The afterlives of monuments

This conference addressed how monuments have been reinvented and transformed for a succession of presents, for changing audiences and diverse communities. As one of our participants identified, ‘the memorial can only survive through reinvention’. The conference was particularly timely. Current events as well as the reassessment of past histories are putting pressure on historic and recent monuments; relocated replicas are highly controversial. Architecture, sculpture, popular culture – monuments are multi-dimensional and multi-media, and speakers are from anthropology, art history, media studies, architecture, the museum world, and contemporary artistic practice. The period considered is from 1850s to the present. Viewing monuments as performative and richly subject to change and contestation, the conference will interrogate the prevailing ‘memory model’, which connects monuments and memorials primarily to memory. The larger purpose is to scrutinise the vast diversity of monuments (and conceptions of monuments) in South Asia in the past and the present, and to test whether and to what extent South Asian examples demand not only a challenge to western paradigms but the creation of new conceptual models and theories. The programme had three strands. The first explored the after-lives of monuments, considering how, where, when and why monuments were remodelled, reused, re-sited, remade, destroyed or abandoned to accommodate changing political and social climates. A second strand reflected on materiality. Whereas colonial monuments were often fabricated in enduring materials and sited at critical junctures of the colonial city, the sub-continent has long fostered a lively culture of ephemeral and temporary monuments, constructed in fragile materials and making inventive interventions into local spaces. The third investigated the emergence and afterlives of counter-monuments in the sub-continent’s contested political, cultural and religious histories.

• http://www.transnational.org.uk/projects...