notes on contributors
Aleida Assmann held the chair of English Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Konstanz, Germany, from 1993–2014, and taught as a guest professor at various universities (Princeton, Yale, Chicago, and Vienna). In 2014 she received the Heineken Prize for History (2014) and, together with her husband Jan Assmann, the Balzan Prize (2017) and Peace Award of the German Book Trade (2018).
Alison Atkinson-Phillips is Lecturer in Public History at Newcastle University (UK). Her research interests include “marginalized” histories, how diffcult pasts are dealt with in the present, public art, and place-based memory work. She is the author of Survivor Memorials: Remembering Trauma and Loss in Contemporary Australia (2019).
Gruia Badescu (PhD, University of Cambridge) is an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Konstanz. His research focuses on the connection between place-making and dealing with the past, including postwar reconstruction in Southeastern Europe and the Middle East, and spatial engagements with political violence in Latin America.
Ulrike Capdepón holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Hamburg and is a research fellow of the Reconstructing Memory in the City project, based at the Center for Cultural Inquiry (ZKF), and the research coordinator of the Civic Strength (Gemeinsinn) research project, both at the University of Konstanz. Currently she holds a DAAD longterm Guest Professorship at CUCSH, Universidad de Guadalajara,
Mexico. Her research interests include memory studies and space as well as human rights policies in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula.
Sarah Dornhof is a research fellow at the Humboldt University Berlin. She received her PhD in Cultural Studies and Anthropology from the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder. Her current research examines contemporary art and cultural politics in Morocco in relation to questions of cultural history, collective memory, and archival practice. Among her publications are Alternierende Blicke auf Islam und Europa: Verletzung als Rationalität visueller Politik (2016). She co-edited F(r)ictions of Art (2016); Situating Global Art. Topologies—Temporalities—Trajectories (2017); and Islam and the Politics of Culture in Europe. Memory, Aesthetics, Art (2013).
Anne Huffschmid is a cultural scientist and audiovisual researcher. She works at the Latin American Studies Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin and specializes in topics such as social memory and urban studies, visual cultures, and experimental research methods. Her long-term project “Memory in the Megacity” explored traumatic memories in Buenos Aires and Mexico City (see the monography Risse im Raum). Her latest project dealt with forced disappearance and forensic agencies (see the documentaries Persistence and Dato sensible as well as the web documentary Forensic Landscapes).
Elizabeth Jelin is an Argentine sociologist engaged in research in the areas of human and citizenship rights, social inequalities, gender and the family, social movements, and memories of political repression. She is a senior researcher at the National Council of Scientifc and Technical Research (CONICET) and at IDES (Institute of Economic and Social Development) in Buenos Aires. She is the author of numerous books and articles, among them, State Repression and the Labors of Memory (2003) and La lucha por el pasado. Cómo construimos la memoria social (2017)— translated into English as The Struggle for the Past. How we Construct Social Memories (2020). In 2013, she was awarded the highest prize for scientifc achievement in Argentina, the Bernardo Houssay National Prize, for her research trajectory in the social sciences. In 2014, she received a Doctorate Honoris Causa at Université Paris Ouest, Nanterre—La Defense.
Stefanie Kappler is Associate Professor of Confict Resolution and Peacebuilding at Durham University. Her main research interests include
spatial approaches to peace, memory politics, and the role of the arts in peace formation processes. Recent publications include Peacebuilding and Spatial Transformation: Peace, Space and Place, (2017), co-authored with Annika Björkdahl, as well as journal articles in Political Geography, Peacebuilding, Memory Studies, Cooperation and Confict, Review of International Studies and Millennium—Journal of International Studies. She is working on projects to investigate the connection between memory politics, cultural heritage, and peacebuilding (see http://peaceandmemory.net/), funded by the Swedish Research Council and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, as well as the role of the arts in peace formation processes, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK.
Antoinette McKane is Lecturer in Museum and Heritage Studies at Liverpool Hope University where she coordinates the MA in Museum and Heritage Studies in partnership with National Museums Liverpool. Her PhD was funded by the AHRC and awarded by the University of Liverpool, in close collaboration with Tate Liverpool. She is particularly interested in the social and political roles of art museums, galleries, and exhibitions. Her research interests include community engagement and participation in art museums, and the relationship between museums, galleries, and urban change. She is an active member of the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Centre for War and Peace Studies at Liverpool Hope University. She recently co-edited a special issue of Kritika Kultura focusing on the theme of arts, peace, and confict.
Susanne Mersmann is an art historian. She focuses her research on French war monuments, critical museum studies, and contemporary art practice. Her doctoral thesis on the Musées du Trocadéro: Viollet-le-Duc and canonical discourse in 19th-century Paris was awarded the Book and Art Review Fair Prize at the French National Art History Festival in Fontainebleau.
Anke Schwarzer is a journalist and social scientist based in Hamburg. She conducted research for the German Institute for Human Rights in Berlin and the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights in Vienna between 2016 and 2018. There she contributed to the monthly data collection on the current migration situation in the European Union. Since 2019 she is member of the Advisory Board for the Decolonization of Hamburg at the Hamburg Department of Culture.
Nadine Siegert is a researcher and curator, and a publisher with iwalewabooks. She works for the Goethe Institute and was the Deputy Director of Iwalewahaus, University of Bayreuth (2011–2019). In 2016, she published her PhD (Re)mapping Luanda on nostalgic and utopian aesthetic strategies in contemporary art in Angola.
Jill Strauss is Associate Professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. Her research involves restorative practices and the visual interpretation of narrative and diffcult histories. She is co-editor of Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (2019) and other articles and book chapters.
Astrid Swenson is Professor of History at Bath Spa University. Her publications include The Rise of Heritage in France, Germany and England, 1789-1914 (2013) and From Plunder to Preservation: Britain and the Heritage of Empire (edited with Peter Mandler, 2013).
list of figures
Fig. 2.1 Aljoscha, the dis- and replaced Russian soldier (a “monument of gratitude”), Tallinn. Photograph by the author 26
Fig. 2.2 Namibia Memorial (Antikolonialdenkmal, Bremen), Fritz Behn 1931. Photograph: Peter Schröder, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons 40
Fig. 3.1 Sydney Welcome Wall, Pyrmont Bay. Photograph taken by the author, November 2013 51
Fig. 3.2 Reasons to Remember Wall, last remaining section of South Australia’s frst native school. Photograph by the author 60
Fig. 5.1 Charterhouse Street Port of London Authorities. Photograph by the author 94
Fig. 6.1 Photograph displayed in the Eldorado Cooperative Museum. Photograph by the author, 2017 107
Fig. 6.2 Exhibition view, Eldorado Cooperative Museum. Photograph by the author, 2017 108
Fig. 6.3 Map of Eldorado 110
Fig. 7.1 Humboldt-Forum Berlin. Photograph by Dirk Schäfernolte, 2020 129
Fig. 7.2 Bismarck-Denkmal Hamburg. Photograph by the author, 2020 132
Fig. 8.1 Mika Rottenberg, Cosmic Generator, 2017, Asian shop, exterior view during the Skulptur Projekte 2017, Münster/ Germany. LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster/Skulptur Projekte Archiv/Henning Rogge ©Mika Rottenberg. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth 150
Fig. 8.2 Mika Rottenberg, Cosmic Generator, 2017. The frst saleswomen in the Yiwu Market, video still (2:41); Battista, 2019 156
Fig. 9.1 António Ole, Mitologias, painted metal, 1985, photograph by the author 174
Fig. 9.2 Kiluanji Kia Henda, Redefning The Power IV (with Miguel Prince), from the series Homem Novo, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Fonti 176
Fig. 10.1 J. Marion Sims Pedestal, photograph by the author 189
Fig. 10.2 Vinnie Bagwell, Victory Beyond Sims (rendering). Courtesy of the artist, Vinnie Bagwell, and BCT Design ©2019 196
Fig. 11.1 Mohamed Arejdal, Face à Lyautey, 2019. Digital photographic print. Courtesy of the artist and Comptoir des Mines Galerie, Marrakech 214
Fig. 11.2 Head of the monumental Lenin statue (by Nikolai Tomski) in Berlin-Friedrichshain, erected in 1970, dismantled in 1992. View of the exhibition “Unveiled. Berlin and its Monuments” in the former Provisions Depot at Spandau Citadel, Berlin. Photograph by the author, 2020 221
Fig. 12.1 The Generalštab complex, destroyed in 1999 by the NATO bombings. Photograph by the author 242
Fig. 12.2 Vraca Memorial Park, Sarajevo, used for shelling the city and then destroyed during the Siege of Sarajevo (1992–1995) by Bosnian Serb paramilitaries. Photograph by the author 247
Fig. 13.1 Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Memorial, Almudena Cemetery, Madrid. The memorial after the names were removed in November 2019. Photograph by the artist 268
Fig. 13.2 Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Memorial, Almudena Cemetery, Madrid. The memorial in its current state, after its demolition and the removal of the name plaques. Photograph by the artist 270
Fig. 14.1 Memorial Lagos de Moreno (video-still short documentary “Dato sensible”, ©Huffschmid and Diaz Tovar) 280
Fig. 14.2 Aerial image of the excavation site in Colinas de Santa Fe, Veracruz (video-still short documentary “Dato sensible”, ©Huffschmid and Diaz Tovar) 282
Introduction: Contested Memory in Urban Space
Ulrike Capdepón and Sarah Dornhof
In times of intensifying migration, mobility, and diversity, as well as rising populism and nationalistic backlash, urban memory politics has become an increasingly contested feld. In 2020, we witnessed a proliferation of worldwide protests against monuments that glorify colonial and racist legacies on the one hand, and against current racism and state violence on the other. What started with the Black Lives Matter movement evolved into a widespread global movement for racial justice, connected to various demands and actions to decolonize urban spaces, but also public institutions such as museums, archives, and universities. In the wake of all this, urban memory culture is now a central issue of contestation, both in its historical and topological dimensions, and in its racial, social, and gendered constitution.
U. Capdepón (*)
Universität Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany
e-mail: ulrike.capdepon@uni-konstanz.de
S. Dornhof
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: sarah.dornhof@hu-berlin.de
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
U. Capdepón, S. Dornhof (eds.), Contested Urban Spaces, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87505-3_1
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Similar to monuments, collective memory reveals its political dimension primarily when it is questioned, contested, abandoned, or transformed. The highly mediated acts of toppling statues—such as that of slave-trader Edward Colston in Bristol, Congo colonizer King Leopold II in Brussels, or Confederate monuments in the United States, accompanied by violent clashes with white supremacists in Charlottesville—are visible manifestations of a stirring up of hitherto marginalized, forgotten, and suppressed memories.
We take the urban space as a starting point for thinking about practices, stakeholders, narratives, and imaginations within the dense complexity of this material, symbolic, and performative contestation of memory. By addressing a wide range of geographies, histories, and collectivities, the contributions to this book focus on historical circumstances and contemporary practices in which urban space and articulations of memory interrelate and transform each other. The city, as well as the margins and outsides which demarcate it as a center, clearly shows, along and across geopolitical and cultural differences, ways in which spatial memories are fragmented and fuid, moving between historical inscriptions and erasures, silence and oblivion, questioning and resignifcation of monuments and traces.
While the book focuses on urban centers in different parts of the world as sites where collective memories of diverse people, of different times and places, connect, it seeks to decenter perspectives on urban memory—in terms of spaces, subjects, and issues. Contributions to the book draw attention to topics and perspectives that have long been marginalized in urban memory manifestations, such as colonial histories (Schwarzer, Strauss) and migration (Assmann, Jelin, Atkinson-Phillips); to geographies that do not fgure centrally in memory studies, like Angola (Siegert) or Morocco (Dornhof); to contestations of forgetting and erasure, such as remembrance of post–civil war victims in Madrid (Capdepón) or of contemporary violence in Mexico (Huffschmid); and to ways in which physical sites and material traces remember, as in urban memory in post-Yugoslav cities (Badescu), in an art installation by Mika Rottenberg (Mersmann), in curatorial practices in community-led urban museums in Cape Town (Kappler and McKane), or in sensory memory in London (Swenson). From different academic felds and interdisciplinary approaches, the book thus interrogates methodologies and felds of study in which centers and margins, memory and forgetting, local and global histories intersect and challenge each other.
The focus on monuments and traces from such decentering perspectives accounts for tensions, frictions, and confict between presences and
absences of materialized memory, between situated forms, transculturally circulating aesthetics, and translating concepts. It draws attention to historical and cultural entanglements as well as racial, gendered, and social inequalities underlying them. The book’s approach to contested memory in urban space therefore acknowledges the locatedness of the historical and material conditions of remembrance and, at the same time, analyzes global implications and power relations.
The following questions are central to the contributions in this volume: How are history and memory inscribed, erased, or transformed in urban space, and how does the cityscape shape ways of remembrance? How do subjective memories become an issue of heritage and identity politics, a matter of public commemoration, monumentalizing, art, or activist intervention? Who is participating in the shaping and transformation of memory in urban space, and who is marginalized and excluded? How can we listen and respond to the silences and absences in the mnemonic cityscape; to inequalities, appropriations, or subsuming generalizations in public commemoration? How can we activate, recognize, and archive future memories of the contemporary city in a plural and democratic way?
Along these questions, the contributions to this edited volume focus on the in/visibility and affective power of memory in urban spaces, and contestations in the present through political, activist, and artistic practices. While they generally draw on dynamic, political, and psychological dimensions within the feld of memory studies, they pay special attention to the built environment, urban architecture, and sites in which memories are not merely attached, but where they live, circulate, associate, disappear, or haunt, thus unsettling the very urban fabric and leading to manifest transformations. The material dimensions of memory, the traces of past histories, and the monuments erected or overthrown at different moments of time provide a common conceptual thread and relational framework for the case studies assembled in this volume.
Contribution to MeMory StudieS: urban SpaCe, inequality, and deCentered reMeMbranCe
As argued by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1992), both individual and collective memories are not only inscribed in “social frameworks of memory” that refer to the deep embeddedness of individual memory in social groups, but they are also spatially determined, as the
collective frameworks of memory are profoundly shaped by spatial locations and physical surroundings. The “spatial turn” has brought new dimensions of research to the feld of memory studies, highlighting the importance of space, cities, and the built environment in the study of the social, the political, and the cultural dimension of remembrance.
Scholars working in memory studies have engaged deeply with the spatial and material dimension of remembrance. Examinations of the relationships between space and collective memory have, for at least the last two decades, shifted from examining national framings to a more global analysis (Levy and Sznaider 2006; A. Assmann and Conrad 2010), transnational approaches (A. Assmann 2014; De Cesari and Rigney 2014; Rothberg 2009), and transcultural perspectives (Crownshaw 2011; Erll 2011; Bond and Rapson 2014). While memory studies draw attention to the importance of memory politics for the constitution of national identities, collective narratives, and forms of public remembrance, interrogations in the feld also focus on ways in which memory has been shaped and erased in transcultural, often violent encounters throughout imperial, colonial, de- and postcolonial, postwar, and post-dictatorship scenarios. In that sense, national remembrance today can be conceptualized as resulting out of transnational and transcultural connectedness, confict, and collective violence and atrocity, and attention has been drawn to various forms of subjectivity based on political struggles, shared traumata, diasporas and networks, selective bonds, and solidarities across national borders. As a consequence, memory studies have adopted cosmopolitan approaches (Levy and Sznaider 2006) and conceptualizations of multidirectional (Rothberg 2009) or traveling memory (Erll 2011).
These approaches emphasize the relational, dialogical, and processual character of collective memory. Rather than being fxed to a place or determined by a group identity, processes of remembrance are able to create identity, connectedness, belonging, and affective bonds. At the same time, memories are formed in contact zones, throughout historical entanglements, and most often in confict and within hierarchical relations. Memory narratives commonly imply multiple collective references, nonlinearities, ambivalences, manipulations, and blind spots. Practices, forms, and media of memory become perceptible as they are traveling and transforming through time and space, as the very condition for a living memory culture (Erll 2011: 11–12). Arguing against a competitive “zero sum logic” by which the memory of one group erases, diminishes, or relativizes that of another, Michael Rothberg (2009) has shown how memory can
evolve out of relationality and comparison, enabling forms, expressions, and mutual recognition through multidirectional remembrance. With his concept of multidirectional memory, Rothberg introduced a new paradigm by connecting transnational and postcolonial perspectives in memory studies. By establishing a dialogue between collective memories of the Holocaust and memories of slavery and colonialism, he opens a perspective for productive mutual fertilization, arguing against competitive, exclusionary hierarchies of memory (Rothberg 2009: 15). However, collective memory does not circulate freely across national, social, and cultural borders. New technologies, social media, and global networks have stretched the scale of communities, manifestations, and scapes of social remembrance much more broadly, but many historical narratives and acknowledged forms of subjectivity remain centered around identities framed in normative or hegemonic terms of national, social, cultural, and gendered belonging with corresponding constructions of alterity, silencing, and oblivion (e.g. Trouillot 1995; Passerini 2007; Hartman 2007).
The shift from national to transnational or transcultural memory also involves a shift in focus from state-centered memory politics around the conservation, commemoration, and commodifcation of heritage to a variety of claims founded on a “right to the city” (Lefebvre 1968; Harvey 2008, 2012), often entailing iconoclastic and performative contestation. The movement of the International Situationists, based in Paris in the 1960s, for instance, reclaimed urban space to encourage new social aesthetic practices of urban life such as “dérive” and “détournement.” Their innovative approach of psychogeography aspired to new modes of perception, emotion, and behavior and promoted tactical subversions of the city’s cultural logic. Nevertheless, the purpose of this shift was not to formulate an antithesis between state politics on the one hand and practices “from below” on the other, but to analyze particular formations and transformations of state-citizen relationships (De Cesari and Herzfeld 2015) and to develop new social and artistic practices for participating in the shaping of urban memory. Recent contestations of colonial monuments and imperial traces, such as demands to restitute the many looted colonial objects in European museums, show not only how today’s postcolonial critique addresses both historical violence and its structural perpetuation through state institutions, but also that civil and artistic efforts to acknowledge silenced or subaltern memories can no longer be easily ignored by governmental discourses.
U. CAPDEPÓN AND S. DORNHOF
The focus on monuments and traces attempts to grasp such challenges of power relations in the realm of urban memory (studies) as moments of contested meaning—symbolic, aesthetic, and political, as well as critical practice. Monuments and traces are not understood as static, given, or merely constructed as repositories of history. Monuments reproducing selective versions of the past are created and destroyed, displaced and dissolved, their histories forgotten, restored, or re-signifed through their sheer materiality, as well as through acts and interaction, perception, deor revaluation in the present (Riegl 1982; Musil 1986; Vattimo 1995; Assmann 2015). Traces bear evidence of past events, meanings, recognition, and erasure, but also of the ephemeral and the contradictory. The trace deconstructs and constructs meaning; it is the absence of a present, a mark of the not-here and not-now, a simulation of a presence that dislocates and refers beyond itself (Derrida 1976; Harvey 2008). From this point of analysis, the differentiating line between monuments and traces becomes fragile, fuid, and shifting. The city, with its manifold overlapping of monuments and traces, is a space for multiple meanings, inscriptions, and haunting presences (Freud 1925; Benjamin 1931; Ricoeur 2004; Stoler 2008; Gordon 2008). It is a privileged site in which to elaborate on the relations between matter, trace, and memory (Benjamin 2010; Huyssen 2003, 2016), considering relations between history, space, and place (Lefebvre 1991; Soja 1996; Assmann 2015; Jelin 2018; Jelin 2002; Jelin and Langland 2003), and between memory and geography (Dwyer and Alderman 2008).
Controversies around monuments, traces, and decentered memory also raise important questions within the feld. Ways in which racial, social, and gendered lines of difference structure formations of memory in subjective experience, public acknowledgment, and political representation in various times and places found their way into the multi-, trans-, and interdisciplinary endeavor of memory studies. In their close connection to cultural history, literary criticism, and psychoanalytic approaches, memory studies lend themselves to interrogating the past not only from a historiographical perspective, but essentially in its present, subjective, emotional, and imaginary dimensions as well as in its potential to open up to future horizons. Critical theories and methods from social and cultural, historical, and political sciences, anthropology, and postcolonial, feminist, and gender studies have opened a range of felds and approaches to differentiated constructions, politics, and controversies around memory and how they shape the cityscape.
Eurocentric and postcolonial critique has, in many ways, focused on the reduction and governing of time and space through the expansion of imperial and colonial powers of capitalist modernity. In his infuential book Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) argues against the mythical fgure of Europe as the source of modernity. The book is a critique of modern historicism, in particular of its underlying assumptions about disenchanted space, secular time, and sovereignty, associated with universalist categories of the abstract fgure of the human. Opposing the reduction of other historical forms and experiences to something incomplete, lacking or not yet achieved, Chakrabarty makes a claim for understanding and recognizing historical difference and the diversity of subjective experience, which have always shaped and modifed the histories of capital and modernity.
Johannes Fabian, in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983), analyzes how anthropology has created an allochronic discourse which places its object of study—most often non-European cultures—in a different, unchanging, past time. Anthropologists’ denial of coevalness has, simultaneously, reassured the present of Euro-America as the standard and privileged time against which the other appears in another temporal zone.
What does it mean for memory studies to interrogate and represent the diverse expressions of memory and instances of silence within a world in which history, space, and temporality appear to be always already centered around privileged narratives, sites, subjectivity, and practice? Can memory studies serve as an antidote to the Eurocentric tendencies that underlie human sciences to a large extent?1 What is the role of urban remembrance within hierarchical histories and marginalizing structures? To what degree are individual and collective memories, trauma, and hope embedded in historical inequalities of recognition and representation, and how can they be used as critique, resistance, or potentiality for change? In postcolonial critique collective memory plays a central role in deconstructing naturalized ideas of marginalization and oppositional hierarchies, demonstrating imbrications in the formation of subjectivity of both colonizer and
1 Eurocentrism can be described as a mode of thinking that places Europe in a hierarchical position from which historical time, norms, and morals spread into the world; from where Europeans patronize and appropriate material and cultural production of Others, denying both the Others’ achievements and their own violent appropriation (Shoat and Stam 1994). 1 INTRODUCTION:
U. CAPDEPÓN AND S. DORNHOF
colonized, and foregrounding subaltern histories, trauma, and erasure of memory (Werbner 1998; Göttsche 2019).
Following Achille Mbembe (2010), the postcolonial moment began with an experience of decenterment, the experience that one’s own thinking, feeling, and self-imaging is constructed from an exteriority, through a graft which reinscribes the enclosure of race (12). In many instances, thinking about Africa—in Europe and on the continent—relies on a European myth which essentializes Africa and cuts it off from any future. For Mbembe, a decolonizing of the future, and thus of memory as remembering a more desirable past, lies in becoming human by becoming a nonracial being, a self-formed subjectivity.
deCentered and deCentering MeMory in the City
Decentered memory points, on the one hand, to the problematic of collective memory in postcolonial and post-dictatorial territories where memory has not merely been erased, but subject to complex practices of depriving, policing, imposing, appropriating, and overforming remembrance and silence. Decentered memory can be understood as a displacing and projecting of memory practices from the former imperial and colonial centers onto territories, cultures, and people, as well as a subjectivation of individuals and collectivities under hegemonic forms of remembrance. On the other hand, decentered memory evokes critical analysis, in the study of memory, which accounts for other spaces and temporalities in the common present of a globalized world: for attention and recognition of deprived, marginalized, minoritized, or subaltern memories in the here and now, and for the imaginary and possible futures to which they open. Decentered memory, therefore, is considered as a notion and fgure of thought, a movement between diagnosis and analysis, a questioning and multiplying of perspectives, rather than a unifying concept or model. It relates to ways of thinking that undercut models of center and periphery, ground and fgure, or progressive timelines of past, present, and future. Focusing on urban space, decentered memory draws on Michel Foucault’s notion of “the archeology of knowledge” (1969), on the basis of which it translates into the image of an urban archeology of contested memories and folds up into fragments of a global geographical map. Different cultural extracts and historical traces become visible, each enfolding their own entanglements with other geographies, times, and migrations. As a model for human memory, Freud’s notion of the palimpsest—the
Wunderblock (the mystic writing pad) (1925)—can serve as another fgure for considering a decentering of memory from the evident and rational toward traces of the past hidden in unconscious spheres. The notion of palimpsest, in which layers of memory coexist in urban space, can be understood as a literary trope relating to writing, intertextuality, and historical intertexts in arts and cultural analysis. It has been further developed by Andreas Huyssen’s readings of cities as “confgurations of urban spaces and their unfolding in time without making architecture and the city simply into text” (2003: 7). On a temporal level, decentered memory emphasizes ways in which the past and the future are imbricated in the present, as a mode of critique and a potentiality of other ways of living (Passerini 2007; Muñoz 2009; Hartman 2019)
An example of the changing political, aesthetic, and temporal memory practices in the city can be seen in the ephemeral monument to migrants that was set up during one day in Berlin, on September 7, 2020. Several refugee organizations installed 13,000 white chairs in front of the Berlin Reichstag, symbolizing the number of people who, at the time, lived in the overcrowded Moria refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece, which became the scene of arson attacks only one day later. The chairs also symbolized the number of refugees that German communities proposed to accommodate, in opposition to the blockade by the federal government. This example of an ephemeral monument not only points to the centrality of disrupting social time, but also of connecting social space, if only for a short instant and situation. For the brief moment of one day, Moria became present in Berlin, and state representatives as well as passers-by were confronted with the—symbolic—interlocking of empty places and overcrowded camps.
Protests against the precarious situation of migrants in European refugee camps as well as mobilization against colonial monuments, expressed in the tearing down of statues and the renaming of places and streets in many different cities worldwide, are examples of how past injustices keep on shaping social tensions in the present. Contemporary inequality is signifcantly germinated from the legacy and memory of historical injustices and past violence (Barkan 2000; Hinton 2010). The making of the modern world cannot be separated from the violence and injustice of colonialism and slavery. This violence and injustice continues to affect social inequality, also in relation to memory cultures in the present. Social inequalities affect the way in which the past is remembered and represented in urban space, and above all the extent to which different voices
and divergent memory discourses can be articulated and have an impact on symbolic representations at the local level of the cityscape. Therefore, when analyzing the relationship between cultural memory and social inequalities, it is also necessary to discuss modes of silence, erasure, and exclusion from discourses and symbolic spaces of commemoration, and the effects these have on representation in the memorial landscapes.
In that sense the cover image refects current struggles over exclusion and historical denial in urban representation. Artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo designed the wooden statue Liberty for all (2018) shown on the cover. His version of the Statue of Liberty portrays a black woman challenging and deconstructing the power of monuments. She is expressing and advocating an inclusive cultural memory in urban space. According to a little-known historical rumor, the French artist who created the original Statue of Liberty, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, to whom Aleida Assmann refers in her chapter, originally designed his statue with an African American identity, before it became a global icon for freedom. Fernando took this hidden historical information and used it for a contemporary comment and critique on foundational, exclusionary racism in the US and beyond.
book StruCture and Chapter overview
The contributions from different disciplinary backgrounds—political science, (public) history, cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, communication studies, and art history—assembled in this book are intended to do justice to the complexity of urban memory constellations. They take us to different sites, cities, and world regions; draw attention to a diversity of histories and collective memories, to social, political, and aesthetic intervention in urban remembrance, and so, we hope, allow us, as an ensemble, to construct a fragmentary image of junctions and disjunctions of decentered memory.
The chapters emphasize constructive and refexive aspects of various approaches to memory in public space. They challenge notions of collectivities and cultures by paying attention to how colonial violence, migration, war, and dictatorship keep infuencing subjective experience and representation of collective histories: how racial, gendered, and social constructions of memory and commemoration have not only been inscribed in bodies, emotions, and the unconscious, but also in the city—its built environment, architecture, monuments, memorials, and names; its
surroundings, its density and inner connections; its open places and hidden corners; its smells, sounds, rumors, and mysteries. They show how colonialism, war, political transformations, and migration have changed social constellations of cities, so that we can no longer assume cultures or collectivities that share a common heritage and are thus grounded in a common memory. Lines of difference run through politically divided groups, through generations, geographical as well as social backgrounds. The focus on memory in urban spaces indeed foregrounds cultural heterogeneity, historical differences, and dynamics of controversy and contestation around their remembrance in the present.
The chapters are structured around four parts, looking at contested memories in the city and transformations of public remembrance in the making. The frst section offers different approaches and methodologies on urban memoryscapes, in particular curatorial and community work concerning commemoration, monuments, and museums of migration and spatial dis/connections, as well as sensory memory and conceptual ties between remembrance, nostalgia, emotions, and space. The second cluster of chapters focuses on ways of decentering memory in urban spaces by looking at how historically ignored and globally marginalized perspectives challenge and inject tension into postcolonial memory cultures. The third part examines cases of toppled statues and monuments in the context of urban commemorative reconfguration, while the fnal fourth part draws attention to traces of political repression, war, destruction, and contemporary atrocities.
The opening section, Approaching contested urban memoryscapes, offers a diversity of approaches to intersections of collective memory and urban space. The frst contribution by Aleida Assmann begins with a historical account of a variety of monuments, offering a panoramic view and analysis of different manifestations of cultural memory in urban space, showing how monuments change their meaning over time. By focusing on ways in which monuments move between visibility and invisibility, the contribution analyzes contexts of political change or general shifts in mnemonic aesthetics. Moving across times and geographies, Aleida Assmann gives examples of, in the frst part, different conditions for monuments to become contested and reinterpreted over time. Monuments can (re)gain public attention when they are negated and removed, replaced by new ones, or when they are historicized and their political message is neutralized. The second part of the contribution sheds light on the history of migration monuments. Contrasting statues in countries of overt
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immigration, like the United States of America or Brazil, to the situation in Germany, where immigration has only recently become an accepted topic for public remembrance, Assmann shows how monuments exist only in and through frames of national narratives as well as silences, as two sides to the same coin. Contestations of monuments are a sort of fipping the coin so that what was previously hidden becomes revealed. The chapter thus shows that a monument is not timeless, given, or carved in stone, but rather that its historical status is changeable and adaptable to contextual transformations.
In the following chapter, Alison Atkinson-Phillips examines examples of monuments and museum sites of Australia’s migrant heritage. The comparison of different sites and practices reveals continuities and fractions in the settler-colonial myth of Australia as being a nation of migration, but also a white nation into which migrants are either drawn or welcomed. This idea is strengthened by the “user pays” participative principle of most Welcome Walls, which favors the visibility of success stories and narratives of successful integration at the expense of others. In particular, these sites stand in tension with the ongoing violence of settlercolonization for Aboriginal Australians, and the treatment of the (usually non-white) asylum seekers or refugees who arrive by boat. Drawing on Dennis Byrne’s concept of networked heritage, the chapter considers monumental sites of migrant memory in dialogue with other less visible sites of Aboriginal and settler incarceration, postwar reception centers, and the “black sites” of contemporary immigration detention.
In the next chapter, Stefanie Kappler and Antoinette McKane analyze and compare curatorial work in two community-based museums, the District Six Museum (D6M) and the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum (LMLM) situated in peripheral townships of the South African metropolis. By inserting them in the urban fabric, interpreting the museums particularly from the angle of where they are located, Kappler and McKane not only offer insights into how specifc memories of apartheid are curated; they also reveal curatorial possibilities in politically marginalized environments, allowing these communities the agency to represent and interpret urban space.
The contribution from Astrid Swenson that follows examines the making of “sensory memories” and its role in urban contestations. In the case of the Smithfeld market area, today’s largest regeneration project in the city of London, the chapter picks up various threads to show how emotions and senses are shaped and contested within complex cultural,
economic, and political contexts. It examines how a selective and nostalgic “sensory memory” recently developed in relation to Smithfeld as a liminal space, characterized by the old meat market and an established culture of late-night clubs, pubs, and cafes, the upcoming move of the Museum of London to the area as well as new businesses, gentrifcation, and rising rents. While a certain historical consciousness is gaining in value, especially mobilized to resist sociocultural changes connected to regeneration, the traces of violent pasts and marginalized histories, often linked to histories of Empire, do not play a major role in current contestations. Based on rich material of different modalities to register senses as part of cultural memory, Swenson’s contribution demonstrates how contestations of urban memory are more about the future than the past, ranging from nostalgic memory to resisting extensive regeneration prospects, to senses and feelings of the present that aid in strengthening future historical displays in the upcoming museum.
The second part, Decentered Memories, focuses on global inequalities and how collective memory and commemoration can be a site of tension and dispute within entanglements between the Global North and South. By focusing on aesthetic interrogation and political activism, the following contributions reveal how legacies of colonialism, past injustices, and violence are shaping memorial landscapes and struggles over urban memory in the present. The frst contribution by Elizabeth Jelin interrogates ways in which entangled histories articulate in memories and silences, as well as in personal feelings and implications in academic research, from the point of view of Eldorado, Misiones, a small town in northeastern Argentina. Starting from a photograph in a town museum, the chapter traces the history of the former settler colony and questions the silences and halfwords which run through community memories at all levels. The photograph in question shows a resident of Eldorado in a Nazi uniform, who died at the Russian front in World War II. This blatant public display of a Nazi symbol is telling about the absence of collective refection on the intercommunal history and conviviality of that remote place in Argentina, in which supporters of Hitler’s Germany as well as Jewish migrants were part of the large community of German origin, living side by side. Conceptually, the chapter brings into focus the “local” not as what is left out of the “center” but as a “decentered center” from where world history becomes visible not as a history of places but one of global, transcultural fows, entanglements, interconnections, and networks.
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In the next chapter, Anke Schwarzer follows a different direction of decentering memory, by showing how central monuments and myths have been questioned in current debates on the decolonization of urban space in European cities, focusing particularly on German cities. From the Humboldt Forum in Berlin to debates not only about the Bismarck statue in Hamburg but also colonial traces elsewhere in Germany, the chapter examines myths surrounding Germany’s colonial past. Schwarzer, by arguing for a power-critical approach, emphasizes how these debates relate directly to historical and offcial exclusion and inclusion practices applied by German state institutions.
The last contribution in this section follows up on connections between art, cultural memory, and space. Susanne Mersmann takes an aesthetic approach to questions of globalization and its mnemonic inscriptions in the city by examining spatial dimensions of the art installation “Cosmic Generator” by Mika Rottenberg. The contribution decenters the physical space of that installation in an abandoned Asian shop in the German city of Münster, which was part of the Skulptur Projekte festival in 2017, by guiding the reader through the artistic transformation of the site and into the video loop that was part of the installation. Following different tracks opened by the installation’s place, space, and media, we are invited to draw connections between sensual and virtual elements of the artwork, refections of spatial structures in the surrounding city and faraway settings of poorly paid service labor, mostly performed by female migrant workers, which condition globalized urban lifeforms and aesthetics. By inscribing Rottenberg’s installation into a net of real places and art historical references, the text unfolds a memoryscape of unequal globalized labor and consumption in which, as in a loop movement, the visible and non-visible conditions of globalization alternately surface and disappear.
The third part, Fallen Monuments, interrogates contested statues, artistic subversion, and the cultural resignifcation of memorials and monuments in the city. Nadine Siegert focuses in the frst chapter on the Angolan capital of Luanda. She engages with how artists relate in different ways to its complex history, shaped by Portuguese colonialism, civil war violence, and the recent history of socialism, and how their engagement can be considered as a form of memory work that is distinct from offcial commemoration efforts. By looking at a variety of artworks from different postcolonial moments, the contribution shows how the city can be seen as an urban archive where the cityscape can be redefned by artistic enactment and new meanings can be inscribed.
Jill Strauss’s contribution, too, is connected to resignifcation of urban space and struggles over a colonial statue that became contested over time. Strauss examines the discussions around the removal of a monument in the El Barrio/East Harlem neighborhood in New York City to the nineteenth-century gynecologist J. Marion Sims, who operated on enslaved and poor immigrant women without their consent. Grassroots activist groups today have managed to call into question and remove the statue that celebrated him over decades. The chapter describes the local controversy surrounding this urban marker and the struggles to re-signify it, replacing it with an alternative monument.
The contribution by Sarah Dornhof interrogates disgraced monuments and moves between postcolonial and post-socialist commemoration practices, and between urban spaces as diverse as Berlin, Rabat, and Marrakech, to explore the afterlife of displaced monuments to the socialist revolutionary leader Lenin and the French colonial governor in Morocco, Marshal Lyautey. Dissimilarities and resonances emerge as thoughts travel between East Berlin, where Lenin’s dismantled head now sits in a historical exhibition of fallen monuments, and Marrakech, where a series of artworks respond to Lyautey, including a reproduction of his monumental sarcophagus in Paris by the Moroccan artist Mohamed Arejdal. Because the creation and destruction of monuments play such a key role in narratives of political transition, their decomposition and recomposition within the sphere of art and museums offer a space to contest the ways in which fallen regimes are remembered in the present. While Lenin’s head on display in a Berlin museum seems to proclaim the fnal burial of socialism, further erasing post-socialist memories, the reappearance of Lyautey in an exhibition in Marrakesh suggests that postcolonial memory is very much alive, seeking responses to and critical appropriations of colonial legacies.
The last part, Traces of Violence, which considers the remembrance of war, dictatorship, political repression, and destruction in urban memoryscapes, opens with Gruia Badescu’s chapter about two former Yugoslav cities, both affected by wars in the 1990s. In discussing connections between postwar architectural reconstruction and contested memories in Belgrade and Sarajevo, he also examines the role of architects and citymakers, as mediators between people’s collective memories and the offcial narratives and state strategies in the complex process of dealing with the past. After exploring the relationship between urban space and the contested memory of war, Badescu moves on to discuss different contested memories embedded in urban space in both cities. Highlighting several
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ruined sites, the chapter problematizes how urban reconstruction relates to strategical remembrance, fnally arguing that urban reconstructions and ruins have to be situated in local contested memory landscapes.
In the following chapter, Ulrike Capdepón engages with the debates sparked by the memorial in the Almudena cemetery in Madrid conceived to honor the 2936 victims executed there as part of the Francoist repression following the Spanish Civil War. By reconstructing the controversy surrounding this memorial that, after a political shift, was destroyed by removing the listed names of victims, the contribution analyzes the symbolic meaning of dead bodies and how they relate to memorials from a forensic perspective. By contextualizing the controversy in global circulations of memorial aesthetics and practices in relation to memorials, it also highlights the importance of the naming of victims in public acts of remembering, particularly to memorialize and acknowledge the traces of violence left after the post–civil war repression. The chapter analyzes commemorative practices in the context of local political change and the struggles around memory in contemporary Madrid.
The section closes with the contribution by Anne Huffschmid that, likewise from a forensic perspective, discusses the agency of memorial and artistic interventions in relation to contemporary forms of violence in Mexico. To explore the connection between current violence and memory work, the chapter argues the need to extend the focus beyond the urban realm toward a variety of spatial typologies, ranging from suburbs to deserts, that have become crime scenes during the last decade. Drawing on her audiovisual research project “Landscapes in Transition,” Huffschmid investigates diverse geographies that have in common an uncanny dual condition as sites of extermination and exhumation. Analyzing memorial agencies at work in these landscapes of necropolitics, the author questions the very notion of memory in contexts of ongoing everyday violence, and its generalized notions of closure or healing.
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