Full Description
Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, monuments became a focal point: protestors toppled or spray-painted them, even danced on them. These politically, visually, and emotionally potent events may have looked instantaneous, yet frequently sprang from years of activism, as well as protracted political and academic debate. Toppling Things challenges stereotypical notions monument topplings as riotous, spontaneous, or irrational. Bringing together the ideas and emotions, the uncertainty and convictions, of artists, activists, and academics, the volume rejects a neatly tied-up, distant narrative. As it sheds light on the global, personal, immediate, and historical processes around the fall of a monument, the volume engages directly with the complexity of toppling activism and monument removal as a form of lived experience.
Contents
Thamyris Mission Statement
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Introduction
Tomas Macsotay and Nausikaä El-Mecky
PART 1: Overhauling: an Anatomy of Memorial Contestations
1 Local Origins of a Global Series: the 1990s Wave of Anti-colonial Iconoclasm
Nikolas Orr
2 Commemoration and (Re)Conciliation: Memorial Culture under Apologetic Settler Colonialism in Canada
Seraphine Appel
3 Contemporary Iconoclasm and Affect
Ernst van Alphen
4 Traumatic Monuments: Decolonial Iconoclasms and "Southern" Memories
Rhea Dehn Tutosaus and Miriam Oesterreich
5 To Remove, or Not To Remove, That Is the Question: the Troubled Legacy of Chiang Kai-shek Statues and Memorials in Democratized Taiwan
Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang
PART 2: Facing: Making a Difference in Memorial Activism
6 A Space of Freedom: Richmond's Robert E. Lee Memorial and the Future of America
David Ehrenpreis
7 Conversations on Black Lives Matter
Tami Sawyer with Stacy Boldrick; Keith Magee with Richard Clay
8 Activist Statement: Down with J. P. Coen
Romy Rondeltap
9 Colonial Reckoning: Reexamining the Slave Past in Catalonia
Gerard Llorens Decesaris and Adrià Enríquez Àlvaro
PART 3: Waking: Imaginings of a Post-Monument
10 Dissolution of the Monuments
Paul Grace
11 The Agency of the Void: When a Monument Falls, Absence Transforms into Powerful Presence
Nausikaä El-Mecky
12 Toppling Things: Artistic Approaches and Media Strategies in Dealing with Monuments—Alexandra Pirici, Morehshin Allahyari, Julius von Bismarck & Julian Charrière
Ursula Ströbele
13 Taking a Knee: Permanence, Ritual and the Respect Insurrection
Tomas Macsotay
14 Artist/Activist Statement: In Search of an Aesthetic of Care: Recording BLM Protests and Documenting One's Life in a Time of Reckoning
Ruth Somalo
PART 4: Prolonged Engagements: Artistic Testimonies
15 Flesh & Stone: Archives, Bodies and "Deep Time" in Ada Pinkston's LandMarked
Cory Wayman
16 Empty Pedestals or The Aesthetics of Truth
Ada Pinkston
17 Artist Statement: On Disgraced Monuments, their Resignification and the Recovery of Emptied Sites
Krzysztof Wodiczko
18 Epilogue: 2020 Revisited
Tomas Macsotay and Nausikaä El-Mecky
Index
