Image: By Elke Krasny, Barra Movement, Cinquantenaire Brussels, Heritage Days, September 2022
Historical monuments, including sculpture in public space, modernist houses or urban ensembles, are visible and spatial expressions of what hegemony understands to be of public value. This lecture uses care and repair as well as refusal and resistance as analytics to understand ‘monumental conflicts.’ This will show how care and repair, often mandated by heritage laws, are implicated in and actively involved with the continuance and maintenance of past injustices. At the same time, refusal and resistance will be rendered legible as new forms of care and repair. Using as examples monuments and modernist houses from different parts of the world the lecture unfolds public imaginaries tied to legacies and conflicts and will present a complex reading of monuments and conflicts around them that include affective, ecological, environmental, material, social, and political dimensions. The lecture opens the question what monument activism and monument justice mean in post-pandemic and climate catastrophic times and introduces notions such as urban curating, curating context, and curating decay to think about active involvements with monuments and conflicts.
Watch the lecture below:
Elke Krasny
Elke Krasny, PhD, Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Krasny is a feminist cultural theorist, urban researcher, curator, and author. Her scholarship addresses ecological and social justice at the global present with a focus on caring practices in architecture, urbanism, and contemporary art. With Angelika Fitz, she edited Critical Care. Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet together (MIT Press, 2019). Her 2023 book Living with an Infected Planet. Covid-19 Feminism and the Global Frontline of Care develops a feminist perspective on the rhetoric of war and the realities of care in pandemic times.
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