Art and Memory as Reconciliation Tool? Re-Thinking Reconciliation Strategies in the Western Balkans

The violent demise of Yugoslavia and the bloody period that marked most of the 1990s in this region have sparked academic interest in the peacebuilding and reconciliation initiatives which emerged after the conflict. Scholarly literature on the subject went in the directions of transitional justice, social psychology and socio-political approaches. However, an unexplored alley of scholarly interest remains in the role of the arts in these processes. By examining the role of arts and memory creation, this introductory article posits these against the background of a problematic reconciliation process in post-conflict areas of the Western Balkans as its core topic. Situated in a post-Yugoslav geographic space, where ethnic conflicts still hinder development, people rest much on the interpretation of the meaning of lived experiences, and the role of images, arts, myths and stories, which are used to either create or dissemble the path to peace between the many ethnic communities that inhabit this area of Europe. The use of several overlapping, yet differently interpreted themes relating to lived experiences and history shows them as symbolic transitional justice policies. They broadly deal with how such knowledges are interpreted through lived moments, such as cinema, museums and public monuments.

Image and Authority

This chapter investigates the role of authorities in the production of images in Roman culture. It focuses on imperial art of the Julio-Claudian period by analyzing significant visual and literary evidence in order to reconstruct social interactions and power relations among agents such as the emperor, the Senate and People of Rome, provincial elites, artists, and soldiers. The first part of the chapter addresses the question of how the images of public monuments erected within the city of Rome reflect the interests of the parties involved. This leads to some general considerations about authority and auctoritas in Roman society. The following section discusses the intentions of the local elites who initiated the construction of imperial monuments in provincial cities, interpreting the specific visual language of the decoration of these monuments. Finally, the impact of imperial motifs and themes on images in the military and private realm is discussed.

HEROIC DEMOCRACY IN HIGH RELIEF: POLITICAL LEGITIMACY AND MONUMENTAL IMAGERY IN FIFTH-CENTURY ATHENS

In recent decades, political theorists have significantly revised their understanding of Athenian democratic thinking. By opening up the canon, shifting their focus from abstract principles to democratic practices, and employing an increasingly diverse range of interpretive approaches, they have collectively reconstructed a more robust and multi-faceted account of the Athenian democratic public sphere. Despite its ecumenical ambitions and manifest successes, however, this project has been fettered by a singular focus on language as the medium of democratic politics. As can be seen in the gloss of one of its contributors, this body of work effectively limits the democratic public sphere to ‘the domain in which judgments and public opinion are shaped and formed through speech’. This logocentric demarcation of democratic practice does not harmonize well with our own experience of modern politics, however, where public monuments, political imagery, and civic spaces play a critical role in the formation of political understanding and judgment, as well as starting points for discussion, debate, and disagreement. It seems similarly out of tune with what we know about the ancient Greeks, who demonstrated a readiness to move between visual and verbal content in reflecting on political and ethical life, and who developed the very idea of theôria out of an extension of the process of seeing. If, as political theorists, we can temper our habitual logocentrism and learn to attend more closely to the visual culture of Athenian democracy, we stand to add new dimensions to our collective reconstruction of the democratic public sphere and, in turn, to enhance our understanding of those texts that have long preoccupied our attention.

(Un)drawing Belgium’s colonial monuments: Comics’ engagement with decolonial debates

As a response to the debates around colonial statues and glorifying forms of memorialization, comics provide one with plurivocal possibilities to decolonize monuments and epistemologies. This article analyzes a number of recent comics/panels (Charles & Bihel, Stassen, Kannemeyer, Baruti, Lambé, a.o.) that de-center perspectives so as to visibilize the violence of the Belgian colonial system that public monuments invisibilize. This analysis focuses on the medium-specific features that depetrify (in)famous statues, draw back to iconic figures like the Leopard-Man, and redraw iconic sites with multilayered temporalities and geographies to enable viewers to move away from one-sided perspectives and consider present forms of discriminations as legacies of colonialism.

Towards Transformative Propaganda: A History of Student Activism at the Australian National University

March 2021 saw the unveiling of a new addition to the vast collection of public artworks at the Australian National University (ANU) campus in Canberra. The piece—an installation entitled A History of Student Activism at the Australian National University—compiles and presents the first comprehensive history of sixty years of student activism at ANU, and sits proudly in the common area of the Marie Reay Teaching Centre. The work comprises a large-scale wall-mounted timeline designed by Joanne Leong, complemented by a pair of moving-image artworks by Esther Carlin and Aidan Hartshorn, all ANU alumni. This article considers A History of Student Activism in the context of contemporary debate on the role of public monuments, and the extent to which public art can drive collective emancipatory action. Drawing on a recent study of the activist potential of art in the twenty-first century by Dutch artist Jonas Staal, this article tests the extent to which A History of Student Activism might serve as a reference point in the turn towards transformative propaganda art.

The Slapstick Routine of Parisian Monumentalism: Robert Desnos and Jacques-André Boiffard’s “Pygmalion and the Sphinx” (1930)

This essay considers the 1930 essay “Pygmalion and the Sphinx” by Robert Desnos, originally published alongside Jacques André-Boiffard’s photographs of Parisian monuments in the journal Documents. I focus on Desnos and Boiffard’s tragicomic depiction of the municipal council of Paris’ failure to reconcile a fragmented sense of national identity through the erection of public monuments. As implicated by its title, “Pygmalion and the Sphinx” compares the “statuemania” of the Third Republic to the Greek myth. As Desnos and Boiffard reveal, within the monumental form is an antagonism between the civic ideal of ‘Pygmalion’ and the brute substance of the statue’s material, or the Sphinx. This tension inevitably collapses the idealist endeavour of monumentalism; a moment of folly opened by the laughter it evokes. Boiffard focuses the pedestal of the monument, and the rigidity of its material when exposed against the urban landscape. These photographs launch a base materialist perspective repeated by Desnos in his comic imagination. This term is further contextualised by the writings of Georges Bataille in Documents, whereby laughter is integral to the critique of idealism. In this essay, I read Desnos and Boiffard alongside Bataille to illuminate how monumentalism prepares its toppling in the ‘fall’ of the slapstick’s laugh.

Ecosocial Theory, Embodied Truths, and the People's Health

This book employs the ecosocial theory of disease distribution to combine critical political and economic analysis with a deep engagement with biology, in societal, ecological, and historical context. It illuminates what embodying (in)justice entails and the embodied truths revealed by population patterns of health. Chapter 1 explains ecosocial theory and its focus on multilevel spatiotemporal processes of embodying (in)justice, across the lifecourse and historical generations, as shaped by the political economy and political ecology of the societies in which people live. The counter is to dominant narratives that attribute primary causal agency to people’s allegedly innate biology and their allegedly individual (and decontextualized) health behaviors. Chapter 2 discusses application of ecosocial theory to analyze: the health impacts of Jim Crow and its legal abolition; racialized and economic breast cancer inequities; the joint health impacts of physical and social hazards at work (including racism, sexism, and heterosexism) and relationship hazards (involving unsafe sex and violence); and measures of structural injustice. Chapter 3 explores embodied truths and health justice, in relation to: police violence; climate change; fossil fuel extraction and sexually transmitted infectious disease: health benefits of organic food—for whom? ; public monuments, symbols, and the people’s health; and light, vision, and the health of people and other species. The objective is to inform critical and practical research, actions, and alliances to advance health equity—and to strengthen the people’s health—in a deeply troubled world on a threatened planet.

Toppled Monuments and Black Lives Matter: Race, Gender, and Decolonization in the Public Space. An Interview with Charmaine A. Nelson

This paper discusses the recent backlash against public monuments spurred by Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in North America and elsewhere following the killing by police of George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man in the United States. Since this event, protestors have taken to the streets to bring attention to police brutality, systemic racism, and racial injustice faced by Black and Indigenous people and people of colour in the United States, Canada, Great Britain and some European countries. In many of these protests, outraged citizens have torn down, toppled, or defaced monuments of well-known historic figures associated with colonialism, slavery, racism, and imperialism. Protestors have been demanding the removal of statues and monuments that symbolize slavery, colonial power, and systemic and historical racism. What makes these monuments problematic and what drives these deliberate and spectacular acts of defiance against these omnipresent monuments? Featuring an interview with art historian Charmaine A. Nelson, this article explores the meanings of these forceful, decolonial articulations at this moment. The interview addresses some complex questions related to monumentalization and the public sphere, symbolism and racial in/justice. In so doing, it suggests that monuments of the future need to be reimagined and redefined contemporaneously with shifting social knowledge and generational change.

MONUMENTOS URBANOS E ARTE PÚBLICA: OS OBELISCOS EM ROTAÇÃO / Urban monuments and public art: the obelisks in rotation

Este ensaio aborda uma forma monumental antiga e muito disseminada no mundo – o obelisco e suas variações – para refletir sobre a importância desse artefato estético e sociocultural até o último século, quando passa a interagir com questões oriundas dos debates propostos pela “arte pública”. Considerando os usos históricos e contemporâneos dos monumentos verticais não figurativos, abordo algumas intervenções e instalações artísticas, focalizando monumentos públicos, para mapear as estratégias de subversão das formas e sentidos a eles atribuídos. Demonstro que certos monumentos são objeto de várias intervenções ao longo do tempo, enquanto algumas instalações artísticas se apresentam como contramonumentos em sintonia com os princípios de participação e debate público que animam os valores democráticos.Palavras-chave: Obelisco; Monumento público; Arte pública; Paisagem urbana; Contramonumento. AbstractThis essay discusses an ancient monumental form and very widespread in the world – the obelisk and its variations – to reflect on the importance of this aesthetic and sociocultural artifact until the last century, when it started to interact with issues arising from the debates proposed by the “public art”. Considering the historical and contemporary uses of vertical non-figurative monuments, I address some interventions and artistic installations focusing on public monuments to map the subversion of the forms and meanings canonically attributed to such artifacts. There are cases in which a monument is the object of several interventions over time, and others, complementary, in which the proposal is to constitute a counter-monument in line with the principles of participation and public debate that animate democratic societies. Keywords: Obelisk; Public monument; Public art; Urban landscape; Counter-monument.