Memory Made Material: Unearthing the Histories of Monumental Matter

Abstract

This narrative web experience invites readers to rethink their own relationships with the material world. The piece frames materials within Western monumental structures — namely the marble pedestal, the bronze figure, and the “living” rock carving — not as inanimate instruments in colonial systems, but as living victims and actors within those very systems. I examine how these materials are treated within the Western monument-making process through alternate frameworks—namely Neolithic, Queer and Indigenous material theories—in order to expose the violences inherent in Western material theory and practice. This piece, structured in a series of web pages, leads the reader through a research narrative strung together from conceptual images, academic text, and instructions for a tactile activity. I intend to explore how the critical lenses we apply to examine monumental materials can act to liberate them from the inanimacies inflicted upon them, and highlight the resistances they mount against monumentalization, prompting a further “dematerialization” of the Western monument.