Agonistic interventions into public commemorative art: An innovative form of counter‐memorial practice?

Abstract

In this article, we will seek to analyze emergent alternatives for the management of conflicts over public commemorative art that challenge both established forms of counter-memorial practice and calls for the removal of problematic public commemorative art. The analysis will be based on two key case studies: the South-Tyrolean city of Bolzano, centered around a fascist building and a fascist monument, which have been augmented with art installations and a new exhibition; and the response of a German art-activist collective, the Centre for Political Beauty, to verbal attacks by right-wing populists on Berlin's Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, commonly known as the Holocaust Memorial. These case studies make for an instructive contrast: the former focuses on a fascist monument challenged by contemporary progressives, whereas the latter relates to a memorial commemorating the victims of fascism challenged by the contemporary populist right. In examining these two case studies, we will critically engage with the notion of “agonistic memory” as it has been developed by Cento Bull and Hansen (2016), with reference to the work of Chantal Mouffe. We will explore how a variety of actors (from artists and museum-makers to civil society activists) have developed interventions in which we can observe the emergence of moments of what we will call “agonistic” practice. While pointing out the benefits of such practice in terms of the maintenance of a democratic political culture, we will also show how such agonistic moments nevertheless exist within a wider landscape of counter-memorials that continue to operate within a dominant “cosmopolitan” mode, as set out below. We will also demonstrate that, while moments of agonistic counter-memorialization may be strategically useful under some circumstances, there are still logistical hurdles to the implementation of full-blown agonistic approaches to monuments and memorials, which need to be taken into consideration by theorists and practitioners. Specifically, we will argue that, although agonistic interventions around contested monuments by means of artwork can play an important role in deconstructing the hegemonic memory regime and eliciting thought-provoking reactions among viewers, the construction of a counter-hegemonic collective reimagining needs to rely on sustained socio-cultural practices and discourses, which foreground radical multiperspectivism as defined by agonistic memory theory. In this way, our analysis also contributes to the ongoing debate over the applicability of the concept of agonistic memory to the management of difficult pasts in a range of cultural and social contexts (e.g., Cento Bull, Hansen, Kansteiner, & Parish, 2019; De Angeli, Finnegan, Scott, Bull, & O'Neill, 2018; Ferrándiz, 2019; Reynolds & Blair, 2018).;In light of recent controversies around the removal or modification of public commemorative art, such as memorials and monuments, this paper interrogates the value of competing approaches to counter-memorial practice using the framework of agonistic memory. It argues that much counter-memorial practice today, as it relates to historical memory, is dominated by a “cosmopolitan” mode that fails to offer a convincing response to the rise of right-wing populism and its instrumentalization of conflicts over public commemorative art. The article investigates two case studies of counter-memorial interventions that focus on the memory of fascism in Europe today and seeks to identify and assess emergent agonistic practices.;