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“In every African country we establish a careful inventory of all colonial statues and monuments. These we shall collect in a single park, which will serve as a museum for generations to come. This pan-African park-cum-museum will serve as colonialism’s symbolic grave on our continent. Once we have performed this burial, let us — promise never again to erect statues to anyone at all. Instead, let us build everywhere libraries, theatres, cultural centres – all these things that from this day forward will nourish tomorrow’s creative growth.” Achille Mbembe.
Future Monuments is an interactive meditation of historical visual experiences based on a visual interactive archival Opera score of which the video herewith is part. The project develops an experiment in sense-memory politics as a series of interventions examining memory and colonial histories in the past, present and future. Each score from the series will challenge visual experiences and perceptions about the way in which political language shaped histories, our sense of collective memory and trauma to propose new ways of memory through interaction, community participation and visual intervention.
The project intends to form a collective memory by creating a time machine through 11 scores of conceptual and visual experiences. The experience migrates through research and archives and ongoing modes of post-colonial experience across diverse cultures and spaces.
The investigation meanders through the stories of people and addresses the issues of forbidden and forgotten histories by creating visual interventions and building memorials for the 22nd century.
Each score responds to particular spaces, cultures and cities.
Future Monuments involves exercises in decolonial memories and actions on cannibalism to reform our perception of what we call history by breaking anthropological selections and reconstructing untold histories left in the memories of the present. It presents different spaces for investigation in indigenous communities and urban spaces.
This investigation towards decolonial cannibalism and aesthesis takes 5 stages:1. The Uncomfortable Truth (mourning)
2. Take This Hammer (commemorations)
3. Pieta (birth)
4. Les Statues Meurent Aussi (the gift monument)
5. The Brick Moon or an Ecology of Darkness (the future)
