Monuments with a capital “M”

The world began with fossils, though they were not fossils at the time. Now we study them as remnants of a distant history, but once they were living breathing organisms. Now incapsulated in rock, how much truth can we distil from stone?

Stone has served humans as a medium for all our history. Marks in stone, inscriptions, frescoes and now monuments are all traces of our existence here. They are the marks ancestral civilizations have left behind in the spaces we inhabit, and they will be the marks we inevitably leave for the next ones to come. A sense of cyclicality and stratification imbues our history in rich juxtapositions of past and present—what was kept and what is now to be decided.

All to be had, in the end, are fossils.

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SENATVS · POPVLVS · QVE · ROMANVS

IMP · CAESARI · DIVI · NERVAE · F · NERVAE

TRAIANO · AVG · GERM · DACICO · PONTIF

MAXIMO · TRIB · POT · XVII · IMP · VI · COS · VI · P · P

AD · DECLARANDVM · QVANTAE · ALTITVDINIS

MONS · ET · LOCVS · TANT[ ]IBVS · SIT · EGESTVS

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This is a transcription of the Trajan column, built after the Roman emperor Traianus wiped a whole population in the Dacian wars, in what was considered a heroic victory for the empire. Even without being able to understand its content, still, this inscription seems to radiate a sense of importance, an intrinsic power—in the dignity of its Latin or in the capitalization of its letters, lies a feeling of monumentality.

[Fig. 2] Detail of the Trajan column.

The column’s narrative is constructed in upward spiralling movie-sequence, so that the illiterate population could understand the events being described. I would say this is an early example of state propaganda.

Monuments have, until now, been reserved for figures of said importance, and events that have shaped our society; the grandness of their stone reflects the significancy of what they represent—they are evidence of the great feats of our society. A mark for ones who have left a mark in our world. They are guardians of history, crusaders of memory, keeping record of what or who should be remembered.

It could be said that they are the fossils of our recent past, inlaid in those pieces centuries of history that withstand time, war and all its paradigm shifts. Though, differently from fossils, the marks they have left are not the product of chance, rather a deliberate act of demarcation. These inscriptions are the names of the people that were chosen to be seen as our history—but who are the ones given the power to choose?

It’s baffling how monuments are an easy way of cementing a version of history as the truth. After all, differing opinions and dissent will fade with the years passing, but those stones will remain. While our memories may faulter and fail, these monuments are infallible—and so suddenly, they become the long-lasting evidence of that time—and the one who wields the power to build them laughs last.

In this way, monuments become an instrument. Consolidating a vision, they preserve something in a snapshot of time, and their pedestal grants gravity to what they represent.

But monuments, I would argue, have become more abstract in the last two centuries. Statues for generals or kings have not been built after the world wars, and the records of our history come now in different gestures. We no longer look up at these statues, and they go largely unnoticed while we bathe in the sun of our public squares.

To think of monuments only as those sculptures is to focus only on one idea of what a monument is (or was), failing to question what are the new forms of monuments we may have built in our modern times. The sculptures have been rendered unimportant, and the square has now turned into a complex web of intangible areas—be it the internet, artistic discourse, academia, political groups, warzones, etc, etc.

But what have the sculptures turned into? What has taken the place of the old monuments in our public—urban or digital—landscapes? What are our new monuments?

In a way, any piece of communication—any mark—that is made public, published, posted has the potential to be a monument. They are, to their core, an act more than the object itself, the materialization is somewhat irrelevant, but the symbolic gesture of monumentalizing something, that is the crucial element. It is the act of canonizing something, giving it the avail of prospective relevancy. They are checkpoints of history, deciding as it progresses what is important to stay. The power to write history.

Within this broader sense of what a monument can be, I see two types: one old and one new.

Old monuments, I believe to be the corrupted ones—an old way of making monuments. Turned into commodities, weapons, or means to sell something, they are a way for some kind of power to establish itself over a people. They are the statues for generals we don’t wish to immortalize and the propaganda for regimes who crave to infect the discourse and seize power.

[Fig. 3] Statue and building at the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (Palace of Italian Civilization). Photo by Rebecca Salem.

Mussolini’s strategy was one of the contamination of an aesthetic with his fascist ideology. He took hostage of the styles of the time, like the Italian Art Déco and Neoclassical, to create an aesthetic that is not explicitly fascist, but speaks volumes in between the lines.

The new form of monuments I will call parniments. From the Latin “pars” meaning to be a part of something, and “mens” which relates to the mind and spirit: they are the individual’s part in the building of a collective memory, a collective mind and spirit. A reminder of the collective significance of a piece of individual history, made universal. Parniments are born out of a necessity to share something that feels relevant, in the hopes of connecting with each other in our many symmetries.

Parniments are more of an invitation to an old monument’s imposition.

But they both share, in the end, the same nature, with differing messaging or strategies. Monuments are all acts of representation, as any work of communication is. They present and represent a specific vision of history; old monuments may hide behind their apparent objectivity, when in reality, we all know they were written by the victors, as the saying goes... parniments, on the other hand, tend to be more forthcoming with the figure of its individual, subjective maker.

Old monuments are the representation of normativity, of what was cemented as the normal. Foucault speaks of the “norm” in his literature dissecting the works of discipline (and punishment), saying that “normalization consists in trying to get people, movements, and actions to conform to this model.” Old monuments are part of a movement to indoctrinate a specific model as the only truth, or simply, the norm. They leave little space for different views, setting their ideas in physical and metaphoric stone.

In contrast to the stones of an old monument, parniments, on the other hand, move more like smoke, more malleable like paper; and their manifestations tend to be more ephemeral as well, like an oral story, a book or a zine. It says something about the power imbalance in the production of monuments, when the ones behind old monuments have the resources to build foul statues of bulls in the centre of New York city, and the others can only resort to self-published, self-funded ephemerals—the game is somewhat rigged as to whom has the bigger chance of lasting... So, I beg to question: why is Wall Street inscribed in gold and the Black Panthers printed in Xerox?

[Fig. 4] Statue of the Charging Bull, standing on Broadway in the Financial District of Manhattan.

Parniments, on the other hand, are simply a piece of someone’s memory turned palpable. They don’t take their place for granted or stand so presumptuous to assume their importance; rather, they are humble—not shy—in their positioning, and attentive to how they could be perceived. They are urgent in their conscience because their existence may be of help for others—empowering a group through one’s process of empowerment.

Queer zines—especially along the sixties, seventies and eighties—were a great safety net of parniments. Collections of poetry, anecdotes, recommendations, reader’s submissions, and written or photographic essays plastered the poorly printed but oh-so-vibrant pages. They were explosive and intellectual, and a sense of urgency paired over each line. Today—undeterred by the flimsiness of their pages—these zines thankfully survived the test of time, and what was once the necessity to connect with each other in a present’s uncertainty, now has crystalized with time. They are an artifact turned into a monument, and now future generations can trace back a whole past of queer life and struggle.

[Fig. 5] Page of an edition of “FagRag”, a queer periodical publication from the 1970s.

This specific publication proved to be fundamental for the poetry and literary scene of the Midwest of the United States.

BUT WHO GETS TO INSCRIBE AND BE INSCRIBED?

Layered echelons of history, all building on top and affirming the previous one. Heroes on the shoulders of heroes, but who elected them our saviours in the first place? Who holds the power to inscribe the names on our monuments?

Michel Foucault speaks of a new society, one of power relations structured around a biopower: a government with the power to control bodies and subjugate life itself. It is an act of dehumanization through uniformity and regulation, turning citizens into patients, students, inmates in an increasing institutionalization of society. In what he calls the anatomo-biopolitics, a state seeks to control different parts of the human body, like birth, death, reproduction and illnesses. Hospitals, schools, prisons, asylums are different ways for a government to enact control.

As part of a system of biopolitics, the state engages in constituting biological bodies as “objects of knowledge,” studying, observing them, and in turn producing new knowledge—new norms—to control them with. Eugenic scientists measured skulls of citizens to then stipulate that people of African descent had smaller craniums, and therefore decreased mental capacity—an obvious fallacy, but it still served as basis for the ideology of the Nazi regime and helped legitimize their actions against the ones that didn’t belong to the Aryan race. As Foucault states: “power and knowledge directly imply one another,” [Footnote 1] even if the knowledge proves to be untrue.

[Fig. 8] Cesare Lombroso, l'Uomo Delinquente (the Criminal Man), 1889.

Cesare Lombroso, mind behind the Italian school of positivist criminology, argued that a criminal mind was inherited and could be identified by physical features and defects.

The field of study interested in knowledge is denominated Epistemology—from the Greek “epistḗmē” meaning knowledge and “logía” meaning the study of something. Epistemological scholars see knowledge as a commodity that can be hierarchized and used as an instrument in the maintenance of power, trying to dissect what are the infrastructures or people involved in the production and upkeep of knowledge, and how do they make use of it.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Portuguese sociologist, in turn coins the term Epistemicide. The swapping of the suffix “logy” to “cide” (referring to the act of killing) changes its meaning, to that of the murder of an entire body of knowledge, or the killing through knowledge. Epistemicide becomes even more significant through the lens of Foucault’s theory of biopower, where a State, in disregarding a group’s contribution to the cultural heritage, denies their place in cultural production and, ultimately, life in society.

In The Will to Knowledge, Foucault describes a shift after the Middle Ages from a politics of kings to a politics of society. It was a shift from individual to collective, from the punishment of an individual for its crimes, to now the control of a whole group of people to assure safety in society. He delineates that it is precisely in this shift that the notion of state racism is born, explaining the dangerous idea that legitimizes the criminalization of bodies: “the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more I—as species rather than individual—can live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be.” [Footnote 2] Thus, the killing (the literal or epistemological one) of the “degenerate ones” ensures the survival of the larger species.

It is ultimately the act of alienation, and a denial of any future prospect other than poverty, crime or death for marginalised groups. Sueli Carneiro, Brazilian thinker and anti-racism activist, calls this process the “annihilation of cognitive capacity and intellectual confidence,” [Footnote 3] where individuals don’t see it as a possible outcome for them to have an active place in society, contributing to our cultural heritage and knowledge production. They don’t see themselves reflected in the monuments, so they don’t think of making ones of their own.

To the bleak situation detailed in part one, I propose a plan of mimicking. A plan of sneaky disobedience and stealthy rebellion, a tactic to infiltrate the channels of history—like wedding crashers at a party they weren’t invited to. To take from them what we need to build it all ourselves, for I am greedy, and I want to see my name and that of my peers inscribed on the pillars of history.

To the concept of mimicking, Plato brings the idea of mimesis. He speaks of the example of theatre—where life is interpreted and represented—saying that art imitates nature. Mimesis is the act of re-presenting, as in presenting something twofold: an object (or idea) is first presented by coming into this world, to then be represented by us humans. It is inherently the act of taking something, and by passing through your own self, make it yours and anew: retelling it in your own vision.

Monuments are, in the end, works of mimesis—there are few differences between the ones they built and our monuments—they are all works of representation, looking at history and proposing one interpretation of it. They offer just one individual interpretation, for an absolute truth is unreachable—to get closer to it we must have an abundance of them. We must be so bold to insert ourselves in the discourse.

But to make our own monuments—our parniments—we could borrow a tad of the forcefulness of the old ones. [Fig. 12] Like Foucault says, knowledge implies power, and vice-versa. Thus the plan is to study and observe, to then produce new knowledge; to borrow confidence from established historical works, and in turn squeeze our production amongst them.

But “who is us?” you might ask, and to that I say it is me and you, reader. It will be a collective effort to decentralize the construction of monuments; all those who are not in positions of power should take part: independent artists, designers, collectives. And who is them? They are intuitively those that rest in the privilege of controlling the cultural production; sometimes it is beneficial to explicit who is the enemy, not to live in resentment of them, but to know, in their opposition, who are our allies, who are the ones we should historicize?

I really enjoy the idea of historicizing the self: to treat one as historical, history-worthy; the word “treat” here almost implying it should not really have a place in history, but we make it so. [Fig. 13] Perhaps fuelled by the fear of oblivion after our deaths, or frightened by the idea that some groups of people are more easily forgotten than others, we live through the monuments we leave behind—may they endure time’s unforgiving hand...

And how to historicize oneself? I believe the answer lies in aesthetics, which is, after all, a language, an instrument. [Fig. 14] A system of communication comprised of (visual) signifiers, symbols and vocabulary, that can be combined to convey a message largely understood by people. These are resources that can be moulded and bent to our will, we may borrow the vocabulary from someone else, but we make the words ours.

By using a vernacular that is—for better or worse—for all to understand, you provide entry points to your work. All can access the external strata of your piece, because it may speak of something they already know; [Fig. 15] and then, like a fish fooled by bait, you can yank them out of the water and show them a whole new world. Beauty, for example, is a great way of luring people in; by making something so visually appealing that people must look at it, and then be involuntarily faced with a content they wouldn’t normally be interested in.

Think of the revival of medieval aesthetics in the last years, where designers, by studying the aesthetics of medieval manuscripts, [Fig. 16] folklore and heraldic shields, see an opportunity of transporting themselves back to the Middle Ages. A way of retelling history, using the visual language of an era to give another vision of the events that transpired then; using the aesthetic of a time where witches were burned to now represent the witch as a feminist figure, for example. A way of fabricating a new document, stealing the visuals of that time, learning from it, mutating and recontextualizing it.

Or think of the Harlem ballroom scene appropriating the poses of white models from Vogue magazine to create a form of performance-dance [Fig. 17]—in what is a subversive act of appropriation from bottom-up: making use of an aesthetic that didn’t speak to them (or of them), to create a new form of art that would be in turn appropriated by the people that they took from in the first place. As Marlon T. Riggs explains in the movie Tongues Untied: “Ironic that dance, my ticket to assimilation, my way of amusing, then winning acceptance by whites, that the same steps were now my passage back home.”

Mimesis, then, as a form of reclaiming power. Re-appropriating as a way of forcefully inserting yourself into a narrative that is exclusionary. A way of manifesto for us to use reproduction as a device to take what is not ours and recite it in a new light, into something that makes sense for us. To take a queer poem and typeset it in Garamond 12pt in a page of golden ratio... but then make it huge, and print it on silver paper in neon pink.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baktir, Hasan, Ortadoğu Üniversitesi, Eğitim Fakültesi, Yabancı Diller, Eğitimi Bölümü, and Arş Görevlisi. “THE CONCEPT of IMITATION in PLATO and ARISTOTLE (ARISTO ve PLATO’DA TAKLİT),” n.d. Accessed March 1, 2024.

Carneiro, Sueli. “Epistemicídio.” Portal Geledés, September 4, 2014. https://www.geledes.org.br/epistemicidio/.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1979.

—. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76. Penguin Books, 2003.

Gavaldon, Sabel. “Inappropriate Gestures: Vogue in Three Acts of Appropriation - Journal #122 November 2021 - E-Flux.” www.e-flux.com, November 2021. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/122/429806/inappropriate-gestures-vogue-in-three-acts-of-appropriation/.

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IJsseling, Samuel. Mimesis: On Appeaing and Being. Kok Pharos Publishing House, 1997.

Tongues Untied. Frameline, California Newsreel, 1989.