Granby Workshop, Assemble, 2015

Following the Toxteth riots in 1981 many of the houses in Granby Four Streets were demolished. Local residents re-appropriated the remaining cluster of dilapidated Victorian terrace houses and founded a Community Land Trust. Assemble was hired and developed the refurbishment of housing, public space and the provision of new work. Granby Workshop was launched as a continuation of the process of physical transformation. It produces and sells a set of handmade items designed for the refurbished flats. Some are cast using rubble from Granby Four streets. The items are distributed to the rest of the world as small monuments of everyday life; they remind one of the capacity to transform the derelict spaces of injustice and ill-management (by the state) into something empowering. The project brings objects from one dwelling place into the dwelling place of others. You live with and from the monument, which makes it a reciprocal relationship: the transformation process forms the monument and the monument forms the transformation process. The social critique of gentrification takes place in the form of an affirmative action, revealing a concrete alternative, which makes this “ready-made” monument a part of alternative political representation. 

Mahnmal gegen den Faschismus (Memorial against Fascism), Esther und Jochen Gerz, 1986

This memorial consisted of a lead-coated column, which gradually sunk under ground over a period of six years. Visitors were encouraged to inscribe their names onto the surface. The artists attempted to overcome the short-lived experience of visiting the monument by involving the visitor in a permanent co-authorship and thus a joint responsibility. In the course of the six years, however, some reactions appeared that had not been envisioned beforehand – swastikas as well as statements against immigrants. These elements gave the monument another dimension: that of an instrument that not only commemorates the past, but also makes the present reactions to the past visible. The (counter)monument problematised the traditional notion of a monument that represents the dominant history of state narrative, based on social consensus. Even though it was conceived as a monument to what in Germany is thought to be an absolute reason of state (the condemnation of its National Socialist past), it showed how the official narrative of having overcome this past is in fact a precarious and tenuous assertion. The monument here is a mirror of the manifold opinions of society. It represents the end of representation, which is completed by the disappearance of the column.

Monument to Charles Fourier, The Situationists, 1969

The statue of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier was removed by the Vichy government on the order of the Nazis occupying power. The empty plinth remained on the Place Clichy with its plaque grinded down until 10 March 1969. It was at the precise moment when a general strike was scheduled to commence, that the Situationists returned the statue of Charles Fourier to its plinth. A plaque was added on the statue’s pedestal: “A tribute to Charles Fourier, from the barricaders of the rue Gay-Lussac” alluding to the clashes of the May 1968 student protests in Paris. The Situationists used the method of “détournement” (high jacking) here for the first time in the domain of memorials. The empty plinth was like a monument in an “unfinished” state, offering a radical potential for appropriation and action. Its initial historic meaning was taken up and expanded into the reality of the then relevant political battles. Up until the municipality commissioned a new monument, the radical potential of the plinth’s emptiness and political radicality of Fourier were ever present.