< Program overview

“You live only as long as the last person who remembers you” (Akecheta, Westworld)

While some people and events are literally and metaphorically written in stone, others are not. It urges to ask: what exactly does it mean to be remembered and what does it mean to be forgotten? When Stones Awake centralizes questions concerning our public way of remembering specific people and events. It presents artworks that deal, directly or indirectly, with the notion of remembering through monuments. The exhibition, curated by Youri Appelo, is looking backwards and thinking forward to raise questions concerning authorship of monuments, and mirrors memory and oblivion as symbols for life and death.

Almost everywhere in the world there are examples of monuments to be found, to remember and commemorate places of importance, specific events, individuals or groups that left their mark on history - both in a positive and negative sense. It appears to be a deeply human need and global phenomenon to transform moments of time into solid materials. With the goal to let what the moment or the person represented, exceed its own time. It is not a coincidence that ‘written in stone’ basically means permanent or for eternity, but also ironically that many monuments expired their expiration dates sooner than expected.

The interwovenness between monuments and administrations of power is undeniable. When the winds of power blow in different directions, the perspective on what is of relevance in the past and the present changes equally with the gusts of wind. The notion that history is written by the ‘victors’ draws into this idea. At the same time, while observing the amount of monuments that are being toppled or demanded to be taken down due to their problematic colonial and unaddressed histories, it seems that these battles those ‘victors’ won were never over to begin with. It shows that history is not something static or objective, but blurry and messy, and very different depending on different personal and cultural perspectives. History can be written down or visualized differently depending on the author. This is also demonstrating the socio-political impact of authorship, for instance by promoting or even propagandizing a different, dominant, incomplete and/or false narratives for decades or ages which causes collective moral amnesia concerning problematic historical events. When specific histories are not addressed, pressed away or denied, it is being endangered with oblivion. When something is forgotten and lost in oblivion, there is no possibility to recall or remember it, and therefore bring it back to life. 

The struggle for the pen that dictates history is ongoing. On a more metaphorical level we could say that the solid material of monuments could represent the factual happenings in history. The solid material as the evidence that something occurred, or somebody was. But the way how the material is molded, shaped and written down is the narrative we attribute to those evidences and facts. Together, both material and shape, function as the (currently available and allotted) window into history. 

The idea that monuments keep narratives that are authored by administrations of power alive in our memories, and therefore overrule unaddressed histories and endanger them with oblivion, is key to the exhibition When Stones Awake. It forces us to acknowledge and address the presence of monumental authorship and therefore come to terms with the subjectification of history within monumental storytelling.

The exhibition hopes to generate thoughts concerning collective and democratised co-authorship in regards to monumental storytelling; to enable the society at large, with all its complexities, to be responsible for the telling of our collective stories. To move towards fluid monuments of intersubjectivity that are reshaped, rewritten, retold as a default mode. Not written in stone but in lava. And to conclude that the rejection of eternity might be the definition of life.

Photo: Olga Ganzha, Motherland is Calling