A video screening and presentation by Sumayya Vally and Wayne Modest on the recognition, restitution, and removal of monuments, specifically in the contexts of South Africa and Jamaica. Are these patterns comparable or part of different phenomena? This is the fourth edition of Monument, a collaboration with e-flux Architecture, to discuss how monuments have—once again—come to play a pivotal role in mobilizing and rearticulating struggles for recognition.

Sumayya Vally

Sumayya Vally is the founder and principal of Counterspace. She is presently based between Johannesburg and London as the lead designer for the Serpentine Pavilion 2020/20 Plus 1. Her design, research and pedagogical practice is committed to finding expression for hybrid identity and contested territory. She is obsessed with Johannesburg as a laboratory for finding speculative histories, future archaeologies, and design languages; often with the intent to reveal the invisible. Her work is often forensic, and draws on performance, the supernatural, the wayward and the overlooked as generative places of history and work.

Wayne Modest

Wayne Modest is the head of the Research Center of Material Culture. He is also professor of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies in the faculty of humanities at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam (VU). Modest was previously head of the curatorial department at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam; Keeper of Anthropology at the Horniman Museum in London; and Director of the Museums of History and Ethnography in Kingston, Jamaica.

e-flux Architecture

e-flux Architecture is a sister publishing platform of e-flux, archive, and editorial project founded in 2016. Edited by Nikolaus Hirsch, Anton Vidokle, and deputy editor Nick Axel, the news, events, exhibitions, programs, journals, books, and architecture projects disseminated by e-flux Architecture describe strains of critical discourse surrounding contemporary architecture, culture, and theory internationally. Since its inception, e-flux Architecture has maintained a dynamic international program of projects and events in collaboration with leading institutions and practitioners.

Monument

Monument is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and Het Nieuwe Instituut, featuring essays by Arna Mačkić, Wayne Modest, Philipp Oswalt, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Robert Jan van Pelt, Valentina Rozas-Krause, and Mabel O. Wilson, and videos by Vasyl Cherepanyn, Manuel Correa, Quinsy Gario, Dima Srouji, The Black Archives, Milica Tomić, and Sumayya Vally. From the toppling and removal of statues to ongoing debates on contested objects, buildings, and landscapes, the series reconsiders the design and construction of monuments in relation to wider processes and structures of memorialization that reify social configurations.

Image: still from Footnotes to Monuments by Counterspace (2020)