Zoe Chatziantoniou | All Monuments Will Fall

A Story of Remembering, A Story of Forgetting

This project will explore the concepts of ‘culture war’ and ‘cultural imperialism,’ which emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. The erection of monuments in public spaces and the establishment of museums and academic disciplines such as archaeology and anthropology were accompanied by the systematic looting of works of art, the displacement of monumental architecture, the seizure of ancestral human remains, and the preservation and display of human and animal bodies. Through these practices, imperial powers have determined—and continue to determine—who is remembered, why, and how. In doing so, they shape collective memory and impose their own historical narratives.

In his recent book, “Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting,” Dan Hicks introduces the concept of ‘militarist realism,’ echoing Mark Fisher’s notion of ‘capitalist realism.’ Hicks uses the term to describe the political, aesthetic, and ultranationalist movement that dominated culture and the arts from the 1870s to the 1920s and that is re-emerging today alongside the resurgence of far-right imperialism in the United States and Europe. Hicks refuses the false choice between the destruction of every colonial monument and the unquestioning preservation of a past that neither we nor future generations could ever change. Yet some monuments must fall from time to time. Inspired by Hicks’s thinking, the project proposes a process of collecting, assembling, and reassembling fragments.

The research seeks to develop an open dramaturgy; an invitation to reconnect what has been broken apart, to listen to what has been silenced, to affirm life over violence, and to reclaim our shared humanity. It is driven by the hope that a new form of cultural memory might emerge.