a super contribution by Micol Bez to “Anche le statue muoiono” issue on Roots&Routes magazine.

“The debate about memorialisation is monopolised by two questions: should certain monuments be removed? Or would that mean censoring, rewriting or forgetting history? Starting from the epistemological premise that all knowledge production and representation has the side effect of producing ignorance, and that monumentalisation does not escape this fate, in this article I would like to propose a move beyond such dichotomies, to explore other possible strategies of memorialisation. As soon as one begins to commemorate, they run the risk of extracting memory from the living space of desiring bodies, de facto depoliticising it. The problem is therefore not only that of “bad monuments”, or of monuments of “bad” historical characters. Even for legitimate monuments, memorialisation is always a violent process, one that establishes a mythology, setting the hero in stone and erasing counter-histories (Foucault, 1997). In other words, erecting a monument inevitably produces ignorance. The monument is thus a paradoxical object in that it stops history and interrupts historicity, suspending the active life of historical figures and ideas within contemporary political consciousness. Monumentalisation turns, literally, life into stone. So, truly decolonising our monuments cannot stop at choosing which ones should be torn down, it requires a much more profound questioning of and de-linking from the epistemic and material conditions of possibility of western discourse on memorialisation (Mignolo, 2007). Why not leave monuments forever tagged and marked in red paint? Why not build monuments to shame and shameful monuments? What are the social feelings that a monument should embody, and why are they so regimented?

Starting from a reading of 1994: a love poem by South African poet Koleka Putuma, and of Igiaba Scego’s Roma Negata, I will explore the affective discourse that regulates our relationship to monuments and propose another possibility: that of a critical monument, or a process of memorialisation that sees itself as provocative, conflictual, and indeterminate, not as celebratory or pacificatory. In dialogue with the work of South African artist William Kentridge, and with the Nietzschean notion of chaos as a constantly conflictual field of competing drives, I will propose to reimagine monuments as provocations, and memorialisation as a field of contingency, ambiguity, plurality, betrayal and bastardy (Kentridge & Morris, 2014).”