to the official narrative, this means that by the middle of the 1950s, the common graves of those executed during the postwar period were empty. Fear was one reason that the vast majority of relatives did not claim the body of their loved ones. And, for that reason, very few of those executed during the postwar period have tombstones today, and only a small number remain in graves that can be visited.4 As described by Manuel García Múñoz, the relatives only obtained authorization to recover the remains “provided that the burial takes place in privacy and without any publicity” (2012: 69), demonstrating the continued repression that made mourning of victims who had fought on the Republican side a clandestine act. However, according to a recent study, around 2500 human remains are estimated to have been abandoned in the two remaining ossuaries at Almudena, one of them only discovered in 2018, which may still contain dead bodies going back to the postwar executions (Montero 2020a: 98), again problematizing the appropriate form of memorialization further. The Human Rights and Memory Office of the former AM-Mayoral administration was promoted to take actions for the study of the remains in March 4  Some of the most prominent cases are the tombs of Julián Zugazagoitia, journalist and last Minister of the Interior during the Second Republic, and some of the fourteen Republican mayors from nearby towns who were shot there as part of the postwar revenge. Furthermore, some of the “Thirteen Roses” are buried in a proper, individual grave in the cemetery.

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2019, but could not go ahead due to the proximity of the elections. While it was unlikely that the current mayoral administration would take charge of exhuming these massive ossuaries in order to identify the human remains, currently a study is being carried out by the official funeral company Empresa Municipal de Servicios Funerarios y Cementerios de Madrid to examine the human remains that emerged in the historic ossuary, however, without involving the relatives association Memoria y Libertad in their work despite they having requested it at several occasions.5 Since officially the remains were cremated in Carabanchel, today, with the exception of some rather discreet individual graves, we do not know exactly if there are human remains in the ossuary that can be associated with the victims who were to be commemorated by the planned memorial.

The Importance of the Names, and the ‘Chequistas’ Dispute As Schwarz and Pacifici (1991) have emphasized for Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Washington Mall, the name of the dead not only fulfills a commemorative function but also allows a memorial to serve as a place of mourning for the relatives of the publicly acknowledged victim, and offerings and objects are left for the deceased as if their bodies were present. In fact, the motto Memoria y Libertad proposed for the Madrid memorial follows this logic: “May my name not be erased from history,” quoting the last words that Julia Conesa, one of the “13 Roses,” wrote to her family a few hours before her execution at the cemetery walls. As expressed by Tomás Montero, the absence of the bodies accentuates a dynamic of metaphorical representations claiming their fictive presence, moved by the desire to fill a void. In this sense, the names have the symbolic function of substituting the authentic body, and with that individualizing the victims.6 To return to the controversy, the question of capturing the names and displaying them on the memorial wall became one of the main topics in the dispute that emerged. When the progressive city council of Ahora Madrid announced the construction of a memorial in the Almudena 5  Público. Arrancan los trabajos en las ‘fosas de los fusilados’ de la Almudena donde podrían estar las ‘Trece Rosas,’ July 7, 2021. E-mail communication with Tomás Montero Aparicio, July 14, 2021. 6  Personal phone interview with Tomás Montero Aparicio, August 30, 2019.

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cemetery, including all the names of the victims who were killed there, the immediate controversy could not have been greater. As soon as the aforementioned report was published, the political opposition led by the PP immediately demanded that a list should be drawn up including all those murdered during the Civil War under Republican rule in Madrid. The media of the political right, especially the daily newspaper ABC, argued that among the persons on the expanded list were 335 names of supposed chequistas, a controversial term used in Francoist propaganda (as an allusion to Soviet communist forces) to imply that the Republican army participated in acts of violence and repression (Jiménez Herrera 2020).7 The confrontations continued in social networks and newspapers as criticism of the memorial took shape, demanding that it should include “mention of the people who participated in the rearguard crimes in Madrid between 1936-39,” to quote the official rejection proposal submitted by the PP and Ciudadanos (cit. in García Funes 2020: 140). As a result, the Memory Commission set up in 2016 by Mayor Carmena precisely to avoid politically partisan conflicts in  local memory politics drew on this argument to reject the list. The commission members advocated a wall with no names, proposing an anonymous memorial instead. While PSOE (the Socialist Party) and AM tried to focus the debate on maintaining that they were not judging the lives of those whose names would be inscribed on the memorial and emphasizing their status as victims, the controversy unfolding in the social media and newspapers labeled the memorial “revanchist.” And yet one of the key demands of the memorial associations involved was precisely that the memorial should display the names of those executed there. Memoria y Libertad’s response was clear: “It is as if Francoism killed the victims twice and twice condemned them to oblivion. It’s an inadmissible proposal,” it said in a statement.8 However, the Memory Commission on this occasion expressed the need for not one memorial (without names), but two: one dedicated to the victims of the Civil War period and the other to the victims of the 1939-1944 postwar period. In both cases, a QR code would replace the presence of names, which a cell phone user could scan to digitally decode the names. Four of the seven commissioners had expressed their  For instance: ABC. Carmena homenajeará a 335 chequistas, February 19, 2018.  Los familiares de víctimas del franquismo en Madrid se sienten agraviados y ofendidos por el Comisionado de la Memoria y piden a Carmena su disolución, April 24, 2018, online: http://www.memoriaylibertad.org/page/2/# 7 8

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rejection of the initial proposal for the memorial, thus jeopardizing the commitment made by Madrid’s city council to the victims’ relatives. Instead, the Commission proposed a virtual consultation—retrieving the names on a cell phone—as the solution to a social demand that had been on the agenda for several years. The proposal seemed more like an attempt to close the problem of the so-­called chequistas by once again invisibilizing the victims in urban space as a whole. It was at this time, with Commission members threatening to resign if the memorial was built, that the Commission then decided to dissolve itself in June 2018. Although its chair Francisca Sauquillo denied that the controversy over the memorial was the reason for the decision, the media highlighted the internal dispute over the names issue as the decisive factor. In the parliamentary debate that followed, PSOE and the left-wing party Ahora Madrid finally voted for all the names to be included in the Almudena memorial, contrary to the proposals by Ciudadanos, the PP, and Vox, and also in opposition to the now defunct Memory Commission. In May 2019, a few days before the municipal elections and despite the controversy, work began to create the memorial wall at the entrance to the cemetery, a few steps away from the improvised ephemeral site. The memorial, conceived and designed by Madrid-based artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo, included a central sculpture—composed of eight bronze oaks with their roots violently pulled out, lying in the center of the monument, representing the absent human remains—and walls in a labyrinth structure for the 3000 names to be engraved. The artist had been in close contact with the relatives’ associations to take into account their ideas about how the memorial should be designed. Anticipating that the monument might not be built, relatives hid in the tree trunk a list of the victims’ names along with personal letters to them that spoke of loss and recognition. Following the initiative of artist Sánchez Castillo, these inscriptions ensured that their relatives would be commemorated at the site, regardless of future political and cultural shifts.9 When the municipal elections led to a political move to the extreme right, the fears of the initiators of the memorial were proved right. The newly elected city council suspended work on the monument two months later, when 80 percent of the project had already been completed and there were only three weeks left before the scheduled inauguration date. 9  Personal interview with artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo in the Almudena cemetery, Madrid, June 21, 2019.

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The new city hall decided to resignify the memorial completely by not only destroying the name plaques but also dedicating it to all the Madrilenian victims of the Civil War—without any local reference to the mass executions that had taken place in the cemetery as an authentic place of memory. In November 2019, Martinez Almeida’s local administration began to remove the name plaques that were already installed (see Fig. 13.1). The new—and only—inscription now reads: “To all the people of Madrid who, between 1936 and 1944, suffered violence for political or ideological reasons or because of their religious beliefs. Peace, mercy and forgiveness”. The last three words of this message were taken, completely out of context, from the famous speech in Barcelona on July 18, 1938, by Manuel Azaña, the president of the Second Republic, as he sought to prepare public opinion for international mediation to end the war. Now it was perceived as a political provocation, igniting the controversy in the media even further.

Conclusion The establishment of long memorial walls of names commemorating victims after dictatorship, war, and mass violence is a contemporary phenomenon that has gained momentum in recent years. We have seen how memorials were constructed as an aesthetic form on a global scale to commemorate the victims of grave human rights violations, serving as a reminder of the atrocities of past violence with often educational purposes about the causes and consequences of a given violent conflict (Buckley-­ Zistel 2020). This is based on the hope that memorials provide some form of symbolic reparation and healing for victims and contribute to a culture of “never again.” In that sense, memorials aim to acknowledge victims’ suffering and have a reparative value; commemorative walls of names must therefore be considered as a form of symbolic burial and as places of mourning—despite the absence of human remains. Because of its materiality, a memorial is capable of telling a story of violence and dignifying the victims as a carrier of a powerful but solemn political message. With reference to the forensic significance implied in the controversy outlined earlier, let me finish with two observations: First, the “political life of dead bodies,” the term coined by Katherine Vérdery (1999), the symbolic meaning of their “material afterlife,” is able to spark controversies in the context of political shifts, independently of the presence or absence of actual human remains, as the names are intended to replace

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Fig. 13.1  Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Memorial, Almudena Cemetery, Madrid. The memorial after the names were removed in November 2019. Photograph by the artist

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absent bodies. The mere display of names at an authentic site was enough to spark a controversy that has dominated public debate in Madrid for more than four years. The second aspect is the absence of bodies, which, in the concrete case of the Almudena cemetery as an authentic, testimonial realm of memory, leads to a certain logic of metaphorization. The cemetery as a place that symbolizes death, and which preserves the bodies of those executed, is potentially able to create an aura of dignification. The logic of the relic can operate in the cemetery environment, and the honoring of the memorial with the names embodied is what makes the memorial a symbolic, not a forensic, grave, creating a place of mourning for the relatives. This symbolic character is transferred to the actual wall of the executions—emphasizing once again, the importance of the names. On the other hand, the absence of the remains is a consequence not of natural death, but of a political repressive practice after a civil war and state-sponsored violence, making the state responsible for its commemoration. In the Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires, it is the wall of names itself that marks a specific characteristic of deaths resulting from forced disappearance, since it intentionally disassociates the memorial from a cemetery, highlighting the absence of human remains in the commemoration, an aspect that was one of the demands of memory associations such as the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. The case study outlined here—with a destroyed memorial standing uncannily alongside an ossuary that might indeed contain human remains related to the executed victims, signaling a renewed, repeated symbolic erasure—illustrates the challenge and tensions between personal expectations, civil society aspirations, and official memory politics, especially when the latter takes place in a context of polarization, discontinuity, unpredictability, and a lack of political will, as in Madrid with its current city hall coalition between PP, Cs, and Vox. The role of the right-wing media and politicians in this controversy consisted in questioning the legitimacy of the names, challenging the definition of victim, and questioning who should be remembered or excluded from collective memory culture, until they achieved their goal of totally eliminating the wall of names as a memorial. As we have seen, in the context of local political confrontation and struggles over memory in contemporary Madrid, disputes about the past are always guided by interests in the present. To conclude, the memorial project for the victims of Francoist postwar repression in the Spanish capital of Madrid, initiated years later than for other cemetries in Spanish cities in similar situations, was converted after

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Fig. 13.2  Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Memorial, Almudena Cemetery, Madrid. The memorial in its current state, after its demolition and the removal of the name plaques. Photograph by the artist

the controversy into an abandoned space of naked stonewalls, with the name plaques demolished and an uprooted tree lying alongside, like tombstones symbolically destroyed in a devastated funerary landscape —an outcome that is the complete opposite of what was initially intended, a resting place, but one that expresses repeated symbolic erasure and destruction. As discussed earlier, a memorial with names is a form of victim commemoration and symbolic reparation that has spread globally in recent years. As shown in Fig. 13.2, the broken name plaques demonstrate the exceptional case that Madrid represents; a scandal not only for the relatives and victims, but also for public observers from Spain and across the world.

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References Aguilar Fernández, Paloma. 2017. Unwilling to Forget: Local Memory Initiatives in Post-Franco Spain. South European Society and Politics 22 (4): 405–426. ———. 2018. Memoria y transición en España. Exhumaciones de fusilados Republicanos y homenajes en su honor. Historia y Política 39., enero-­ junio: 291–325. Assmann, Jan. 1992. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. München: Beck. Baines, Gary. 2019. A Duty to Remember (and Forget)? A Transnational Perspective on Commemorating War. In War Memorial. The Second World War and Beyond, ed. Frank Jacob and Kenneth Pearl, 23–44. Paderborn: Schöningh. Barsalou, Judy. 2014. Reflecting the Fractured Past. Memoralization, Transitional Justice and the Role of Outsiders. In Memorials in Times of Transition, ed. Susanne Buckley Zistel and Stefanie Schäfer. Cambridge/Antwerp: Intersentia. Buckley-Zistel, Susanne. 2020. Memorials and Transitional Justice. In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies, ed. Oliver Richmond and Gëzim Viskoa. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3 -­030-­11795-­5_13-­1. Buckley-Zistel, Susanne, and Stefanie Schäfer, eds. 2014. Memorials in times of transition. Cambridge/Antwerp: Intersentia. Corrales Morales, David. 2015. Placas conmemoriativas a “las 13 rosas” en el cementerio de la Almudena: La represión franquista a través de las fuentes epigráficas. In Múñoz Serulla, María Teresa (ed.) Ab Initio, Revisa digital para estudiantes de Historia, Epigrafía en Madrid, número monográfico, III (6): 257-284. El Diario.es El memorial de La Almudena esconde un pendrive con los nombres que el Ayuntamiento de Madrid arrancó del monumento. October 8, 2020. Ferrándiz, Francisco. 2014. El pasado bajo tierra. Exhumaciones contemporáneas de la Guerra Civil. Barcelona: Anthropos. García Funes, Juan Carlos. 2020. El todo por la parte. La polémica en torno a los nombres de la víctima en el memorial del cementerio de la Almudena. In Morir en Madrid (1939-1944). Las ejecuciones masivas del franquismo en la capital, ed. Fernando Hernández Holgado and Tomás Montero Aparicio, 135–146. Madrid: Antonio Machado Libros. García Muñoz, Manuel. 2012. Los Fusilamientos de la Almudena: La violencia sectaria en Madrid durante los años de guerra y postguerra. Madrid: La Esfera de los libros. Hernández Holgado, Fernando, and Tomás Montero Aparicio, eds. 2020. Morir en Madrid (1939-1944). Las ejecuciones masivas del franquismo en la capital. Madrid: Antonio Machado Libros.

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Hernández Holgado, Fernando, et al. 2018. Listado de Personas ejecutadas durante la posguerra (1939-1944) en la ciudad de Madrid. Informe explicativo. Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jiménez Herrera, Fernando. 2020. Reinterpretar la violencia revolucionaria. El Franquismo y la construcción de las ‘checas.’. In Morir en Madrid (1939-1944). Las ejecuciones masivas del franquismo en la capital, ed. Fernando Hernández Holgado and Tomás Montero Aparicio, 147–157. Madrid: Antonio Machado Libros. Kattago, Siobhan. 2015. Written in Stone: Monuments and Representation. In Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies, ed. Siobhan Kattago, 179–195. Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate Publishing. Koselleck, Reinhart. 2002. Die Transformation der politischen Totenmale im 20. Jahrhundert. Transit. Europäische Revue 22: 59–86. ———. 2011. Modernidad, culto a la muerte y memoria nacional. Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales. Colección Historia de la Sociedad Política. Koselleck, Reinhart, and Michael Jeismann, eds. 1994. Der politische Totenkult. Kriegerdenkmäler in der Moderne. Bild und Text. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Laqueur, Thomas W. 2015. The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press. Mir Curcó, Conxita, and Josep Gelonch Solé, eds. 2013. Duelo y memoria. Espacios para el recuerdo de las víctimas de la represión franquista en perspectiva comparada. Lleida: Edicions de la Universitat de Lleida. Montero Aparicio, Tomás. 2020a. Quiénes eran. In Morir en Madrid (1939-1944). Las ejecuciones masivas del franquismo en la capital, 87–100. Madrid: Antonio Machado Libros. ———. 2020b. Memoria y libertad. Familiares de as víctimas haciendo historia. La represión franquista en Madrid. Memoria antifranqista del Baix Llobregat 15 (20): 9–13. Nuñez Díaz-Balart, Mirta, and Antonio Rojas Friend. 1997. Consejo de guerra: los fusilamientos en el Madrid de la posguerra, 1939-1945. Madrid: Compañía Literaria. Pacifici, Robin, and Berry Schwarz. 1991. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Commemorating a Difficult Past. American Journal of Sociology 92 (2): 376–420. Palacios, Daniel and Miriam Saqqa. 2019. De la exhumación a la monumentalización: una perspectiva interdisciplinar sobre la legitimación política en España desde el año 2000. In Amnis. online: http://journals.openedition.org/ amnis/4377; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/amnis.4377. Schindel, Estela. 2009. Inscribir el pasado en el presente: memoria y espacio urbano. Política y Cultura 31: 65–87.

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———. 2014. Grasping the Global and the Local in Memorialisation Practices. Some Dialogues and Tensions between Latin America and Europe. European Review 22 (4): 594–602. Vanderstraeten, Raf. 2014. Der Toten gedenken: eine soziologische Analyse von Friedhöfen und Grabsteinen. Sociologia Internationalis 52 (1): 41–64. Vérdery, Katherine. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies. New York: Columbia University Press. Viehbach, Julia. 2014. Alétheia and the Making of the World: Inner and Outer Dimensions of Memorials in Rwanda. In Memorials in Times of Transition, ed. Susanne Buckley-Zistel and Stefanie Schäfer, 69–95. Cambridge/Antwerp: Intersentia. Winter, Jay. 1995. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 14

The Mass Grave and the Memorial. Notes from Mexico on Memory Work as Contestation of Contemporary Terror Anne Huffschmid

Opening Imagine a land plagued by human remains in various shapes and sizes. Some have been located and salvaged by exhumation; others still lie underground, latent exhumations, as skeletons or fragments, some even liquefied or burnt to ashes. Imagine that there has been no natural disaster, but that human agency has sought deliberately to sever these bodies from their personhood. It does not require a work of fiction or the memory of a past event to imagine this scenario. This is Mexico today, or at least a part of it. In a landscape like this, what meaning or function might memory have if we think of it as agency? Can it reverse the impact of such dehumanization? Is it feasible or desirable to transform a mass grave into a memorial? I will approach these questions from two angles that have guided my research over the last fifteen years. The first emerged from my

A. Huffschmid (*) Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 U. Capdepón, S. Dornhof (eds.), Contested Urban Spaces, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87505-3_14

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investigation of processes of public memory related to violence and political repression of the so-called recent past and their articulation in present space, a long-term project linking Argentina and Mexico, inserted within the urban fabric of their capital cities.1 The second entailed me entering the forensic field with a broad study of processes and agencies in response to forced disappearances in Latin America, with a particular focus on Mexico today and the new forensic agencies of those affected.2 I shall explore tensions and intersections between these two realms, not only in their spatial and temporal logic but also in the way they generate meaning, based on my recent audiovisual research that I called “landscapes in transition.”3 On the one hand, I conceive the secret graves and other killing fields as sites where the necropolitics of the so-called recent past and present reveals its efficacy. They lend spatial and material form to the appalling uncertainty, deliberately fostered, that envelops bodies stripped of their identity within a limbo or a void (Aguirre 2016: 84), whose counterpart is the necrotheatrical exhibit of destructed bodies (Diéguez 2016: 134). On the other hand, I conceive these sites as contested spaces that harbor potential for an agency of resistance. As I have argued elsewhere (Huffschmid 2015b), we can understand forensic intervention and reconstruction as constitutive agency in the face of an ontological crime such as a forced disappearance. It offers, potentially at least, to reconnect names without bodies (those who are being sought) to bodies without names (those who have been found), to reconstitute their personhood, and to restore these rehumanized bodies to the social world (Somigliana 2012: 33). I propose, therefore, to see forensic work, performed by scientists but also by affected families—as it is in Mexico, where groups of searching  This research, carried out between 2005 and 2013, led to a number of publications, including the monograph Huffschmid (2015a); for a summary in English see Huffschmid (2018). 2  This research began in 2013 and ended in 2020, with audiovisual outcomes such as the documentary Persistencia (2019) and the web documentary Forensic Landscapes (2020) as well as the short documentary Dato sensible (2020). For written publications, see in Spanish Huffschmid (2015b, 2019b), in German Huffschmid (2019a), and in English Huffschmid (2020). 3  This exploration was facilitated by a fellowship from November 2019 to June 2020, together with Alfonso Díaz Tovar, granted by the Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS), based at its headquarters in Guadalajara, Mexico. A preliminary version was written in Spanish for the edited book Memoria y memoriales en México, coordinated by Alexandra Délano Alonso, Alicia de los Ríos, Maria del Vecchi, and Benjamin Nienass (Colegio de México, 2021). 1

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relatives have taken much of this labor into their own hands—in terms of reconstruction. Memorial work interests me as signification, as agency seeking to wrest social meaning from atrocity and to insert it in the terrain of what can be said and processed. Mario Rufer argues, concerning the “political work that memory performs on time,” that we should not understand it primarily “as the work of remembering but as the work of connecting” (Rufer 2019: 94; my emphasis). How does the emblematic space of forensics, the mass grave—which implies forensic activities such as searching, exhuming, identifying, and reconstructing—relate to the construction of memorial sites and markers that seek to commemorate and signify violence? And how can we speak of massacre, torture, or disappearance that occurs in geographical proximity to our urban everyday—for instance, in suburban settings—and yet seems to take place in a parallel universe, disrupting everyday scenarios constituted by “floating indifference” (Joseph 2002: 29)?

Mexican Terror Fields and Memory Agencies Unlike its South and Central American neighbors in the twentieth century, postrevolutionary Mexico’s political landscapes have been characterized by the formal continuity of a democratically elected government and the absence of formally acknowledged armed conflict. Nevertheless, from the late 1960s, the Mexican state applied selective but systematic repression, including forced disappearances, in order to defeat political and armed insurgencies within Mexican territory. This systematic state violence was kept widely invisible to the international eye by the political performance of the Mexican government as antagonist to the military regimes of South and Central America. As a result, it has never been fully recognized in recent Mexican history.4 Although there have been isolated initiatives to commemorate state violence, no transitional justice process was ever initiated. The impunity of state crimes remained intact and institutionalized, which is regarded as one of the enabling factors for the current violence crisis. More than 250,000 people have been killed or massacred, more than 80,000 have disappeared according to the latest statistics from early 2021, and more than 35,000 unidentified bodies, or parts of them, lie in forensic 4  See Rangel Lozano and Sánchez Serrano (2015), who correctly characterize Mexico’s counterinsurgency strategies in the 1960s and 1970s as “state terrorism”, departing from the usual but misleading semantic label “dirty war”.

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institutions. These numbers speak of a contemporary state of terror much less legible than the political repression or counterinsurgency policies in Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America. Organized crime and illegal economies play their part alongside fragments of a partially corrupt state apparatus. The current crisis is usually framed by the notion of a “war on drugs,” but this clearly oversimplifies the situation. Criminal economies go far beyond trafficking in illegal drugs, and they differ significantly from war scenarios, where the warring parties and front lines are clearly defined. They have roots in the militarization, from 2007 onward, of official action to combat the drug cartels, sparking in turn an unprecedented militarization of these competing cartels, the brutalization of territorial competition, and the diversification of forces committing violence. Moreover, a great deal of terror know-how was transferred from former counterinsurgency strategies, namely terror techniques such as torture and disappearance, military equipment, weaponry, and even manpower, as former generals, soldiers, and police officers enrolled massively in organized crime. Nowadays, the notion of state crime in Mexico no longer refers to a centralized logic of political repression but rather to a fragmented state apparatus, with some segments unwilling or inefficient, while others foster open ties with organized crime based on corruption in every form. The diversification in criminal agencies and motives entailed a significant shift in the profile of the victims. In Mexico, the overwhelming majority of victims are not killed or abducted because of their political, social, or professional activities (as activists, insurgents, or journalists), but because of their territorial or economic “availability” and vulnerability: for crossing a certain territory, for hanging out in certain areas, for doing business in certain precarious locations. The events associated worldwide with the name “Ayotzinapa”, the attack on unarmed college students by local police officers in September 2014 and the forced disappearance of 43 of them in Southern Mexico, brought the entanglements between local authorities and organized crime to the public realm.5 As for memorial agencies, the challenge consists then how to make sense of such widespread but opaque violence, which differs from the well-studied patterns of political and military violence in Latin American dictatorships or civil war settings during the 1970s and 1980s. How can extreme violence be commemorated when it is not confined to the recent or remote 5  For a detailed reconstruction and contextualization of these events, see the platform created by the research agency Forensic Architecture: http://www.plataforma-­ayotzinapa.org/.

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past, but keeps on happening in the present, as it does in contemporary Mexico, shaped by mass killings, disappearances, and deeply rooted impunity. Despite of the obvious difficulties to do so, it is worth taking note of the fact that many of the families of massacred or disappeared people actually express a fervent desire to carry out some kind of memorial work. The volume Memoria prematura, edited by Alfonso Ovalle and Díaz Tovar (2019), gather valuable account of recent memorializations. It lists a group of memorial manifestations around mass killings and disappearances in the last decade, grouping them into “markers,” “monuments,” and “anti-monuments.” Whereas marcas are placed at the crime scene, usually outside the urban centers, the other two categories delineate a field for debate about the meaning of a memorial in public and urban life; the authors present as monumentos six state-managed projects while they propose to coin as antimonumentos a group of self-organized, temporary, and shifting installations created by affected families. We will return to the notion of “marker” in the next section and to that of antimonumento in the third. For now, I would like to state the fragility of these (and other) self-organized memorials, which we might characterize also as vernacular. Their precarious nature, I argue, is symptomatic of the way Mexican society addresses the violence. The “affectedness” is only shared among those who have been affected directly, whose pain has not been socialized and has not elicited even a minimum institutional response. To them has fallen then not only the searching and the reconstructing of scattered remains, but also the impossible task of signifying the atrocities, by carrying out some kind of precarious memory work.

Memorial Markers at Sites of Extermination To explore the connection between extreme violence and memory work in contemporary Mexico, our focus must extend beyond the urban realm, the customary setting for memory sites, toward a variety of spatial typologies, ranging from suburbs to deserts, that have become crime scenes during the last decade. Our project “Landscapes in Transition”6 investigated 6  The title of this project carried out during the mentioned CALAS fellowship refers to diverse notions of transition: One, tha fact that these landscapes are being transformed into what I conceive of as “forensic landscapes”, first by extermination and then by the activities of those affected; two, we wanted to situate these landscapes within political or post-conflict scenarios of “transition” from a state of war or uncontrolled violence to the “pacification” promised by the new Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador when he took office

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Fig. 14.1  Memorial Lagos de Moreno (video-still short documentary “Dato sensible”, ©Huffschmid and Diaz Tovar)

three spaces, diverse geographies that have in common a dual condition as sites of extermination and exhumation. This section takes a closer look at some of the memorial agencies at work there. The little farmhouse lies on the edge of a highway, a few kilometers from the picturesque old town of Lagos de Moreno (see Fig. 14.1). The building is dilapidated inside with crumbling walls and broken windows; in the courtyard, ruinous walls and dried-out shrubs and trees are being overrun by new vegetation. The wall facing the road displays a colorful mural with five painted faces and a small metal plaque evoking “memory that resists” alongside a list of names. On the sign displaying the original name, La Ley del Monte (The Law of the Mountain), the segment “del Monte” has been blotted out and replaced by “de la verdad” (“of truth”). in late 2018. Furthermore, these areas had been previously explored by the two us, in seperate projects, in relation to the forensic and memorial agencies of families and others; this familiarity facilitated the inclusion of new methods such as drone photography and sound recording. The resulting narratives, the essay booklet Paisajes en Transición and the short documentary Dato Sensible (Sensitive data), focus on textures, patterns, and spatial contexts, seeking to combine a sensorial approach with an analytical perspective. The booklet is accessible online: http://www.calas.lat/publicaciones/libros-y-revistas/paisajes-en-transicion; the international trailer of Dato sensible: https://vimeo.com/512637526.

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The history of this former grocery store, used as a security base by one of the micro-cartels in the area, was reconstructed after the abduction of a group of youngsters in July 2013. The authorities, under pressure from intense family mobilization and with unusual speed, managed to detain a group of suspects, who confessed to the crime and also revealed the spot where the youngsters had been tortured, murdered, and then, according to their murderers, dissolved in acid. Some fragments were identified by DNA tests, others were not. This terrifying fact—that the bodies had been dissolved here—makes this site a de facto cemetery. Teresa Hernández7, the mother of one of the victims, describes it thus: This is my son’s grave because all of him remains here. And as I couldn’t bury him, I couldn’t do what people normally do, I see this as his grave. My son is here, his remains, what was left of him.

Different layers and functions are superimposed here in one place: it is the scene of a crime that has been at least partially reconstructed; it remains the repository for unidentified remains; it acquired the role of a cemetery for those who were identified, and it was turned by the families into a memorial marker. Let us look at that process more closely. Although the families soon learned, because of a leak, what had happened there, they were not allowed onto the site for a long time on the grounds of judicial restrictions. Not until 2015 could they enter the premises and discover not only its state of abandon but also the negligence of the authorities, who had not registered all the clues and evidence present. This was the starting point for a memorial recovery process, initiated by a group of anthropologists called Reco,8 resulting in August 2017 in a series of activities: they began with a “sowing for life” and a collective piece bordado (embroidery) that transferred the trauma temporarily into the town center,9 followed by a memorial pilgrimage on the supposed route of the abducted youngsters, and finally by the intervention on the façade, which consisted of a mural depicting the faces of those who had been murdered and a renaming, the mentioned rewriting ot the sign over the entrance. It is interesting to note that this renaming is not to be seen as a mere deletion, but as a deliberate 7  This verbatim quote and others from people involved have been extracted from recorded conversations during a stay in Lagos de Moreno from December 6 to 8, 2019. 8  Reco specializes in commemorations with victims of violence in Mexico (Díaz Tovar and Ovalle 2018: 233). 9  For an analysis of this particular memorial practice, see Olalde (2016).

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overwriting, a resemantization in defiance of the supposed narco-meaning of the original name. In a more indirect manner, the painted faces may also be read as contestation, challenging the literality of extermination and disappearance and the necro-power that claims to convert human life into nothingness. We might say that restoring the face is one of the primary functions of memory processes and spaces in general, just as reconstructing the name is one of the objectives of forensic action. Although the families assure to be happy that the mural has not been vandalized and has been widely “respected” so far, their memorial shares its relative powerlessness with that of other sites and markers. There still is a general lack of research into the impact of any kind of memorials on social imaginaries. But it sure can be stated for this specific case, that the indignation felt by the affected families was not echoed on a mass scale in Lagos de Moreno and that their mobilizations did not arouse major public empathy. “People don’t respond, that’s how it is,” An elder man, Felipe, recalled at one of our meetings. Another activist, Rosa, endorsed this: “The town did not support us.” And at times, she adds, a people’s own families do not either: “In my house they tell me you only talk about the dead.” At another point in the Mexican geography, the Gulf Coast, the mass grave at Colinas de Santa Fe is located a 15-minute drive from the port of Veracruz, a few minutes away from a suburban neighborhood. Here a

Fig. 14.2  Aerial image of the excavation site in Colinas de Santa Fe, Veracruz (video-still short documentary “Dato sensible”, ©Huffschmid and Diaz Tovar)

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group of mothers, banded together in a collective called Solecito, managed to locate, after three years of self-organized excavation work, about 300 bodies buried illegally, with the aid of a search brigade that they organized and financed themselves. Without dwelling here on the dynamics of this extraordinary forensic empowerment, which I have treated extensively elsewhere,10 I shall just focus on the potential for memorial action at this site (see Fig. 14.2). When the work finished in August 2019, a modest commemorative plaque was made by the members of the brigade. Interestingly, it carried no official logo but only an inscription that read: “In memory of all those who lay in darkness and now, with God’s bounty, are returning to the light. The Solecito Collective is grateful to the institutions who supported this great miracle,” a reference to the Office of the Attorney-General and the Science Division of the Federal Police. On first sight this grateful tone may seem surprising in view of the pronounced institutional passivity that was confined to “safeguarding” the work of the brigade, as we were able to observe on numerous field visits, and also in keeping with what we had been told by groups of families in other parts of Mexico. Upon closer scrutiny, the inscription permits other readings, for it recognizes the “support” of those who, as representatives of the state, had a clear obligation not to “support” but to take charge of this clandestine graveyard. And there is subtle irony to designating such an utterly worldly process, based on self-organized forensic, physical, and financial efforts, as a “miracle.” Moreover, it is revealing that the plaque speaks on behalf of the collective, confirming its decisive engagement with the site and therefore the mother’s responsibility for the site. Today, the plaque has disappeared, too. A few days after it was placed there by the brigade it was torn down by unknown hands. Only a few cellphone photos testify that it was ever there at all. “Incredible, but it vanished as if by magic,” we were told by Don Gonzalo, a member of the brigade.11 “Perhaps someone didn’t want it, didn’t like it, maybe the owner. Maybe he was thinking that if he wanted to sell the property in future it might cause problems.” While Gonzalo attributed the aggression to monetary calculation, Tere Jiménez from the Solecito collective took it 10  I followed up this process, together with Jan-Holger Hennies, between April 2017 and January 2019, leading to the audiovisual narratives and essays mentioned in footnote 2. 11  Colinas de Santa Fe, Veracruz, August 15, 2020.

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as a communicational purpose: “By taking it down they were implicitly telling us: the impunity continues, don’t go on, don’t do this.”12 I suggest reading the disappearance of the plaque as an indicator for the difficulty of practicing memory, as a kind of commemorative closure, in a terrain that is quite literally contested: between those who search and excavate buried corpses and those who keep burying them secretly, due to all the enabling structures. Jiménez is fully aware of the contestedness of the terrain and of the underlying messages they receive: If we wanted to honor them in some way with this plaque and they did this to us, obviously we are not going to put any other plaque there or anything else. How do you think we would dare? What for? What will we gain? We will come back to the same “don’t look for it”, “don’t push it.”

On this same site there is another marker, also there to record the crime but operating in a different way. It is a little nopal (prickly pear) that was planted a few years ago by one member of the collective, Celia Garcia, on the exact spot where they found the first body that they were able to identify and restore to a family. Celia recalls:13 I saw a little cactus, and I said, “this cactus is going to grow with time” and it will mark the place where the son of my friend Griselda lay. It was very moving, because I was thinking of my son too, and felt as if it was my son, and this left a sign, a marker that here someone had lain who was very much loved by a mother, who could have been me, but it was my friend.

It is a marker which goes without any discursivity, intended to mark - in a totally material sense-, one of the few certainties that could be snatched from this land of uncertainties, and at the same time recalls a bond of empathy: unerasable, but unreadable in its intimacy, decipherable only by those involved.

12  Conversation with members of Solecito during our encounter in Veracruz, from March 13 to 15, 2020 13  In a WhatsApp chat on September 9, 2020.

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Memory as Aesthetic Irruption Memory work might be interrogated as an interactive setting. Where do the memorial markers emerge from and whom are they addressing, that is, from which place or position do they speak and who are they trying to speak to? In the memorial at Lagos de Moreno, the inscription derives from an initiative taken by those affected and addresses, primarily a small community of people in a similar situation or with some kind of affinity: mostly relatives, some friends, or activists wishing to express solidarity, who come to the place to celebrate some anniversary or another commemorative reunion. In Veracruz too, in the clandestine graveyard at Colinas de Santa Fe, both the commemorative plaque and the nopal sown at the site of the first succesful excavation were placed there by people directly affected; they serve as reminders of the huge efforts they undertook, on their own behalf and for the few that might recognize themselves in the mirror of those efforts. Hypothetically, both markers might transcend the relative inaccessibility of the physical spaces by circulating as images on digital networks. Nevertheless, I argue – as elaborated, in earlier work14–, that without an accessible spatial anchor that can lend material shape to this experience and enable visitors a get into physical contact, any site will remain as an echo without resonance in the social space and imaginary. The markers materialize the effort to resist erasure and in so doing they do defy the dehumanizing message of the disappearance itself. But, as stated above, they do not reach beyond the affected community. Undoubtedly, there is an obvious need for spaces and sites where the experience of those who suffered the violence directly can be articulated and socially heard. But the “victim’s voice” cannot be taken as the only or absolute foundation of such spaces.15 First, because it is essential to recognize the situated nature of the victim’s statement, its subjectivity, but also its vulnerability and fragility. And second, because some crimes leave no 14  The need to (spatialize) memories of the terror in order to have a social as well as legal impact was one of the findings of my research into urban topographies of memory in Latin America (Huffschmid 2015a: 181). 15  On the complexity of the site of testimony, whose outcomes will always depend on a readiness to listen, see Jelin (2002: 79-98). The point, of course, is not to play down its veracity, but to recognize the importance of the unsayable, be it a “traumatic hole” (ibid. 96) or a self-protective silence.

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testimony: massacres with no surviving witnesses, bodies found that had not been sought, victims not sought or claimed by any family. So it is, I argue, about facilitating and broadening processes of social interaction and imagination. At this point I would like to bring in the potential of artistic intervention. If we see art as a “practice of problematization,” as Suely Rolnik suggests (Rolnik 2001: 6), a “practice of direct intervention” that seeks to “transform the world,” we must ask where exactly this artistic act seeks to “intervene” and what or whom it is trying to “change” there. Primarily the victims by helping them to “heal” or work through, and thus survive the experience? Or is it more about those (of us) who keep on living apparently untouched, shielded by some degree of amnesia? It is always useful to keep in mind that what we tend to call memory “by no way precludes forgetting,” as Todorov puts it in his famous writings on the “abuses of memory” (Todorov 2000 [1995]: 15). Jelin (2002) also teaches us to be skeptical about the usual binary or antithesis of remembering versus forgetting, pointing out that any dictatorship will establish and install its own memorial “stories” in the public sphere (Jelin 2002: 41/42). From this angle, negationism—denying the systematic nature of a criminal state but also of contemporary violence—is not the same thing as oblivion: it is in itself a narrative. From that perspective, in the current crisis of Mexican violence, memorial projects do not so much confront the forgetting and the silence, as is often claimed. Instead, the powerful and highly efficient narrative of no pasa nada (“there’s nothing going on”) or por algo será (“there must be a reason”), the usual excuse for criminalizing victims, just replaces the figure of subversivo—as in social imaginaries during dictatorships—with that of criminal. The atrocities themselves are not suppressed, for that would be difficult under a nondictatorial regime. Rather, they are somehow relegated to a parallel universe, by stigmatizing the victims or by trivializing the violence. So this narrative tends to normalize, dilute and fragment the social impact of the unbearable, converting it into some kind of dense and impenetrable opacity, in an attempt to naturalize our social coexistence with terror, to accept the unacceptable. Breaking out of the opacity, the paralyzing denseness, calls for memorial work, in my opinion, that does not seek to heal or comfort, but to confront and deconstruct these narratives. That is where I propose to locate the political potential of art, that I understand primarily as an aesthetic agency, that is, different from and beyond a pedagogical purpose or

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representational mediation or ethical immediacy, according to the typology described by Jacques Rancière16 (2010: 53–84) for the usual attributes assigned to art in political contexts. Instead, the “aesthetic efficacy” that Rancière (ibid. 58) highlights addresses the “coordinates of the sensible” (ibid. 66), facilitating detachment, discontinuity and an experience of dissent, as a “conflict between different sensory regimes” (ibid. 61), than Rancière finds crucial for the potential of artistic or aesthetical intervention in the political field. Its ability to produce “disruptions in the sensory fabric of perception” (ibid. 66) may lead to a reshaping of templates of perception and therefore enabling other ways of seeing and perceiving. This, says Rancière, means dispensing with the usual assumption of continuity between intention and effect. “Critical art is art that knows its political impact depends on aesthetic distance. It knows that its effect cannot be ensured, and that something always remains unsayable” (ibid. 84). Understanding memorial art as a labor of deconstruction was the principal achievement of what James E.  Young (1992) coined “counter-­ monuments.” This artistic movement originated in Germany in response to the paradoxical task of “commemorating” a genocide germinated not outside or on the margins of the nation, but within its very entrails: “How does a state incorporate its crimes against others in its national memorial landscape?” (Young 1992: 270). From the 1980s, a new generation of artists—“ethically certain of their duty to remember, but aesthetically skeptical of the assumptions underpinning traditional memorial forms” (Young 1992: 271)—began subverting memorial conventions and routines in public life. One protagonist of that movement, the artist Horst Hoheisel, developed the particular aesthetic of counter-monuments as inverted or negative monuments. The best-known example was his provocative suggestion, submitted in 1995 in a competition to design a memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe, that the Brandenburg Gate should be ground to dust and scattered to create a “horizontal sculpture” that people could walk around. Not unexpectedly, the jury rejected this proposal. Other memorial provocations by Hoheisel were, however, implemented. His pioneering piece, in his birthplace Kassel, was the replica of a fountain in the form of an obelisk originally donated by a Jewish entrepreneur and later destroyed by the 16  The cited quotes from Rancière (2010) stem from a Spanish edition that the author worked with and has translated, for the purpose of this article, into English.

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Nazis. Hoheisel had the obelisk faithfully reproduced, but he inverted it: the “negative” of the sculpture was sunk to a depth of 12 meters, creating a hole instead of a monument, inviting passers-by to look down into what Young describes as “ghostly reminder of the original, now-absent monument” (Young 1992: 292).17 Another example of a counter-monument strategy that appeals to social imaginaries in public life was created by Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock in Berlin in the early 1990s. “Places of Remembrance”18 consists of 80 signs spread around a neighborhood where many Jewish families lived before the Nazis took power. On one side there is a colorful pictogram: a bench, a syringe, a football. On the other, a legal paragraph extracted from the Nuremberg Race Laws declaring that these residents are no longer allowed to sit on the bench or visit the doctor or take part in organized sports. The installation exhibits the mechanics that gradually stripped Jewish citizens of their civil rights by means of seemingly harmless codes such as bylaws or childlike drawings. This is efficiantly transposed into a present-­ day urban setting without any mediation or explanation. The signs catch the passer-by unawares; they disconcert and elicit some form of indignation, triggering questions that I consider productively uncomfortable: How could people once accept such blatantly bizarre, absurd laws? And how would people like ourselves react when confronted by regulations of this kind in contemporary life? The counter-monument operates as a political aesthetic strategy that challenges rather than reproduces the visual iconography and rhetoric commonly associated with public memory. It seeks by means of an aesthetic provocation to disrupt social anesthesia and to activate a cognitive as well as an affective process. And it does not do so in the more customary manner of a rhetoric of denunciation that tends to shift the blame to some other (the state, some abstract entity), but tries to destabilize our protective mechanisms, which allow us to carry on externalizing violence as if it belonged to some other time or place. That is why the counter-monument is so decisively different from what in Mexico has been known, in recent years, as the anti monumento, usually identified by a “memory from below” (Díaz Tovar and Ovalle 2018: 11). Its prototype was erected by human rights activists on a busy boulevard 17  Interestingly, Hoheisel has taken part in memorial debates and processes in Latin America for almost two decades; see the brochure Hoheisel (2019). 18  See: http://www.stih-schnock.de/remembrance.html.

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intersection in Mexico City in April 2015, a few months after those 43 students were disappeared from the rural Ayotzinapa college. It consists of a three-meter-high number—the 43—painted in red with a +sign. More recently, in March 2019, feminist activists placed a purple female icon, with the classical clenched fist and an inscription indicting femicide, right in front of the Palace of Fine Arts. Undoubtedly, these sculptural installations succeed to irrupt into public life as a certain counter point to the flows to everyday life. Still, they do not seek to subvert or disrupt the usual templates associated with commemoration, or the iconography of traditional formats, be it the statue or the plaque. Instead, they reproduce these formats, but instilling them with different content, and work efficiantly as a site of denunciation, without aiming to generate an aesthetic experience of dissent or disassociation by “shifting the boundaries that configure the consensual field of the given,” (Rancière 2010: 78). Even an abstract figure such as the oversized red number, prevents passers-by from feeling any further aesthetical or semiotic discomfort, yet its inscription—the historical slogan “alive they took them, alive we want them back”—confirms and consolidates an unequivocal message. To be sure: It is not my purpose here to question the legitimacy or efficacy of these markers installed to disrupt the urban everyday. I simply state that they do not operate primarily by aesthetic means and therefore do not contribute to subverting our imaginary commonplaces and conventions regarding contemporay terror.

Trace, Not Metaphor: Materiality and Imagination There is a widespread belief that metaphor is a powerful force in memorial work. In this last section I would like to destabilize this idea by engaging with the notion of trace, that I conceive—from a forensic perspective—as an intersection between material remains and imaginary work. I begin with what I consider to be the crucial difference between two narrative strategies: the literal and the material. Literal reproduction of terror may, of course, be justified if we think, for example, of the images of piled up bodies that were circulated when the concentration camps were liberated in 1945. The images are unbearable, impossible to look at for long or to “digest.” But in this case, behind this double visual agency—filming those bodies and circulating that footage—there was a conscient purpose to produce a visual shock: displaying the dehumanization in all its literality in the public eye, at that specific historical juncture, meant making it tangible

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and extracting it from the realm of “desimagination” (Didi-Huberman 2007: 36). This specific visual maneuver did not seek to generate empathy for the victims, in the first place, but to confront a society that, for twelve long years, had agreed to look away. In a setting such as Mexico today, given the showcasing of terror as spectacle and the necropolitics of disappearance, memorial or artistic agencies that operate such literality, in ethical as well as political terms, are highly problematic in my view. Reproducing the imagery generated by a dehumanizing agency implies collaborating in what we might read as visual necropolitics, the staging of dehumanizing power. Very different from the literal reproduction and echoing of deliberate performances of terror is a strategy founded on materiality, that of bodies, of landscapes, and of people inhabiting these landscapes. My own audiovisual work, which has explored both extermination zones and the agencies that defy dehumanization (see my documentary Persistence and the web documentary Forensic Landscapes), might be conceived as a strategy of audiovisual materialization. By that, I do not mean to promote the fetishizing of “things” or objects, but more to avoid generalizing metaphors that tend to erase, and also trivialize, the specificity of things. Instead “materialization” refers to the focusing on the traces, material and immaterial, and textures of what actually happens in a certain place at a certain time.19 Returning to our initial question about how to do memory in the face of annihilation, I will first refer to two noteworthy artistic interventions, one in Mexico and one in Argentina, before concluding with a note on traces of extermination and their relation to memorial imagination. The works I wanted to bring in here are different in almost every respect: one is permanent, the other ephemeral; one refers to a past event, the other to the present day; one is situated in what is sometimes referred to as an enormous graveyard, the Rio de la Plata, the other took place in urban space. But they have something in common, and that is an attempt at what we might call an aesthetic of specificity. The sculpture “Reconstruction of the Portrait of Pablo Míguez”,20 made by the artist Claudia Fontes for the Parque de la Memoria in Buenos 19  I offer some insights and ideas on the process of constructing such a narrative in Huffschmid 2019a and Huffschmid 2019b. 20  See: https://www.buenosaires.gob.ar/laciudad/noticias/parque-de-la-memoria-detallesde-la-unica-obra-que-esta-en-las-aguas-del-rio-de-la.

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Aires, seems to stand on the surface of the water, near the coastline of the Rio de la Plata. The silvery silhouette, which is of course anchored to the ground, was modeled on the size of a teenager aged 14 who was disappeared by the last military junta in 1976. The statue appears as a phantom-­ like figure emerging from the waters, into which thousands of bodies were tossed from planes during the so-called “death flights.” But this is no ghost or phantom: it is a reference to a specific person who had a body and a name. Moreover, the figure does not wear an expression of happiness or serenity, like in the photographs of the disappeared that mothers and other relatives circulate in public space and that produce an involuntary effect of “frozen in time.” Instead, this specific boy will not show us his face at all, but turns his back on us as he looks out to the open sea. In November 2011, the artist Laura Valencia performed Cuenda [“Tie”]21 on an inner city avenue in Mexico City. The artistic action involved wrapping a dozen statues, all representing “famous men” from Mexican history, in thick black rope, virtually disappearing them. Each of these wrapped figures was dedicated to a person who had been recently disappeared, whose name was indicated on strips of paper attached on site; to this end, the artist collaborated with the affected families. For two days, the memorial performance, including the somehow disconcerting wrapping up process, achieved an effective irruption in urban everyday life, prompting many small-scale conversations between passers-by and participants. One of the most intriguing details, in my perception, was that the amount of rope used depended on the estimated size and weight of the person referenced. In other words, these statues transformed into shapes were not a simple metaphor. Each one evoked a specific physical materiality, forcing us to imagine the person who had disappeared as a body, dead or alive, wounded or suffering, but human and tangible. To return to the killing fields with which this essay began, I would suggest that the very materiality of the sites of extermination resists their conversion into a commemoration setting. Not only because of the permanence of the crime that lies beneath them, unresolved and unpunished, but for two more specific reasons. One is that these are mass graves under reconstruction, with a clear priority for forensic procedures, and where the only legitimate memorial marker seem to be the ones installed by the people actually working the site, that is, the affected families. The other reason

 Online video: https://lauravalencialozada.com/Video-CUENDA.

21

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is that these sites are inevitably contaminated with remains, shattered bones, and even ashes. Zuzanna Dziuban (2017) has suggested that when human ashes take no part in any burial rite, but are just scattered—as they were across the German death camps—it is the scattering itself that disconcerts. This diffuse character that oscillates between biological substance and some kind of personhood, quite unlike bones in their extreme “thingness” or “formlessness” (ibid. 269), complicates the evocation of a human figure or person. At the same time, quoting the archaeologist Bjørnar Olsen, Dziuban proposes that ashes might be seen as a resilient human presence. Olsen described ashes as a form of “dust” whose uncontrolled spread subverts the totalizing purpose of annihilation. This not-going-away-ness can be read, says Dziuban (2017: 283), as a kind of material resistance to disappearance. This idea—and image—of a substance that will not leave us in peace, that can seep through cracks and pollute everything, even the air we breathe, is certainly disconcerting. It comes close to what Young meant when he states, referring to the power of a counter-monument, that “it forces the memorial to disperse – not gather – memory” (Young 1992: 294). This horizontal spreading, transcending the verticality of time, resists fixation. And it brings me back to the minuscule fragments gathered up by the groups searching in the desert wastes of Northern Mexico. Both materialize the not-going-away-ness of dehumanization and, more than any memorial marker, transform these settings into permanent contact zones22 with what happened. With no explicit memorial agency to mediate, but depending on the agencies that bring them to our field of vision, they function—and potentially speak to us—as an indelible trace: the human remains.

References Aguirre, Arturo. 2016. Nuestro Espacio Doliente. Reiteraciones para pensar en el México contemporáneo. Puebla: Afinita Editorial / BUAP. Assmann, Aleida. 1999. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Munich: C.H. Beck. 22  In its original context (Marie Louise Pratt) the term “contact zone” designates a post/ colonial territory of cultural clash, overlappings and transculturalization; it has been adapted to the memorial context by Sternfeld (2011) and also Assmann (1999: 137).

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Díaz Tovar, Alfonso, and Paola Ovalle. 2018. La ley de la verdad. Arte comunitario ante el horror. In Cuerpos Memorables, ed. Ileana Dieguez and Caroline Perré, 229–246. Mexico: CEMCA. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2007. Bilder trotz allem. Munich: Wilhelm Fink. Diéguez, Ileana. 2016. Cuerpos sin duelo. Iconografias y teatralidades del dolor. Monterrey/Ciudad de México: Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León. Dziuban, Zuzanna. 2017. Between Subjectification and Objectification: Theorising Ashes. In Mapping the ‘Forensic Turn’: Engagements with Materialities and Mass Death in Holocaust Studies and Beyond, ed. Zuzanna Dziuban, 261–288. Wien: New Academic Press. Hoheisel, Horst. 2019. El arte de la memoria. La memoria del arte. CAPAZ, 4, 2019. Online: https://www.instituto-­capaz.org/el-arte-de-la-memoria-lamemoria-del-­arte-­documento-­de-­trabajo-­de-­capaz. Huffschmid, Anne. 2015a. Risse im Raum. Erinnerung, Gewalt und städtisches Leben in Lateinamerika. Wiesbaden: VS Springer. ———. 2015b. Huesos y humanidad. Antropología forense y su poder constituyente ante la desaparición forzada. Athenea digital. Revista de pensamiento e investigación social 15 (3): 195–214. Online: http://atheneadigital.net/article/view/v15-­n3-­huffschmid/1565-­pdf-­es. ———. 2018. Scratching Space. Memoryscapes, Violence and Everyday Life in Mexico City and Buenos Aires. In Urban Latin America: Images, Words, Flows and the Built Environment, ed. Bianca Freire-Medeiros and Julia O’Donnell, 231–251. New York: Routledge. ———. 2019a. Neue forensische Landschaften. Verschwundene, Suchmanöver und die Arbeit der Bilder in Mexiko. In Forensik. ZfK  – Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, 1/2019 (eds. Zuzanna Dziuban, Kirsten Mahlke and Gudrun Rath), 69-82. ———. 2019b. Paisajes forenses. Sobre como mirar, leer y narrar a las fosas intervenidas de nuestro tiempo. In Tiempos Sombríos. Violencia en el México contemporáneo, ed. Arturo Aguirre Moreno and Juan Carlos Ayala Barrón, 39–70. Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos. ———. 2020. The Human Remains. Forensic Landscapes and Counter-Forensic Agencies in Violent Presents – the Mexican Case. In: DSF – Forschung aktuell, No. 54. Online: https://bundesstiftung-­friedensforschung.de/blog/ forschung-­dsf-­no-­54/ Jelin, Elizabeth. 2002. Los trabajos de la memoria. Madrid/Buenos Aires: siglo XXI. Joseph, Isaac. 2002. El Transeúnte y el Espacio Urbano. Ensayo sobre la dispersión del espacio público. Barcelona: Gedisa. Olalde, Katia. 2016. Bordando por la paz y la memoria en México: Marcos de guerra, aparición pública y estrategias estéticamente convocantes en la “guerra contra el narcotráfico” (2010–2014). PhD thesis at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).

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Ovalle, Lilian Paola and Alfonso Diáz Tovar. 2019. Memoria Prematura. Una década de Guerra en México y la conmemoración de sus víctimas. Heinrich Böll Stiftung, Ciudad de México – México y el Caribe. Online: https://mx.boell. org/es/2019/11/27/memoria-­prematura Rancière, Jacques. 2010. El espactador emancipado. Buenos Aires: Manantial. Rangel Lozano, Claudia, and Evangelina Sánchez Serrano, eds. 2015. México en los setenta ¿Guerra sucia o terrorismo de Estado? Hacia una política de la memoria. Mexico: Itaca/UAG. Rolnik, Suely. 2001. ¿El arte cura? In Quaderns portàtils, No. 2, ed. MACBA Barcelona. Rufer, Mario. 2019. La cultura como pacificación y como pérdida: sobre algunas disputas por la memoria en México. In Políticas, espacios y prácticas de memoria. Disputas y tránsitos actuales en Colombia y América Latina, ed. Carlos Salamanca Villamizar and Jefferson Jaramillo Marín, 76–107. Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Somigliana, Carlos. 2012. Materia Oscura. Los avatares de la Antropología Forense en Argentina. In Historias desaparecidas. Arqueología, memoria y violencia política, ed. Andrés Zarankin, Melisa A. Salerno, and Celeste Perosino, 25–34. Córdoba: Encuentro Grupo Editor. Sternfeld, Nora. 2011. Erinnerungskulturen in einer geteilten Gegenwart. Gedenkstätten als Kontaktzonen. In european institute for progressive cultural politics. Online: http://eipcp.net/policies/sternfeld/de. Todorov, Tzvetan. 2000 [1995]. Los Abusos de la memoria. Barcelona: Paidós. Young, James E. 1992. The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today. Critical Inquiry 18 (2): 267–296.

Index1

A Aboriginal, 14, 46, 46n1, 48, 49, 52, 52n6, 54, 55, 55n7, 58, 58n12, 59, 62, 63 Absence, 5, 8, 15, 66, 67, 76–78, 90, 93, 94, 99, 170, 172, 174, 177, 194, 210, 254, 260, 261, 264, 267, 269, 277 Aesthetics, 5, 7, 8, 11–13, 15, 16, 18, 25, 27–28, 134, 149, 157, 159, 173, 175, 177, 180, 181, 207, 208, 238, 240, 254–262, 267, 285–290 Afterlife of fallen statues, 219–222 Ai Wei Wei, 35 Aljoscha (SCH), 26 Almudena cemetery, 18, 253–270 Amnesia, 137, 240–246, 248, 249, 286 Amos, Wilhelm Anton, 143 Angola, 4, 169, 171, 173, 174, 177, 178, 180–182

Anticolonial film, 215 Anti-colonial Monument (in Bremen), 39–42 Anti-monument (anti-monumento), 215, 223, 279, 288 Anti-Semitism, 29, 119 Apartheid, 14, 66–68, 70, 71, 73–75, 78–80, 123 Architecture, 5, 11, 12, 50, 91, 128, 149, 151, 171, 175, 181, 222, 232, 233, 240, 241 Archival snapshot monument, 208 Archive, 3, 5, 16, 27, 32, 41, 92, 94, 97, 139, 143, 170, 173, 175, 176, 182, 257 Arejdal, Mohamed, 17, 206, 212–214, 223 Artistic avant-garde, 206 Artistic intervention, 18, 43, 143, 182, 192, 286, 290 Asian shop, 16, 148–152, 157, 158, 160–162

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 U. Capdepón, S. Dornhof (eds.), Contested Urban Spaces, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87505-3

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INDEX

Assmann, Aleida, 4, 6, 8, 12–14, 99, 150, 151, 232, 236, 237, 245, 292n22 Assmann, Jan, 85, 90, 254, 255 Asylum seeker, 14, 45, 49, 52, 60–63 Audiovisual research, 18, 276 Authenticity, 55, 77, 157, 174, 222, 231 Ayim, May, 126, 127, 140 Azaña, Manuel, 267 B Bagwell, Vinnie, 194–197, 199 Bartholdi, Frédéric Auguste, 12 Becker, Wolfgang, 215, 216 Beirut, 229 Belgrade, 17, 230–235, 231n2, 237–241, 243, 243n3, 245, 248 Benhabib, Seyla, 133, 134 Benjamin, Walter, 8, 85, 151, 151n3, 215, 216, 276n3 Berger, John, 123, 124 Berlin, 11, 16, 17, 28, 35, 36, 111, 111n5, 128, 130, 136, 141, 148, 206, 209, 210, 216, 217, 219–222, 243, 288 Berlin Conference, 131 Berlin Wall, 216, 219, 220, 223 Bismarck, Otto von, 16, 131–132, 136, 140 Black Lives Matter, 3, 77, 190n4, 200, 223, 223n14, 224 Black Youth 100, 193 Blind spot, 6, 76 Bogdanović, Bogdan, 232, 236 Bolshevik Revolution, 205 Boltanski, Christian, 28 Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), 230, 233–236, 238, 240 British Empire, 93–95

Built environment, 5, 6, 12, 79, 88, 90, 92, 218, 232, 233 Burial, 17, 130, 209, 211, 213, 255, 259, 263, 267, 292 C Cape Town, 4, 65–80 Carmena, Manuela, 262, 265 Center of Political Beauty (Zentrum für Politische Schönheit, ZPS), 35, 36 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 9 Charlottesville, 4, 188, 188n3 Cho, Hye Jeong, 156, 157 Christopher Columbus monument (in Buenos Aires), 34 Cloquet, Ghislain, 214 Coalition to Remove the Dr. Sims Statue: Reclaiming Reproductive Rights of Women of Color, 192 Cold War politics, 217 Collective memory, 4–7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 17, 85, 92, 97, 170, 181, 187, 231, 232, 234–237, 243, 244, 248, 254, 255, 269 Color, 128, 149, 153, 157, 173, 190, 191, 193, 194, 198, 200 Colonial era, 130, 133n2, 134, 139 Colonial Exhibition, 215 Colonialism, 7, 11, 13, 15, 16, 67, 73, 125–128, 133, 133n2, 135, 137–140, 142, 170, 171, 181, 206, 207, 209 Colonial monuments, 7, 11, 41, 125, 131, 140, 172, 175–177 Colonial myth, 137–139 Colonial object, 7 Colonial rule, 41, 127, 209 Colonial traces, 16, 139 Colony (of Germans in Eldorado), 111 Colston, Edward, 4, 126, 141

 INDEX 

Columbus, Christopher, 34, 125, 141, 190, 200 Commemoration, 5, 7, 12, 13, 15–17, 27, 43, 47, 54–57, 55n7, 61, 62, 69, 75, 77, 78, 80, 93, 109n3, 137, 170, 176, 180, 181, 185, 208–209, 212, 217, 218, 224, 254–261, 269, 270, 281n8, 289, 291 Communism, 206, 207, 216, 218, 219, 223 Confederate icons, 126 Confederate monuments, 4 Congo Conference, 136 Contact zone, 6, 42, 292, 292n22 Contemporary art, 170, 171, 206 Contestation, 4, 5, 7, 13–15, 66, 67, 84, 89, 95, 98, 186, 187, 209, 224, 233, 237, 248, 275–292 Contested memory, 3–18, 85, 207, 222, 230–236, 238–240 Contested monument, 24, 136, 186, 190, 199 Counter-monument, 27–28, 131, 134, 136, 142, 170, 187, 196, 200, 287, 288, 292 Cultural dominance, 208 Cultural heritage, 46, 48, 190, 211 Curation, 69, 72, 73, 86, 88, 89 D da Gama, Vasco, 141, 173 Darug, 53 Das braune Haus (“the brown house” in Eldorado, Misiones), 113 Dayton Peace Agreement, 231 De Blasio, Bill, 188, 190n4, 193 Decentered center, 15, 122 Decentered memory, 8, 10–12, 207, 208 Decentralization, 137

297

Decolonializing knowledge, 143 Decolonializing public space, 143 Decolonization, 16, 128, 131, 133, 135, 137, 143, 182, 224 Decolonize Berlin, 128 Decolonize Bismarck, 128 Decomposition, 17, 212 Deconstruction, 31, 137, 208, 287 Demnig, Gunter, 36 Dickens, Charles, 84, 91, 97 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 154, 290 Disgraced monuments, 17, 205–224 District Six Museum (D6M), 14, 66, 68–70, 73, 78–80 Document, 47, 91, 98, 115, 116, 136, 143, 177, 206, 212 E East Berlin, 17, 206, 215, 216, 218, 220 East German Palace of the Republic, 129 East Harlem Preservation, 192–194 East-West relations, 217 Eisenstein, Sergei, 205, 208, 215 Eldorado (Misiones), 15, 105–124 Eldorado Cooperative Museum, 106–108 Elefant! (monument in Bremen), 41 Ellis Island, 50 Embeddedness, 5, 122 Embodiment, 122, 244 Entangled histories, 15, 42, 207, 209 Entropy, 152, 153, 160 Ephemeral monuments, 11, 224 Erasure, 4, 8, 10, 12, 48, 90, 190, 218, 240, 249, 269, 270, 285 Ethnological Museum, 130 Eurocentric, 9, 155 Eviction, 70, 74, 79 Excavation, 149, 209, 219n11

298 

INDEX

Exhibition, 17, 56–58, 61, 69–71, 73, 74, 76, 77, 92, 95, 96, 108, 121, 128, 131, 133, 133n2, 147–149, 151, 154, 156, 158, 160, 161, 174n3, 206, 208, 213, 217, 219–224 Exhumation, 18, 254, 256, 263, 275, 280 Extermination site, 18, 279–284, 290, 291 F Fabian, Johannes, 9 Fascism, 218, 219, 221n13, 223, 246 Federal Republic of Germany, 14–16, 28, 32, 34, 36–41, 108, 109, 112–115, 125–143, 148, 158, 161n18, 162, 207, 208, 210, 215, 216, 230, 287 (Female) service staff, 148, 149, 152, 155–159 Fieldwork, 86, 106, 231n2 Film, 109, 112n6, 153, 154, 157, 159, 161, 205, 208, 214–216, 224 Floyd, George, 125 Forensic Landscapes, 276n2, 290 Forensic practices, 253–270 Forensics, 18, 254, 267, 269, 276, 277, 280n6, 282, 283, 289, 291 Forgetting, 4, 28, 34, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72, 90, 99, 207, 212, 213, 224, 241, 246, 286 Foucault, Michel, 10, 155, 160n16 Fremantle, 45, 54, 59, 62 French protectorat, 209, 211, 212 Freud, Siegmund, 8, 10 G Ganslmeier, Jakob, 222 Gender, 8, 75, 122, 152, 154, 195

General Staff of Yugoslav Army (Generalštab), 230, 234 Genocide, 42, 127, 129, 133n3, 136, 139, 257, 258, 287 Geographies [of memory], 89 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 129, 136n5, 216–218, 221 German East Africa, 127, 139n7, 141 German Empire, 39, 127, 220 German militarism, 220 Gerz, Jochen, 28 Global connections, 95 Global histories, 4, 32 Good Bye, Lenin, 215 Grande Odalisque, 194 Gynecology, 191 H Halbwachs, Maurice, 5, 233 Healing, 18, 142, 188n2, 199, 237, 254, 267 Hegemonic, 7, 10, 57, 148, 207, 208, 224, 239 Henrich, Eureka, 49, 50, 61 Heritage, 5, 7, 13, 14, 45, 46, 48, 49, 66, 75, 79, 88, 98, 99, 119, 133, 135, 141, 143, 170, 178–181, 187, 210–214, 218, 232, 239–241, 248 Hidden (Hidden Labor/Hidden Workers), 156, 160–162 Historical representations, 207 Histories of the senses, 86, 92 History of slavery, 126 Hoheisel, Horst, 28, 287, 288, 288n17 Hohenzollern monarchs, 129 Holocaust, 7, 223, 254, 257 Holocaust Memorial, 257 Hospitality, 38, 46, 63 Human remains, 78, 254, 258, 259, 261, 263, 264, 266, 267, 269, 275, 292

 INDEX 

Humboldt, Alexander von, 130 Humboldt-Forum Berlin, 129 I Iconoclastic, 7, 26, 172, 182 Imaginary, 8, 10, 45, 50, 99, 178, 181, 182, 212, 282, 285, 286, 288, 289 Imagination, 4, 29, 98, 109, 112n6, 170, 175, 286, 289–292 Immigrants, 17, 30, 34, 35, 39, 62, 93, 106, 111, 119, 121, 188, 191 Imperial connections, 95 Independence, 34, 170–173, 175, 178, 178n6, 181, 208, 210n4, 213, 233, 234 Inequalities (racial, gendered, social), 5–12, 15, 67, 73, 75, 79 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 194 In Search of Lost Time, 85 International Situationists, 7 International Slavery Museum, Liverpool, 126 Interviews, 53, 54, 86, 90, 91, 93, 94, 97, 115, 115n8, 148n2, 152, 155–157, 159, 161n18, 266n9 Invisibilities, 13, 25, 89, 213 J Jacir, Emily, 158 K Karl Lueger Monument, 29–31 Kia Henda, Kiluanji, 171, 172, 175–179, 181, 182 Kim, Sook Hyun, 156, 157

299

L Laboratories of modernity, 210 Lameck, Lucy, 141 Latin America, 34, 276, 278 Lebbeus Woods, 230, 244, 248 Legacy, 15, 17, 63, 67, 68, 71, 93, 126, 139, 185–200, 206, 208, 211, 214, 223, 224, 241 Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov), 17, 26, 180, 205–224 Leopold II, King, 4, 126 Life stories (of settlers), 114 Liminal place, 86 London, 4, 14, 53, 83–99, 111, 243 Luanda, 16, 169–183 Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum (LMLM), 14, 66, 68–72, 74, 77–79 Lyautey (Maréchal Hubert Lyautey), 205–224 M Maafa, 135 Madrid, 4, 18, 253–270 Manet, Edouard, 155, 162, 194 Manicom, Jean-François, 126 Marginalisation, 9, 74, 79, 248 Marker, Chris, 214, 215 Mark-Viverito, Melissa, 191 Marrakech, 17, 206, 209, 213, 214, 223 Martínez-Almeida, José Luis, 254 Mary Turner: A Silent Protest Against Mob Violence, 195 Material afterlife, 254, 267 Material culture, 66, 69, 75, 76, 78, 79, 210 Materiality, 8, 65–80, 89, 97, 105, 240, 267, 289–292 Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, 188, 192

300 

INDEX

Mbembe, Achille, 10, 170 Meissner, Alfred, 106, 113 Memorialization, 67, 93, 199, 230, 233, 237, 246, 248, 254, 256, 257, 259, 259n2, 261, 263, 279 Memorial landscape, 12, 15, 128, 186, 216, 217, 287 Memorials, 12, 16, 18, 32, 45, 47, 50, 54–57, 57n11, 60, 67, 69, 75, 88, 93, 96, 127, 135n4, 137, 142, 181, 186–188, 190, 191, 193, 195, 210, 218, 230, 233, 236–238, 243, 245, 246, 248, 254–267, 269, 270, 275–292 Memorial sites, 209, 254, 277 Memoria y Libertad (Memory and Liberty), 260, 262, 264, 265 Memory collective, 4–7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 17, 85, 92, 97, 170, 181, 187, 231, 232, 234–237, 243, 244, 248, 254, 255, 269 communicative, 85, 86, 92, 98 contested, 3–18, 85, 207, 222, 230–236, 238–240 cultural, 12, 13, 15, 16, 27, 37, 85, 86, 88, 90–92, 98, 256 culture, 6, 13, 127, 135, 217, 219, 256, 259, 269 individual, 5, 9, 85, 86, 92, 97, 98 landscape, 18, 190, 200, 230, 231, 233, 236, 239, 255, 256 theatre, 136 urban, 4, 7, 8, 12, 15, 86, 210, 229–249, 255 work, 16, 18, 130, 181, 237, 239, 275–292 Memoryscapes, 13, 16, 17, 66–70, 76, 78–80, 208 Mexico, 4, 18, 148, 157, 275–292 Migrant, 11, 14–16, 30n2, 31–36, 38, 42, 45–63, 71, 72, 77, 162

Migrant labour, 68, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77–79 relocation, 84, 92 Migration, 4, 10, 12–14, 31–39, 45, 47–50, 52–59, 55n7, 61, 62, 73, 92, 153, 154, 159, 162 Migration monument, 13, 32 Montero Aparicio, Tomás, 262, 263 Monument, 4, 24, 57, 68, 89, 125, 149, 170, 185, 206, 230, 256, 279 Monumentalization, 255–257 Monument Park (in Budapest), 27, 206 Monuments and Markers, 188, 192 Monuments of gratitude, 25 Monument to the Third International, 206 Moria, 11 Morocco, 4, 17, 206–212, 210n4, 223, 224 Mortal remains, 208, 209, 223 Mostar, 232 Multidirectional memory, 7, 207, 224 Münster, 16, 133, 147–162 Museum objects, 209 Museum of London (MoL), 15, 84, 86, 88–93, 95, 97, 98 Musil, Robert, 8, 23–25, 28, 29, 42 Mutu, Wangechi, 194 N Nazi history, 127 Nazism, 105–124 Necropolitics, 18, 212, 276, 290 Neglect, 246 Networked heritage, 14, 47 New wars, 231, 231n1 New York City, 17, 185–200

 INDEX 

1999 NATO bombing, 230, 234, 235, 238, 240–242, 244–246, 248, 249 No Humboldt 21!, 128, 130, 131 Non-European collections, 129 Non-lieu, 149–152, 162 Noongar, 47, 54 Nora, Pierre, 85, 96 Nostalgia, 13, 68, 73, 74, 80, 84, 96–99, 137, 244, 248 O Oblivion, 4, 7, 26, 27, 43, 209, 257, 265, 286 Odalisque, Grande, 195 Oguibe, Olu, 37–39 Ole, António, 172–174, 174n3, 174n4, 182 Olympia, 194 Oral histories, 47, 53, 72, 73, 78, 86, 91 Ortiz, Marina, 194, 196–198 Outback, 50, 56 Ovaherero and Nama, 127, 129, 136, 139, 139n7 P Palimpsest, 10, 11, 66, 175 Patrimonial heritage, 212 Pedestal, 26, 27, 34, 76, 125, 169–183, 188, 190, 192–195, 197, 200, 216 Percent for Art, 193, 194, 198 Performance, 35, 36, 62, 173, 176, 177, 182, 192, 215, 223, 224, 261, 277, 290, 291 Perkins, Bill, 192 Photograph, 15, 47, 56, 70, 78, 90, 93, 94, 105–108, 107n2, 112, 113, 119, 120, 122–124, 127,

301

129, 132, 151n4, 153n8, 174, 175, 177, 179, 189, 206, 212, 213, 221, 232, 242, 247, 257, 260, 270, 291 Places of amnesia, 241–246 Police violence, 125 Political life of dead bodies, 267 Post-civil war repression ( Madrid), 18 Postcolonial memories, 13, 17, 207, 209, 214 Postnational community, 134 Postnational solidarity, 134 Post-socialist memories, 17, 224 Preservation, 95, 96, 98, 126, 131, 134, 190, 210, 219, 233 Protected monuments, 216 Proust, Marcel, 85 Provincializing Europe, 9 Psychogeography, 7 Public artworks, 190, 197, 209 Public memorialization, 199 Public space, 12, 24–26, 28, 31, 38, 45, 63, 65, 67, 68, 86, 113, 120, 125–143, 169–183, 200, 207, 208, 221, 224, 232, 236, 291 R Race, 10, 71, 75, 111, 122, 157, 192–198, 215 Racial, 3, 5, 8, 12, 76, 133, 142, 186, 190n4 Racial segregation, 79, 80, 195n12, 210 Racism, 3, 12, 29, 30, 48, 53, 58n12, 63, 93, 119, 125, 133, 133n2, 137, 140, 142, 186, 191, 193, 194, 200 Rancière, Jacques, 287 (Re)appropriations of memory, 208

302 

INDEX

Reconstruction, 17, 18, 31, 49, 79, 139, 171, 209, 229–249, 276, 277, 278n5, 291 Refugee, 11, 14, 33, 34, 37, 45, 48, 49, 57, 58, 60–62, 121, 238 Regeneration project, 14, 88, 95 Remembrance, 4–10, 12–14, 17, 18, 58, 60, 96, 99, 135, 162, 207–209, 224, 231, 256 Repatriation, 78, 80 Republika Srpska(RS), 231, 234, 236, 237 Resistance, 9, 70, 126, 128, 133n2, 135, 140, 141, 143, 186, 235, 246, 255, 276, 292 Resistance movement, 218 Resnais, Alain, 214 Right to the city, 7 Rodchenko, Alexander, 206, 208, 212 Rothberg, Michael, 6, 7, 135, 148, 161, 207 Rottenberg, Mika, 4, 16, 147–162 Ruin, 18, 28, 229–249 S Saar, Alison, 195 Sánchez Castillo, Fernando, 12, 253, 266, 266n9, 270 Sarajevo, 17, 230–240, 231n2, 243–248 Sargent, Antwaun, 198, 198n15 Savoy, Bénédicte, 128 Schwelm, Adolfo Julius, 106n1, 109–111, 110n4, 113 Sculpture pedestal, 177 Second World War, 28, 50, 55, 119, 219, 220, 230, 246 Senses, 6, 12, 14, 15, 48, 51, 54, 55, 70–72, 74, 75, 78, 83–89, 91, 94, 96–99, 108, 134, 139, 142,

153, 154, 162, 206, 209, 241, 248, 261, 264, 267, 278, 284 Sensory history, 86, 90, 92–97, 99 Sensory memory, 4, 13–15, 83–99 Sensory nostalgia, 97–99 Serbia, 234, 238, 241, 244, 246, 248 Settler-colonialism, 63 Settler-colonization, 14, 45, 55n7, 56, 62 Settlers, 14, 15, 35, 46, 47, 49–52, 54, 55n7, 56–60, 62, 106, 109, 111, 113, 114, 119, 121 Seukwa, Louis Henri, 127 Shalev-Gerz, Esther, 28 Shoah, 135 Silence, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 28, 94, 105–124, 128, 285n15, 286 Simmel, Georg, 85 Sims, J. Marion, 17, 185–200 Skulptur Projekte, 16, 147–162 Slavery, 7, 11, 93, 126, 126n1, 141, 186, 187 Slave trade, 93, 95, 129, 138, 223n14 Smithfield market, 14, 83–99 Smithson, Robert, 151, 154, 160 Social history, 49, 58, 59, 89, 90, 95, 96 Sound recordings, 86, 91, 280n6 South Africa, 66, 67, 69–71, 74, 75, 78, 79, 125, 182 Sovereignty, 9, 46, 46n1, 49, 63, 217n10 Soviet Union, 25, 26, 58, 180, 206, 217–219 Spandau Citadel, 219–221 Spanish Civil War, 18, 218, 254 Spatial turn, 6 Stalin, 206, 218, 221n13 Statue of Liberty, 12, 32–34

 INDEX 

Statues also die, 214–219, 222 Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 128 Streetscape maps, 86 Subversive affirmation, 159–160 Sydney, 45, 50, 52, 53, 55, 57, 59, 60, 62 Symbolical burial, 209 Symbolic violence, 239, 248, 249 T Taboo, 36, 114 Tatlin, Vladimir, 206 Tatlin Tower, 206 Temporality, 9, 10, 57, 65–80, 154, 207 Testimonial/authentic site, 97, 255, 259, 262, 269 Thälmann, Ernst, 218, 221, 221n13, 222 13 Roses (13 rosas), 264 Tomski, Nikolai, 217, 221 Toppling monument, 25–27, 178 Toppling statues, 4 Traces, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 18, 27, 45, 50, 67, 73, 75, 76, 78, 89, 93, 95, 99, 109, 123, 125, 127, 128, 137, 139, 148–152, 151n4, 160, 173, 175, 176, 179, 183, 208, 212, 222, 230, 231, 233, 236, 240, 241, 244, 248, 289–292 Traditional owner, 46, 53, 54, 59, 62 Transcultural, 6, 7, 15, 207, 210 Transitional Justice, 69, 254, 261, 277 Transnational, 6, 7, 57, 255 Trauma, 9, 10, 25, 28, 53, 187, 200, 244, 281 Tsar Alexander III, 205 Twist, Oliver, 85, 99

303

U Unified Socialist Youth (Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas, JSU), 260 Unveiled: Berlin and its Monuments, 220 Urban memory, 3, 4, 7, 8, 12, 15, 86, 210, 229–249, 255 Urban memoryscapes, 13, 17, 70, 76, 79, 208 Urban space, 3–18, 27, 30, 43, 66, 67, 86, 89, 95, 128, 149, 169–172, 175, 179, 182, 207, 208, 218, 222–224, 231–233, 236–238, 244, 245, 262, 266, 290 Urban transformation, 67, 85, 97, 99 Urbicide, 232, 236 Vraca Memorial Park, 246, 247 war, 232, 236 Utopia, 171, 181, 182, 219, 244 V Vérdery, Katherine, 218, 267 Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 135 Victim memorial, 255–262 Victims of fascism, 218, 223 Video, 16, 141n9, 148, 152–162, 156n11, 158n14, 161n18, 194, 195, 212, 213, 222 Violence, 3, 4, 6, 7, 11, 12, 14–16, 18, 45, 56, 58n12, 60–62, 65, 67, 69, 71, 72, 125, 139, 141, 142, 156, 194, 216, 230, 231n1, 232, 233, 236, 239, 248, 249, 256–258, 265, 267, 269, 276–279, 279n6, 285, 286, 288 Völkermord verjährt nicht!, 128

304 

INDEX

W Wall of names, 56, 257, 258, 269 War memorial, 50, 56, 96, 127, 237, 256 Warrick Fuller, Meta, 195 Washington, M. Ndigo, 198 Welcome Wall, 14, 45–63 Whiteness, 48 Wiley, Kehinde, 194 Wilhelm II, 129, 136, 136n6

Wissmann, Hermann von, 141 Woods, Lebbeus, 230, 244, 245, 248 World Heritage, 109, 211 Y Yiwu Market, 148, 156, 157, 160, 162 Yoonkyung, Lim, 158, 161 Young, James E., 28, 287, 288, 292