Monumental Power
The Christopher Columbus statue in downtown Chicago. Photo courtesy of Block Club Chicago.
By Jordie Davies and Ayesha Singh
Elizabeth Jordie Davies is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Chicago and Ayesha Singh is an interdisciplinary artist and co-founder of Art Chain India who lives and works in New Delhi, India. She graduated with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute in 2018.
Together, their research project titled “Power Structures: Connotations of the Facade in State Architecture” received the Art, Science, and Culture Initiative Graduate Collaboration Grant in 2017–18. Davies and Singh produced large-scale photographs of government buildings and structures in their hometowns, considering what histories state architecture or monuments might project into the public sphere and how they uphold entrenched divisions of power in American society.
Davies, a political scientist, teaches and conducts research on Black politics, social movements, and political participation. Her research agenda focuses on the influence of identity and experiences on social movement support and political activism, specifically the Black Lives Matter movement and progressive movements in the United States.
Singh’s practice subverts socio-political hierarchies and highlights the assertion of established systems of power in architecture. Video, sculpture, installation, performance, and drawings create sites of discourse and record. The works question the assumed permanence of architecture contextualized within the presence of colonial monuments, contemporary Empires (capitalist and political), and present conflicts, to flip these narratives through critical spatial interventions that emphasize collaboration and coexistence.
While Davies’s and Singh’s work employ different approaches, the stakes of their work are similar: each is interested in the ways that power is constructed and how the public responds. In the following essay Davies and Singh consider how recent protests have taken up monuments as a challenge to state power.
Architecture and monuments hold space and attention, projecting myth, legend, and authority into the public sphere. Yet, recent uprisings and protests across the world suggest a rejection of what these structures represent. In this essay, we think about uprisings in the US and India and the role of monuments and state architecture in the construction and deconstruction of power. A demand for recognition is in play. Those occupying the margins are pushing to redefine their positions, and along the way they are destroying white supremacist and neo-colonial symbology and resisting oppressive responses to uprisings.
In summer 2020, amid widespread protests against police violence in the US, protesters were defacing public monuments to Confederate and colonial pasts—like the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia (pictured above), or the Christopher Columbus statue in Chicago. This was a part of an international backlash against anti-Black state violence.
In New Delhi, India’s capital city, the state built cement, barricade-like-walls to dampen protesters’ momentum this January. Public funding was being used to contain the public on the one hand, and on the other, to create architectural boasts for the future: the new ₹20,000 crore (US$2.8 billion) Central Vista project for new government buildings in central Delhi. From the Mughals to British colonizers, the city has a history of transient authorities building permanent monuments to themselves and using architecture to cement their power in public.
In light of these worldwide refusals and struggles to control public space, what are the new monuments and structures that shall come forth? Can those on the margins ever take up the center, the town squares of history? Do these refusals need to occupy public space, inhabit a sculptural embodiment for them to be monumentalized and exist through time (into the future)?
As moments of resistance recede into memory, artists and activists recognize the importance of historicizing and making monuments out of uprisings.
Protesters have raised new memorials in public, even as this occupation is fraught: for example, Bristol activists removed a monument of Edward Colston, a slave trader and replaced him with a monument to Jen Reid, a Black Lives Matter protester. The monument to Reid, titled “A Surge of Power” was, however, removed within 24 hours by local government officials.
The New York Times reports that the defaced Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia, which now bears carved names of those lost to police violence, graffitied “BLM” lettering and messages, represents an influential piece of protest art. BLM activists reclaimed the space and repurposed the monument for the movement. The statue is slated for removal in 2021 in response to activist demands, though appeals have been filed by others to protect and preserve the Confederate iconography.
In India, the occupation of public space, including roads, markets, and historical architectural monuments, facilitated the creation of new sculptures and murals.
India Gate, replica.
A replica of India Gate, which was originally built during British colonization to commemorate British Indian Army soldiers who died during World War I, was created by activists at Shaheen Bagh during protests against new citizenship laws. This replica featured the names of people who died in various states in India during protests, symbolizing a reclamation of the colonial structure. The new monument was ultimately removed from its site and the murals were painted over.
Monuments to the state, then, can be altered and reclaimed through resistance, processes of both destruction and creation in service of the people. Despite the ebb and flow of resistance and government response, we assert that protest and protest art represent a path to building (potentially) monumental power.
Watch a video of Davies and Singh’s 2017-2018 ASCI Project, “Power Structures: Connotations of the Facade in State Architecture,” below:
Photo Credits: Robert E. Lee Memorial: Flickr/ Mobilus in Mobili, India Gate Replica: Press Trust of India (PTI)