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Gigantic, neoclassical statues loom over London’s cityscape in 2099. Archaic angels, fractured ruins, historical and mythical gods, and heroes comprise the anachronistic imagery we encounter in the TV series The Peripheral, a recent adaptation of William Gibson’s sci-fi novel of the same title. The story is set in two different time periods, one in a near-future world of advanced technology and the other in a post-apocalyptic future. The two time periods are linked by VR technology that allows individuals to interact across time, creating a complex web of power relations and alliances. As the plot unfolds, we learn that the statues are merely functional effigies whose sole purpose is to purify the air of pollution and radiation. As monuments, they have become utilitarian structures to aid the few remnants of mankind in surviving in a world rendered otherwise uninhabitable. The appearance of London – architecture and public life – turns out to be unreal; as projections, the only reason they exist is to create an illusion of a world that is still intact and alive. The immediate past of this post-apocalyptic future is not to be remembered as it is a past of erasure and human-induced apocalypse. The technologically created architecture and life convey an illusory, soothing image. An image that gives a sense of continuity with a pre-apocalyptic past.
Today, we are experiencing the opposite. In many parts of the Western world, the ideologies inscribed in monuments and public sites, as well as their aesthetics, stand at odds with the social and political reality of our time. Rather than a means to orient and control the present through a continuous narration and legitimation of the past, many historical monuments embody a bizarre disconnect with the present. According to Jan Assmann, monuments are a mode of externally storing “information of cultural importance.”[1] Of course, and this brings us to the breach – breach as in alluding to an inherent ethical violation – “information of cultural importance” is a highly selective field and the reason why, today, we must investigate monuments as signifiers of a complex web of economic and political power relations as well as myths, reinforcing dominant narratives of identity. Focusing on this inherent breach within monuments, I propose a radical rethinking of ‘contemporary’ conceptions of monuments and public sites through artistic practices that reevaluate their aesthetics and ethics. With ‘contemporary,’ I refer to monuments as traces of historical and cultural heritage still present in our public spaces, on the one hand, and to new methodologies, on the other hand, that upend or defy the culture of monuments to be found in Western and mainly European context.
In the last decade, we have been witnessing growing scrutiny towards redefining public monuments of the past, ubiquitous in the Western world, that celebrate or remember slavery, colonialism, Fascism, Communism, or the genocide of Indigenous peoples.[2] The reactions and methods employed range widely and depend heavily on their local context. Existing approaches like “contextualization,” adaptation, alteration, re-interpretation, decoding, or musealization have been reformulated. Since the late 2000s, becoming fully established in the late 2010s, critical public debates on the history of the Western world have become more popular, and, today, can hardly be sidelined – in Europe, on its colonial past, in North America on a reality of enduring racial injustice, white supremacy, the history of slavery, and the genocide of indigenous peoples. In this context, a movement of public acting out, defacing, or vandalism against monuments that commemorate these histories has taken place, partly by artists but primarily by activists. Interestingly, this renewed undertaking considers not only one aspect of a recently elapsed problematic past but, more or less, the whole of problematic displays of power in the form of Western monuments since the late 16th century through the ‘explosion of monuments’ in the 19th and 20th centuries. The reevaluation of an immediate past or a prevailing cultural heritage is not new: In the European context, every generation has to grapple afresh with the past reality and the cultural heritage of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century as well as the atrocities committed under the Fascist, National Socialist, or Soviet regimes. However, the endeavors and modes of reflection have so far heavily depended on local and immediate economic or financial influences.[3] The fact that we’re now observing such a phenomenon globally attests to the urgent necessity to challenge past, predominant, and current power relations and ways of historization, matters of visibility and marginalization in the cultural and public memory, and the ownership of our public spaces.
What now makes the monument such an appealing “construction site” of our present? I borrow the term from Hal Foster, who applied it in his text An Archival Impulse (2004) to discuss contemporary artists using archival materials and methods in their work.[4] By recontextualizing archival materials and presenting them in new ways, artists can challenge traditional understandings of history and create alternative visions of the past and present. Foster, however, warns of a one-dimensional historical determinism in simply re-assembling historical facets and the hierarchical power relations inherent to any archival practice and knowledge production, ultimately creating a canon and hierarchies of access. Public monuments are an archive: An archive from which we can learn of past power relations, can understand how these structures still play out in the form of political and social realities in our present and speculate about more constructive versions of the future. Independent of the intersection of intentions within the monument – ranging from governance, identity, commemoration glorification and propaganda to legitimation – its locus in the public space brings with it an enormous potential. Although legally speaking, in most cases, monuments are state-owned, and their violation will be sanctioned, in their role as ‘ambassadors’ of cultural and public memory, they somehow belong to the public. Given their public exposure and culture of creating a sense of continuity with the past, they create a promising field for artistic practices to challenge predominant conceptions of history, ideology, and identity. The monument’s ambivalent role between the governance of remembrance, on the one side, and public interpretation and appropriation, on the other, makes it an exceptional example of how these two sides intertwine and public consciousness is shaped by governing elites while constantly being counter-shaped by civil society. Urgency and potential of the topic further evolve against a twofold temporal backdrop of a) the reappearance of far-right and neo-fascist movements, which is having widespread global effects prevailing structures and new forms of economic colonialism and exploitation, and b) an intensified deconstruction and decolonization of the Western history canon. Obviously, operating in the realm of art is limited, even that of public art. It’s a baby step within a broader structural change that needs to happen. The latter can only be executed by revising the course of public institutions of governance, education, and knowledge production, creating more ethical and critical media and public discourses – to name just a few.
Prior to commencing the topic the Quadriennale has invited me to discuss, namely, to identify and critically reflect on a specific phenomenon in the Italian contemporary art scene, I would like to add two notions that inform my position and the context of the topic at hand. First, I rely on Michel Foucault’s notion of the “archive”, which he defines in The Archaeology of Knowledge as “first [being] the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.”[5] Indeed, who writes history? Who has access to its outcome? And how do power and identity fall into place here? Public and national institutions, especially those operating in the field of knowledge production, have had, and continue to have, a powerful impact in shaping discourses of memory. They are the creators and guardians of, in the case of the Quadriennale, an art historical canon. As unmissably stated on their website, “the Quadriennale di Roma is the national institution entrusted with the task of promoting Italian contemporary art in Italy and abroad.”[6] Besides the founding dates as a periodical exhibition in 1927 and as an autonomous body in 1937, I was not able to find any direct connection to its roots in Italy’s Fascist regime or its role within the Fascist cultural propaganda machinery aiming to create a distinctively Italian culture that would be celebrated both at home and abroad. In exploring contemporary notions of the monument through ‘Italian-situated’ artistic positions that raise questions around and decode their cultural heritage, the Quadriennale, as an institution with roots in fascism and culturalism, becomes an interesting lens itself. I do not intend to build some sort of nested case of institutional critique. I am highlighting these aspects due to the responsibility and duty in posing such a query as a national institution amid a time in which established perceptions of cultural heritage, national identity, migration, colonialism, and history, as well as their reproduction through the mechanisms of funding, representation, and distribution are challenged and upended. Therefore, an inquiry into the status quo of art must be concerned with questions of power, identity, and representation – the complexities of which Foucault has poignantly summed up in his definition of the archive. Who is heard and visible in the first place? Who is asking? According to which parameters is an inquiry executed? So on to the setting: My situatedness is that of a female, white, 32 years old, German-born curator. Influentially phrased in her article Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective (1988) and written against the apparent masculine objectivity of that time, Donna Haraway proposes a methodology of “limited location and situated knowledge” to “allow[s] us to become answerable for what we learn how to see.”[7] Being German here plays an essential role as it implies a particular memory politics and predominant approach of dealing with cultural heritage apparent in Germany. After WWII, confronted with the systemic persecution and mass murder of millions of Jews and hundreds of thousands of victims, classified by the Nazis as “racially inferior,” as well as the heritage of Fascist architecture, Germany (reinforced by the Allied powers) put to the fore an iconoclastic approach to break with the heritage of its immediate past. Consequently, buildings were demolished in an attempt to erase any trace of recent history. In the 1980s, this approach was replaced by “critical preservation” (Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, 2000), which favored conservation over demolition, provided critical information was supplied.[8] Despite local differences that intensified throughout Germany’s division into East and West Germany (1949-1990), we can speak of a unified movement and collective narrative, what has become known as “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” – which translates to ‘the struggle to overcome the past’ and describes an overall approach throughout culture, politics and society in postwar Germany, still evident today. While now, it is thus rare to find a public site related to Germany’s Fascist past that hasn’t been re-contextualized, things are quite different when it comes to monuments associated with Germany’s colonial history, the account and heritage of which have long been ignored. Only in recent years, we can witness a more institutionalized course towards dealing with its role as a colonial power. In her essay Difficult How? Italy’s Inertia Memoriae of Fascism, cultural anthropologist Mia Fuller attests Italy an “inertia memoriae: inertia of memory” as the “distinguishing trait of how [it] has handled its Fascist past.”[9] She acknowledges a very complex mix of sentiments and varying histories with roots in the fragmentation of Italy’s regions and a deriving internal division that deepened with the Civil War (1943-45) in the aftermath of Italy’s defeat in WWII, and, up until today, tears a rift through Italian society. As a result, Italy still lacks – and here we might be able to draw a comparative line to Germany – a meta-narrative on its Fascist past. Drawing on recent and current debates, empirical research, and case studies, Fuller avoids falling into the trap of simplifying explanations of the current Italian state. Instead, by introducing the term “inertia memoriae,” she underpins a twofold hypothesis.[10] On the one hand, explaining the omnipresent remains of Fascist infrastructure in Italy due to “a pattern (of inaction and/or reactive action),” which becomes tangible in the meaning of “inertia” as “referring to both a lack of change and a staying-in-place.” On the other hand, attesting to the fact that this internal stasis has been upended mostly by external, in her argument, foreign voices and observations in the recent past, which becomes apparent in a second, less known meaning of “inertia”: “a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force.” It is the set of relations “inertia” draws between monument, memory, and history, that I am interested in. Monuments were historically created to establish a sense of permanence and authority, often to assert a singular, centralized power and maintain a legacy that endures over time. The inertia, Fuller attests Italy in regard to its cultural memory, might be an Italian one in regard to its Fascist and colonial past. However, when it comes to colonialism and imperialism, “inertia” necessarily describes a European or Western condition in general.
How have these considerations around heritage, memory, history, and identity influenced artistic practices in Italy and abroad? In one of their texts for Quaderni d’arte italiana, Francesca Guerisoli and Marco Trulli present an in-depth survey of the Italian status quo of art practices around monuments and the conflicting past they represent.[11] Part of my analysis hence parallels their research. I propose to open up the interrogation in terms of not only asking about artistic practices interacting with the traditional monument as sites of remembrance and conflicted memory but also thinking of contemporary monuments that defy or undermine that purpose. These sites, ruins, or monuments to the conditions of the present become cartographies to be read through an economic and socio-political lens. Constructing new monuments – in the sense of defacing old histories as well as in applying the culture of the monument to other fields – becomes a methodology to reimagine and rewrite our past and present. Ryts Monet and Alterazioni Video, both on show at Palazzo Braschi, are representative of these two types of approaches.
Ryts Monet’s practice might be best captured by a quote by Hannah Arendt: “Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”[12] In his multimedia practice, he references cultural insignia of sociopolitical representation, ranging from monuments to postcards or everyday objects such as banknotes, linking historical ideologies to the means of governance in a globalized world – the globality of which has been shaped by the concept of European modernity. Taking the Shadow of an Obelisk and letting it dissolve into the Sea (2018) consists of a cyanotype on paper and a video, showing the real-time process of its materialization. The sizing of the two elements – the monumental cyanotype and the compact size of the monument on screen – speak of a reversal in itself. The title foretells the two acts Monet undertakes to transform the aesthetics and ethics of the obelisk of Villa Opicina in Trieste by using the cyanotype as a technique. With the act of “taking the shadow of an obelisk” Monet takes more than a picture, he ‘measures’ the religious, historical, and national implications of today’s presence of the obelisk; the act of “letting it dissolve into the sea” manifests the imprint of the obelisk and, at the same time, literally questions the epistemological, cultural, and semiotic grounds it stands on – in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s words, Monet attempts to create a form of history that instead of legitimizing the present, “look[s] toward its own death”.[13] The obelisk represents a conflicted history. Rooted in Ancient Egypt, where it was conceived as a petrified sun ray, the symbol of the deity Ra, the sun god, it was later on stolen or displaced, and appropriated as a monument by the West: Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, obelisks and obelisk-like monuments sprouted up throughout Western cities as well as cities of the colonized world, becoming an icon of European imperialism and the Enlightenment. The latter narrative of Europe as the cradle of reason and birthplace of modernity belongs – among the concepts of citizenship and nation-state – to the substantiating forces of an enduring binary, first introduced and produced ever since by imperial and colonial rule. Monet attends to the many identity and time indexes of the obelisk while creating a powerful and yet subtle and poetic gesture of their translation. The cyanotype technique requires a surface being sensitized with a particular solution, followed by the exposure to ultraviolet light, and completes by washing the paper in water, which develops and freezes the image. In an alchemical process, Monet produces a replica of the stone monument that carries on the religious connotation of Egypt’s sun god as sunbeams imprinting on earth – indicating the origin of the obelisk. Mussolini, too, had appropriated the symbol of the sun. His desire for a new Italian Empire, matching those of Britain and France, sought to guarantee the Italian people “a place in the sun”. The blurred shadow, caused by the movement of the sun, symbolizes a process in time. The final act of dissolving the cyanotype into water, which is a technical necessity to develop the picture, can be read as dissolving a European identity and meta-narrative into the sea, connecting its historical foundation with the present of migration flows across the Mediterranean Sea.
Three Ethiopian stamps document the long process of repatriation of the obelisk of Axum from Italy to Ethiopia. Taken by the Italians as war booty in 1937, when Italy’s occupation of Ethiopia ended, the stele was brought to Rome and erected in front of what used to be the Ministry for Italian Africa and, today, is the headquarters of FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). Fifty-eight years would pass from the decision to repatriate it to its eventual arrival back in Ethiopia. A fourth stamp, depicting Bob Marley, hangs in close proximity. Legend has it that Marley pleaded for the obelisk’s return during a concert at Milan’s San Siro stadium, located at the Piazza Axum, during his Uprising Tour in 1980. His presence recalls Rastafarianism, a religion and culture founded in Jamaica in the 1930s. The Rastafarians praised Haile Selassie I., the last emperor of Ethiopia, as the reincarnation of Christ on Earth, while fascist propaganda under Mussolini depicted him as a tyrant and instrumentalized this image to justify the invasion and subsequential ‘liberation’ of the Ethiopians. In this series of stamps Monet opens a discourse around multi-perspectivity culminating in cultural symbols as well as their role within the interconnection of history, identity, and myth making.
Such archaeological practices developed out of a long tradition of re-signifying the aesthetics of traditional monuments and establishing an ethics from which to reflect on problematic pasts. In the 1980s, along with a renewed public discussion on Nazism in West Germany, an artistic movement arose that was later coined “counter-monuments” (James Edward Young, 1992). Directed against the fear of historical amnesia, their “idea was to ensure the wound was not allowed to heal and the debate kept going”.[14] One of its most striking and direct examples is the Memorial Against Fascism by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz. In 1986 in Harburg, a 12-meter-high stele was erected, and the public invited to write on it in order to participate in remembrance. When one accessible part was covered with inscriptions, it was sunk into the ground. All that remains visible today are the top of the monument, now level with the ground, and a text panel describing the process in seven languages, reading: “… In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice.” Another powerful and, in this case, a decentralized example of a counter-monument, is Gunter Demnig’s ongoing project Stolpersteine (stumbling stones), initiated in 1992. By now, the small brass plates, each inscribed with “Here lived,” followed by the victim’s name, date of birth, and fate: internment, suicide, exile, or, in the vast majority of cases, deportation and murder, are scattered all over Europe. In many places, the stones have become a part of everyday life and urban environments. As anti-monuments, these works experiment with absence rather than presence and hence explore how memory is alternatively implemented in public spaces and public culture. Ultimately, they demand public participation and ongoing self-reflection on the topic rather than outsourced memory work, cast into monuments or memorials. They work against the formal language of classical monuments, establishing a new aesthetic. Arnold Holzknecht’s and Michele Bernardi’s intervention in Bolzano (2017) follows the concept of a palimpsest. It doesn’t erase the past; it layers over it. An LED-illuminated inscription of a quote by Hannah Arendt, “Nobody has the right to obey,” runs across the bas-relief and inscription of a fascist-era building, today the town’s financial offices. The frieze depicts Mussolini on horseback and carries the slogan “Credere, Obbedire, Combattere” (Believe, Obey, Combat). The simple intervention stands in contrast to the gesture of grandeur of the relief, while the quotation, explained by the artists, is a “direct answer” to the “invitation to blind obedience” contained in the fascist slogan.[15] Similar in its approach of applying the monumental quality of an inscription or a monument against itself is Olu Oguibe’s Monument for Strangers and Refugees (2017), installed in Kassel during documenta 14. The obelisk bears the biblical verse, “I was a stranger and you took me in”, in Germany’s four predominant languages: Turkish, Arabic, English, and German. Its installment in 2017 occurred during a fragile period after what was derogatorily referred to as the “refugee crisis” of 2014-15, a crucial point in European history. The strength of this work lies in bringing together various perspectives on wanted and unwanted or forced forms of hospitality and how the monumental obelisk shifts in meaning depending on who is interacting with it. Its performative nature clearly showed in its usage as a public meeting point as well as a pilgrimage for migrants and activists, but also in the stirred public controversy and projected hate by far-right movements such as Germany’s right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), whose members defamed the obelisk as a piece of “ideologically polarizing distorted art” (entstellte Kunst), by this summoning the ghosts of the Nazis’ program to describe modern art as “degenerated art” (entartete Kunst).[16] Ultimately, unannounced and without consulting with or informing the artist, the obelisk was taken down and, months later, re-erected along Kassel’s ‘art promenade,’ featuring artworks from past documenta editions, and thereby, at least to some degree, placed in the sheltered space of art, which indeed allows for more freedom of expression, but often brings with it the potential irrelevance for socio-political discourse. By far more provocative but similarly polarizing is Hans Haacke’s commissioned temporary memorial And You Were Victorious after All (1988) in Graz. Subject to controversy, vandalism, and eventually firebombing by neo-Nazis, Haacke recreated a Nazi victory column that had been erected over a public statue in 1938, when Hitler honored Graz as an early Nazi stronghold. While true to form and original site, Haacke’s memorial included an additional text to commemorate those killed locally by the Nazis. In doing so, he intended to reverse the original intention of the Nazi memorial while pouring salt on the still-open wound of a not-so-far-away past of Fascist complicity and collaboration. Both works – while Oguibe’s monument reappropriates the aesthetics and semiotics of the obelisk and Haacke’s memorial overidentifies with them – allude to the potential such artistic interventions can have in stirring up public debate and participation. They further emphasize that past connotations, like future implications, in monuments can be rewritten by – and this cannot be stressed enough here – the role of the public within that process. Examples like Haacke in the 1980s and Oguibe six years ago also point to the huge amount of work that still needs to be done. It must, therefore – in the canon of art history and through the work of artists, historians, and so on – be understood as a monument in itself to engage in the logic with which problematic histories, such as fascism, colonialism, and slavery but also patriarchy – have been materialized in public spaces and hence our public, social, and cultural consciousness.
Although I wasn’t able to identify public commissions of that sort in Italy, there have been and still are ongoing interactions with and translations of public monuments, pointing to the core of problematic remembrance. In Milan, the statue of right-wing journalist Indro Montanelli, erected in 2006, is a paradigmatic example of a) the activist/artistic attempts to re-signify a public monument and thereby public remembrance of Italy’s relationship to its colonial past, b) the perverted tactics of denunciating such attempts as directed against a historical heritage of importance worth preserving, and hence – consciously or naively – remaining blind to the highly selective and systemic erasure of marginalized histories, and c) the hesitation or lack of action of governments to attend to the history of European colonialism, racism, and white supremacy, as claimed by an ever-growing public – a process that would ultimately question their own legitimation. Of course, this applies not only to Italy but to Western hegemony as such, implemented and still very much present via the act of “collective forgetting” in our public sites and memory. According to Cindy Minarova-Banjac, “Collective forgetting refers to how states and citizens selectively remember, misremember, and disremember to silence and exclude alternative views and perspectives that counter the official discourse. The act of ‘forgetting’ involves deconstructing and reconstructing meaning, values, and institutions, where the dominant group produces a quasi-natural state of reality that delegitimizes alternative histories and memories. … forgetting plays an important role in foreign and domestic policy as states use narratives of the past to legitimize their national identities.”[17] Publicly remembered foremost as a journalist, Montanelli was also a political conservative and served as a soldier in the Italian colonization of Ethiopia, where he bought a young 12-year-old Eritrean girl and made her his wife. For years, activists and artists have been targeting the statue – all of which have been downplayed or condemned as vandalism or vile acts against a historical heritage worthy of being preserved. In 2020, artist and activist Cristina Donati Meyer placed a marionette representing a young Eritrean girl in the lab of the statue. Il vecchio e la bambina transformed the monument’s narrative for a short moment – until the police interrupted, removed the marionette, and took the artist into custody. Activist groups such as Non Una di Meno or I Sentinelli di Milano have doused the statue in pink paint or publicly requested its removal from Porta Venezia.
There are numerous artists, for whom the traumatic legacy and the contested field of memory politics in regard to Italy’s fascist, imperial, and colonial past, symbolized in public monuments, become a starting point for documentary, performative, or sonic translations. These works often go hand in hand with a de- or immaterialization of the monumentality of a historic site or event. Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani’s film Freedom of Movement (2018) featuring the Palazzo Civiltà in Rome’s EUR quarter, interweaves reenactments and archival footage, raising questions about how this legacy should be treated while drawing attention to society’s diversity and shared history. Theo Eshetu’s video installation The Return of the Axum Obelisk (2009) chronicles the repatriation of the war trophy from Rome to Ethiopia. He employs a visual style reminiscent of traditional Ethiopian icon paintings to convey a multifaceted narrative, encompassing the obstacles of the obelisk’s repatriation and reinstallation, the ensuing festivities, and moments of reconciliation between Italians and Ethiopians. A more educative approach is the film essays by Alessandra Ferrini. In her work, she explores the production of historical narratives with a focal point on “the carefully orchestrated politics of visibility and invisibility that shape the memory of colonial trauma in Italy.”[18] Laura Cazzaniga’s practice, on the other hand, could be described as civil disobedience and anti-authoritarian, attempting to understand and mediate how power structures and interpretations of history condition our lives. The series Studies on counter-monument (2017) comprises ephemeral interactions with Fascist monuments in Rome and Madrid that now exist as b/w photographs. She uses the resilience and resistance of street dance against the rigid form and historical conception of Fascist monuments. Like Cazzaniga, Rossella Biscotti is interested in unofficial accounts of history that live on the margins of any official discourse or practice. Often, her initial point is the inert and silent legacy of historical architecture and monuments that she weaves into a new course of counter-history. In Le Teste in Oggetto (2009), five casts of bronze heads of King Vittorio Emanuele III and Mussolini produced in 1942 for the Universal Expo in Rome, and never exhibited due to the show’s cancellation, demystifies the image of power. In Il Processo/The Trial (2010-13) the course and historical site of the publicly known “Processo 7 aprile” trial against members of the extra-parliamentary left-wing group Autonomia Operaia, becomes Biscotti’s “construction site”. The trial took place in the Aula Bunker at the Foro Italico, one of Mussolini’s major urban projects in Rome; built in 1934 as the Fencing Academy and turned into a high-security court in the late 70s. After a long vacancy, the building is now restored to its original function. Before a subsequent partial demolishment, Biscotti was able to salvage a few original elements from the site and cast minimalist concrete sculptures of architectural details in the courtroom. The essential component of Biscotti’s installation, turning it into a reenactment piece, is a six-hour edit of the original court recordings and its simultaneously performed live translation into several languages. Like Cazzaniga, Biscotti’s work proposes fluidity and motion against the rigidity of historical objectivity, in her case through language and translation. Another artistic position, opposing history with movement, transforming it through humorous reenactment and juxtaposing monumentality with immateriality, is Alexandra Pirici. Her performances emphasize the role of a public, the commons, and the possibilities deriving from a collective presence in addressing and understanding power structures. In If You Don’t Want Us, We Want You (2011), staged in her hometown Bucharest, performers enacted ephemeral monuments based on their post-Communist originals in the city. Explorations into the sonic field that further immaterialize the monument as a manifestation of the culture of public remembrance, emphasize the potential and importance of a social and public body to re-write history. The artist duo Invernomuto’s ongoing project Black Med follows sonic trajectories through the Mediterranean Sea. Constructed as an open archive, it forms a cartography of movements, events, identities, and narratives, constantly rewriting itself, and meant to be rendered and performed by multiple actors. Such works place the discussion on cultural heritage around the immaterial, beyond material inherently connected to nation- and identity-building. They try sound as a place for affect, memory, pulse, solidarity and spirituality across space and time.
The artists discussed thus far share a practice which is situated in a contemporary (Western) condition of inertia when it comes to dealing with its heritage and those histories that challenge the long-standing privileges of a few in opposition to a majority of ‘others’. They propose a transformation of the inert uniformity as the systemic standardization of memory politics, perpetuated in monuments of the past that celebrate imperialism and colonialism. They are motivated by a desire to engage with the complexities of history and memory, and to challenge dominant narratives and representations of the past. Where, now, do we situate the monument when it comes to entropy? Derived from physics, like inertia, in short, entropy describes the decay of energy in a system by measuring the degree of chaos within it. According to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, an isolated system always loses energy, which means its energy is converted into another form – as it can never be lost – and the entropy within the system maximizes to a point of equilibrium. Mia Fuller linked “inertia” to public remembrance in the Italian society. I suggest using inertia, coupled with entropy, to investigate the reciprocal dynamics between monuments, the public, and memory politics, as well as artistic practices stirring up the former. Land art artist and critic Robert Smithson had appropriated the term in the 60s and made it a focal point of his work. For Smithson, entropy became a way to fuel his artistic practice while giving a framework to the life of his earthworks. Essentially, for him, entropy translated into “time as decay or biological evolution”,[19] often in regard to a redefinition or new meaning given to postindustrial sites. In relation to the here elaborated shift and task of a transformation of memory politics and public consciousness of a History, I propose, and attest to these artistic practices, a reformulation of entropy as a driving force. The inert material in the form of documents gathered by a centralized History in order to legitimize its continuous course in the present, then becomes, “a kind of diversity and discontinuity [that was] completely pervaded by the entropic process”.[20] Such a disconnect becomes apparent in the breach between the growing search for social and political equality and the supposedly grounding, now crumbling historical image conveyed in the aesthetics and ethics of historical monuments in public spaces. The entropic process as in the falling apart or decay within a system – which in Smithson’s work was of biological nature – then becomes a new way for artists to deal with historical monuments, to envision, in Chakrabarty’s words, “a history that will attempt the impossible: to look toward its own death by tracing that which resists and escapes the best human effort at translation across cultural and other semiotic systems, so that the world may once again be imagined as radically heterogeneous”.[21]
In my opinion, one artist whose work seems to be full of entropy is Lara Favaretto. Situated between “destruction and reconstruction, collapse and recovery,” as she herself describes it, her work defies the methodology and materiality of monuments as placed in our public spaces and memories per se. The Momentary Monuments, staged since 2009, have taken various forms so far, from hollowed-out granite boulders, a swamp installation, thousands of piled sand bags, a library, or a scrap dump. These monuments – momentary, transitory, unwanted, ephemeral, or metaphorical – pay tribute to immaterial exchanges, disappeared persons, neglected objects, or those in the shadows of history. They are temporary and will be destroyed after display; they organically decay in their materiality or through the interaction of people, as in the case of a gigantic library of used books, which visitors were invited to take with them, slowly breaking down the monument. Opposed to the monument’s form and material as permanent, Favaretto’s monuments carry their own termination and limits of legitimation. They resist the dogma of visibility and hence displace the mechanisms that have substantiated knowledge, canons, and archives by highlighting the presence of some while making others invisible. Anticipating a maximum of entropy, of decay of whatever habit, material, and function in society, she poses, in the most simple and raw ways, a new or reversed life circuit. The question of who builds our monuments nihilates in donations collected inside an empty monument and given to neighboring charities. Consumption becomes redistribution. Accumulation becomes dispersion. The border ultimately dissolves. The artist strips materials bare, situating them in their spatial, socio-cultural, and economic structures and thereby laying the groundwork to make us aware of their fundamental politics in interacting with them. Only then does their symbolic meaning reveal itself.
Equally committed to a more constructive future is the work of Alterazioni Video. Here the entropic process of decay has become an artistic catalyst to examine our time via the ruins of the present and the conditions, in which they are produced. These ruins – vacant, decaying buildings, bunkers, or neglected, literal construction sites, inhabiting our urban and rural areas like skeletons – were not built to commemorate a history or an identity, rather they have become idiosyncratic of the immediate history and identity of the present in Italy as well as on a global scale. They are monuments in the sense of representing a collective memory yet to be investigated. They are unfinished. Incompiuto is Alterazioni Video’s ongoing research project, archival atlas and artistic practice aiming at creating a history through identifying “the unfinished” as a particular “style” and phenomenon of our present. In the words of Alterazioni Video, “We see the entire ‘national system of unfinished works’ as a material witness to the current socio-cultural context that permeates everyday life, and we propose a definition as a new Style that will return its contents from multiple points of view.”[22] Looking at the documents Alterazioni Video has assembled throughout the years, again Nabokov’s phrase from Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, “The future is but the obsolete in reverse,” comes to mind.[23] Pointing to the possible nihilation of the future as always being a reflection or inversion – a recycled version – of the past, the question is: Can we create the world anew as an original, radically heterogenous place? As a work in progress, initiated in Sicily in 2007, the project has by now appeared in various media, projects and collaborations, consisting of photographs, prints, installations, maps, video, and a book titled La Nascita Di Uno Stile / The Birth Of A Style. The collages on display at Palazzo Braschi show unfolded building structures that appear like maps or spaceships floating in the air. Thinking within the tradition of cartography – maps, like minds, always project. The multiplied concrete facades in Instituto Medico (2018) or Ispica (2018) recallthe Brutalist ghosts of architects like Nervi or Andrault and Parat, paradigmatic for an Italian functionalist post-war architecture. They, too, evoke sites like Pizzo Sella in Sicily or the coast of Castel Volturno – sites of rotting concrete skeletons, some of which have been confiscated by the authorities, but remain mostly neglected – symbols of power affirmations by the Mafia and material witness to money laundering, corruption and real estate speculation in the more recent Italian past. Also, Alberto Burri’s monumental land artwork Il Grande Cretto (1984-2015) comes to mind, which the artist conceived as a memorial to the town of Gibellina, destroyed by an earthquake in 1968. In their abstraction, floating against clear blue skies, they could be maps of unventured territories; they could be spaceships, abstract formations reminiscent of Kubrick’s monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in terms of imagining the unimaginable. The thought of these ruins as Jungian archetypes, meaning certain symbols, apparent and similar throughout different cultures as they have been developed from archetypes shared by a collective human unconscious, is not too far off when we take in the full complexity of a globalized world. Instead of neglecting these sites, an artistic approach like Alterazioni Video’s, proposes to look at them as “heritage” that can be utilized for the future. Such an endeavor must not be seen as nostalgia for a bygone past, but rather a broad scope discussion around the functionality and sustainability of buildings as well as changing societal demands and the on-demand economy in a globalized world in general. Mapping more than 750 building sites throughout Italy, 350 of which are located in Sicily, Incompiuto is more than a style, I would argue. It’s a methodology through which to interpret a more recent Italian past of internal conflict, economic oppression, exploitation and stagnation.Similar approaches of creating new archives of the present by examining contemporary conditions, manifesting in a form of ‘non-heritage’ also exist in the work of Margharita Moscardini, the collective Fare Ala, or Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade. In 1XUnknown (2012 – ongoing), Moscardini catalogues historic bunkers as permanent structures of the past, too expensive to demolish, and, hence, mostly in ruins today. The Atlantic Wall along the coast of Europe and Norway was one of Hitler’s military infrastructure projects. It transformed parts of the natural coastal lines into what the Nazis called “Fortress Europe”, consisting of roughly 1500 bunkers, partially still in place. In recent years, the term refers to the protectionist and military reinforcement of the European borders and beyond through externalized border policies, so-called hot spots, and buffer countries in order to stop illegal migration. Fare Ala’s project Pizzo Sella Art Village attempted to transform the public consciousness of the above-mentioned Pizzo Sella in illegally painting the inside and outside of the vacant buildings. With a focus on Rome, the collective Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade develops methodologies to map out and reimagine the manifestations of urban and societal change by activating these sites through walking or collective actions, often involving neighboring communities. Concerned with the transition of the temporary to the permanent, DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency), the artistic practice of Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, demands the transformation of refugee camps into cultural heritage. The refugee camp as a structure built to be demolished represents a short-term solution to a long-term phenomenon of global migration and flight due to wars, climate change, social, economic, and political crises. “As a paradigmatic representation of political failure, they are meant to have no history and no future; they are meant to be forgotten”.[24] Sites that have become emblematic of our present especially in regards to migration and neo-colonial forms of global and national relations – such as the border wall between Mexico and the US, the multitude of refugee camps or the shores of Lampedusa – have become a source for numerous artistic works, often fusing ethnographic and anthropological research with artistic appropriation.
How can artists situate themselves within these liminal, contested, often illegal, provisionary, and precarious places? How can artists ethically tell such stories that involve immensely complex entanglements of human fate? And how can artists then give voice and space to how people and communities want to be represented in the first place? What are the forms of monuments that don’t celebrate an event or person(s) in history but commemorate a moment, a structure – something non-defined – whose history, identity, and reality are ignored, neglected, or erased? Whose very existence nevertheless speaks so cruely of the human condition in the 21st century? Therefore, the biggest challenge is an ethics in order to work with and not about people in such precarious and inhuman situations, without crossing a line into the cynical or, even worse, appropriating human misery and injustice and instrumentalizing it for one’s own cause. The crucial point, it seems to me, is that of a modus operandi not of but with. Places like refugee camps, shanty towns, or vast urban peripheries appear to not be granted a history or future. Mostly neglected, carelessly constructed, or makeshift, these global infrastructures could be seen as collateral for socio-political, economic, and ecological decision-making by those in power. Could we call these places unwanted monuments of our present? Places that politics and society continuously attempt to render invisible. Places that have been evicted repeatedly; whose inhabitants, often forcedly living there, are subject to continuous displacement and abuse. Places whose traces of existence have been eradicated again and again. Places that, ultimately, are negated an existence and a history. Such a place was the “Jungle of Calais” as it existed in 2015-16. Initially set up in 2002, it reached a population peak during the “migration crisis” in 2015 and was demolished entirely in 2016. The history of the “Jungle” is a testament to a failed European project of collective solidarity and care. The “Jungle”, however, also represents a collective attempt to create a place of solidarity and hope to protest the border politics and reinstated exclusionary politics of the European Union. Hence, its history, the many stories about and appropriations of its case, are highly ambivalent. This is evident in a brief etymological detour. “Calais” locates the camp in close vicinity to the port of Calais in France on the shores of the English Channel. The term “Jungle”, originally coined by migrants to ironically circumscribe the rough conditions in such camps, derives, as suggested by Michel Agier, from the Pashto word “dzjangal”, meaning a forest or wooded area, and came into use in Pakistan in the 1970s to refer to Afghan refugee camps.[25] Afghans in exile originally named the temporary infrastructures they inhabited after them and it eventually became the generic term it is today, labeling precarious migrant settlements. French authorities called the “tolerated” camp “Camp de la Lande” – “lande” means “heath” or “moor” – relating to both the series of scattered campsites in the area as well as their location among dunes and flatlands on a still contaminated former landfill.[26] The term was adopted by media and politicians to refer to a state of exception and chaos, othering and degrading its inhabitants as “savages” and outsiders – a rhetoric that has formerly played an enormous role in the Western project of colonization and its narration. The reason why I am tracing the lineage and controversial usage of names for the refugee camps in Calais is to point to the evident impossibility for migrants and refugees to have a voice and own their story within a political debate and a process that continuously makes them passive bystanders and refuses them any political agency. In regard to artistic interventions within that field, the role of ethics hence cannot be stressed enough. Gian Maria Tosatti’s New Men’s Land (2015-16) is a multilayered and episodical work, the process of which can be read as a hypertext to the political chance for and subsequent failure of the European project, both of which the “Jungle of Calais” has come to symbolize. Consisting in a series of interventions on site, I concentrate on two different concepts of the monument in New Men’s Land that each represent a path for memory politics. Triggered by the destruction of the camp, Tosatti eventually gilded a remnant of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, located on the beach of Calais. He thereby transformed a pre-existing fragment of the past – a monument to Europe’s Fascist and exclusionary past – into a golden star, like the ones on the European flag. It is a fallen star: A monument to a present European politics that is repeating its past instead of reinventing itself and delivering on a promise made at the foundation of the European Union as a place of diversity and inclusion. Originally, Tosatti had planned a monumental rainbow sculpture, towering beside the refugee camp, which was never constructed due to pending permits and the eventual demolishment of the camp. As a universal sign of alliance and difference, it was supposed to be seen from afar, symbolizing a new, hopeful chapter of European solidarity. A new identity, featuring at its core difference as a unifying element, opposed to a history of colonialism, exclusion, and “homogeneity of population and rootedness in the soil” as stated in the Minority Treaties in 1919/20 after WWI. The latter welded the “right to have rights” (Hannah Arendt) to the concept of citizenship within the then freshly founded European nation-states, framed by borders, whose lines were drawn irrespective of prevailing ethnic differences. Against any external label, the rainbow should stand as a universal sign of language in accordance with “language as translation” (Etienne Balibar). It should help the community to build a self-narration in order to gain political agency in an ongoing debate on their fate, in which they were solely passive bystanders. Like many artists and thinkers, Tosatti has thereby theorized and stylized the “Jungle of Calais” as a historical site and moment, in which people from all over the world came together as equals to build an urban infrastructure, a “new capital of Europe” and to reconfigure an ethical canon for this European community “to come.” In their book Lande. The Calais ‘Jungle’ and Beyond, Dan Hicks and Sarah Millet, through contemporary archaeological methodology, propose to read the “Jungle of Calais” as “a place through which to remember the undocumented human experiences of the near-present, a lieu de mémoire for the recent past,” rather than “an urban prototype, prophecy, or site for some tautological ‘future heritage’.”[27] The focal point hereby becomes the process of how a monument comes into being rather than its eventual form. Their approach brings together the opposing dynamics within the camp “as a place of dehumanising borderwork, governance and violence on the one hand, and on the other, as a ‘space of appearance’ and protest, and as a site for comparison.”[28] When Calais was alive, it was a space of collective performativity, in which humanitarian, civil, political, artistic, and architectural endeavors fused in an unprecedented way to collectively protest against dehumanizing borderwork and migration management – the manifestation of which was the camp itself. I propose this interpretation of Tosatti’s work too. Individually, the Rainbow and the Star, attest to a particular moment within the camp’s history – its moment of appearance as well as its destruction. Taken together, they tell a more complete story, full of contradictions and struggle, of failure and hope. Tosatti has paid tribute to the importance of the process as a whole by publishing a book on New Men’s Land in 2017, taking into account not just the many moments of collective imagination, but also their disillusionment. While the camp is long gone, its existence, turned into an ephemeral glow in history, the mass of material and digital heritage in the form of artistic documents echoes, too, as a monument to our present. Foucault has described this relationship between the object and its past most poignantly, “in our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments”.[29]
Tosatti’s New Men’s Land aimed at deconstructing a border made up of the trinity birth-nationality-rights that marks the mechanism of granting rights to some, but not to others, and the impossibility for migrants to speak and be heard. The concept of the border is situated differently in Eugenio Tibaldi’s practice. Setting out from the dialectics of the megalopolis and its outskirts, he is concerned with what we might call a border of perception permeating the majority of modern society and culture. This border segregates cities, like living organisms, into those places which make up an image that’s communicated to the outside and the “non-places”, which are considered a poor, degraded reality. Such a distinction classifies the inhabitants and actors of either side accordingly. For him, the outskirts are places of aggregation, he calls them “super-places”, full of life, intensity and hidden beauty – the backbones of our cities spoken from a socio-economic perspective. It is along binaries such as visibility/invisibility, legal/illegal, and meta-history/collateral histories, that he develops his work. In making peripheries and outskirts his methodology, Tibaldi subverts prejudices of this kind. Like Gayatri Spivak’s deconstructivist theory of the margin, he displaces the intrinsically ideological politics behind any form of world making by putting to the fore an active, provisional non-strategy. A displacement of these politics does not simply reverse the centrality-marginality-axis, which essentially would reproduce the same hierarchical relations, but emphasises and investigates their mutual existence – counteracting and coexisting in opposite ways.[30] His anthropological research on the production and impact of the para-design created at the crossroads of society, economy, and culture – undocumented and hidden interactions, exchanges, and contaminations – become the subject of his artistic practice. His work grows out of long-term local research, often through living onsite in order to work with a perspective rather than on it. What I have described in the beginning of this text as a disconnect between ideology and reality, posed by historical monuments in our public places, is equally to be found in Tibaldi’s working method and output. It is the artist’s starting point from a place of disconnect between image and reality as well as his radical counter-writing of history, aesthetics, and myth building – ultimately the formation of a reality – that lead me to discuss his work here. Similar to Alterazioni Video’s approach, Tibaldi, throughout the last 20 years, has been building a multimedia atlas of such social, spatial and temporal traces in the suburbs and peripheries. His work can be seen as a monument to these places, to be found all over the world, and their manifold processes and social relations within. He subjectively accentuates the beauty he finds there, neither didactic nor instructive. His work subtly guides our views to the modes of production of what is considered the world: the traces of the “super-places, may these be of economic, industrial, consumerist, architectural, or social nature. Tibaldi is aware that any critique always represents a certain position for which responsibility has to be taken. By assuming this responsibility though, one is able to recognise others as equally constitutive of a heterogeneously built territory. A mutual territory oneself is also part of. In this line of thought, borders become an active space of production and not a reciprocally defining and segregating line. This paves the way for new maps and narratives that refuse to fall victim to any instant relativization or being put into (mis)use as tokenism. In the series of artists working on contemporary monuments already discussed, Tibaldi adds one important aspect of contemporary politics of representatives and representations: the meta-writing of public and cultural consciousness through advertisement. The early series Landscapes (2002-04) consists of photographs of billboards, advertisements, and posters – the so-called monuments of consumerism, capitalism, and mass culture – that he modifies with white acrylic. The subjective emphasis and erasure of elements reveals estranged landscapes, neither photograph nor painting. Emptied of any human trace or context, these skylines of signs deliver a brutally honest picture of the hidden structures of capitalism governing our lives. They are hidden in plain sight. Tibaldi solely renders them visible. He thereby attests not only to society’s binary worldviews but to the untransparent mechanisms of their reproduction in a capitalist world.
In an attempt to make a tentative conclusion of these ongoing processes. I set out to investigate the contemporary notions of an aesthetics and ethics of the monument. We have seen two main strategies of making the monument a construction site: The first encompasses artistic practices such as counter-monuments, anti-monuments, and temporary monuments as well as contemporary archeological, archival, and immaterial practices that deconstruct ideologies commemorated in historical monuments. The second constructs new monuments out of contemporary conditions – in the sense of defacing old histories and canons, questioning new forms of a meta-writing of history, and in applying the culture of the monument to other infrastructures. The notions of inertia and entropy become helpful tools to tackle both the structure and materiality of the monument and the memory politics developed through them as well as artistic strategies of their deconstruction. What unites all these approaches, independently of where the artists or the subject of their work are located, is an inquiry into contemporary conditions, in which ghosts of our past haunt and manifest the present, essentially nihilating a future that is not solely a reproduction of the past. Making the monument a construction site of our present is a process of changing the politics based on which we memorize and form social, public, and cultural consciousness. Both strategies inherently demand a new consciousness around the notions of history, identity, and representation. Considering the monument as a methodology to alter meta-narratives of the past or to form “the construction site” as a new canon through which to understand the present, promises to be a fruitful path for the future – not only in regard to Italy – as it is uniquely situated between the processes and players in the evolution, shifts, and perpetuation of public memory and consciousness.
[1] Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization. Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination, Cambridge University Press, New York 2011, pp. 8.
[2] Dell Upton, Nationalism’s Difficult Monuments, in: A Difficult Heritage: The Afterlives of Fascist-era Art and Architecture, edited by Carmen Belmonte, Cinisello Balsamo (MI), Silvana editoriale, Milan expected 2023, pp. 69.
[3] Mia Fuller, Difficult How? Italy’s Inertia Memoriae of Fascism, in Belmonte, Balsamo (exp. 2023), pp. 15.
[4] Hal Foster, An Archival Impulse, OCTOBER 110, Fall 2004, pp. 3–22.
[5] Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, Pantheon Books, New York, 1972 [1971], p. 129.
[6] The mission statement and the historical chapters can both be accessed viahttps://quadriennalediroma.org/en/about-us/, accessed April 12, 2023.
[7] Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, in: Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575-599, p. 583.
[8] Hannah Malone, Questioning the Idea of Difficult Heritage as Applied to the Architecture of Fascist Italy, in Belmonte, Balsamo (ed.) (exp. 2023), pp. 41-57, pp.46-47.
[9] Fuller (exp. 2023), p. 17.
[10] Ibid., p. 21-22.
[11] Francesca Guerisoli, Marco Trulli, Monuments and Shared Values Towards a New Relationship with History, in Quaderni d’arte italiana #3 History, pp. 54-58.
[12] Hannah Arendt, Isak Dinesen: 1885–1963, in: Men in Dark Times, Harcourt, Brace & World, New York 1970, p.115.
[13] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton University Press, New Jersey 2020, pp. 46-47.
[14] Nora Sternfeld, Counter-Memorials and Para-Monument, https://hfbk-hamburg.de/de/projekte/conference-counter-monuments-and-para-monuments-contested-memory-public-space/gegendenkmäler-und-para-monumente/, accessed April 17, 2023.
[15] Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti, A small Italian town can teach the world how to defuse controversial monuments, December 6, 2017, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/06/bolzano-italian-town-defuse-controversial-monuments, accessed April 7, 2023.
[16] Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, The Curious Case of Olu Oguibe’s Monument for Strangers and Refugees, frieze Issue 219, March 22, 2021, https://www.frieze.com/article/olu-oguibe-monument-strangers-refugees-controversy, accessed April 17, 2023.
[17] As stated in the abstract of Cindy Minarova-Banjac, Collective Memory and Forgetting: A Theoretical Discussion, Centre for East-West Cultural & Economic Studies, no. 16, Bond University, 2018.
[18] Alessandra Ferrini, Sight Unseen, https://www.alessandraferrini.info/sight-unseen, accessed April 17, 2023.
[19] Robert Smithson, Entropy and the New Monuments (1966), https://holtsmithsonfoundation.org/entropy-and-new-monuments, accessed April 20, 2023.
[20] Robert Smithson, An Interview with Robert Smithson (1973) by Moira Roth, in Robert Smithson, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2004, 93.
[21] Chakrabarty 2020, pp. 46-47.
[22] Alterazioni Video, Incompiuto Siciliano, May 9, 2017, https://www.domusweb.it/en/photo-essays/2017/05/09/alterazioni_video_incompiuto_siciliano.html, accessed April 21, 2023.
[23] I owe this reference to Robert Smithson who used it in his text Entropy and the New Monuments (1966) to critically reflect on the contemporary conditions of the City.
[24] DAAR (Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti), Refugee Heritage, https://artandtheory.org/products/coming-soon-refugee-heritage, accessed, 15 April 2023.
[25] Michel Agier, Nouvelles réflexions sur le lieu des Sans-État: Calais, son camp, ses migrants’, in Multitudes, 64 (3): pp. 53–61, p. 56.
[26] Dan Hicks and Sarah Mallet, Lande: The Calais ‘Jungle’ And Beyond, Bristol University Press, Bristol 2019, p. 2.
[27] Hicks, Millet 2019, p. 81.
[28] Ibid., Preface, IV.
[29] Foucault 1972, p.7.
[30] Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, London, Bloomsbury, 2013, 396-98.
