The Everyday Life of Urban Monuments

The conference is jointly hosted by the research project Moving Monuments: The Material Life of Sculpture from the Danish Colonial Era (Novo Nordic Foundation, 2022-2026) at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen and the Explorative Research Network The Everyday Life of Urban Monuments (2024-2026) led by the Museum of Copenhagen.

The conference organizers are Jakob Ingemann Parby (Senior researcher at Museum of Copenhagen), Ida Hornung (PhD fellow, University of Copenhagen and Museum of Copenhagen), and Mathias Danbolt (Professor of art history, Department of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen).

The research network The Everyday Life of Urban Monuments is funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark. Read more here on the research network.

Moving Monuments: The Material Life of Sculpture from the Danish Colonial Era is funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation.
Read more on the research project here. 

Abstracts and people, keynotes

Horizontal Monuments, Professor Marisa Anne Bass, Yale University

Monuments are designed to generate powerful, embodied responses. They condense in a single locus an expression of authority, an ideology, or a particular conception of the past that might provoke contemplation or abhorrence or any number of competing reactions over the course of time. To answer the question of what a monument is depends on understanding what monuments do. 

This lecture takes as its starting point that monuments have always been a problem, and that the problem is in part definitional. When monuments are characterized only by monumental scale or by certain types and iconographies, the genre’s plurality is lost. Defining monuments by their affective power allows for the realization that anything can become a monument, regardless of medium or scale. 

My particular focus will be on the case of “horizontal monuments” that might otherwise be described as urban infrastructure from the late seventeenth-century Netherlands. The projects in question coincided with mounting threats to Dutch commercial interests abroad as well as political instability at home. The individuals involved in the design and promotion of these projects understood them as vehicles for instantiating the power of the Dutch empire on local soil. What happens when a monument cannot be toppled—when it is as integral as the road beneath one’s feet?

Marisa Anne Bass is professor of History of Art at Yale University, New York.

Her research explores the intersections between creative and intellectual culture in northern Europe. Her interests include the representation of nature, the cult of images, portraiture, Renaissance notions of imagination and invention, print culture, the painting of everyday life, emblematics, antiquarianism, monuments, and miniatures. Her latest book, The Monument’s End: Public Art and the Modern Republic from 2024 is a fascinating study of how we think about monuments, both today and in 17th Century Netherlands. Bass is currently writing the definitive monograph on Desiderius Erasmus and the visual arts over the long sixteenth century.

“Quotidian Nontriumphalism and Bodies Walking Backward”, Professor Rebecca Schneider, Brown University

In his great poem "The Sea is History," the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott answers the question "Where are Your Monuments?" with the curious phrase: "in the salt chuckle of rocks." In distinction to monumentality, Walcott pronounces the sound of pebbles on a beach -- stone eroding stone -- as "History, really beginning." What kind of quotidian nontriumphalism is pronounced by a pebble or, as Vanessa Agard Jones asks in "What the Sand Remembers," is carried a grain of sand? As the current American President proposes to build a massive triumphal arch on the Washington mall directly across from the Lincoln Memorial, this paper looks at stone on stone in a time of return to white nationalist triumphalism.  Looking at a set of artists who walk backward or present a back-turned refusal, moving otherwise to lithic imperial gestures, the paper thinks again about sand, stone, and flesh in interinanimation. 

Rebecca Schneider is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, US. She teaches performance studies, decolonial methods in media and live arts, prehistories of the screen, and theories of intermedia. Her work brings performance studies in dialogue with Black feminist thought as well as cognate fields in Indigenous and postcolonial studies. Her books include The Explicit Body in Performance (1997), Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (2011), Theatre and History (2014), and Remain (2018, with Jussi Parikka). She has published over sixty essays, including “It Seems As If…I Am Dead: Zombie Capitalism and Theatrical Labor” (2012) and “That the Past May Yet Have Another Future” (2018), and has edited numerous issues of the performance studies journal TDR, among them “Precarity and Performance,” “Performance and New Materialism,” “Performance and Social Reproduction,” and “Possession and Automation.” A digital book, Standing Still Moving: Gesture, Temporality, and the Interval, is currently underway.

Remembering Pop: Music, Monuments and the Landscape of London, Professor emeritus, Simon Gunn, Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester

Since the early 2000s a steady stream of urban monuments and memorials have been established around London commemorating sites and people connected with pop music, especially the music of the 1960s. They include plaques on walls, murals and statues of singers like Amy Winehouse, buildings such as the Camden Roundhouse and even whole streets like Denmark Street, designated as ‘musicland’. By comparison with the classic London monuments to official or high music culture – Covent Garden, the Albert Hall, the statue of the English composer Henry Purcell at Westminster – these memorials are little noted in the everyday urban fabric, but they have become of increasing importance in the public commemoration of pop.

This paper explores the significance of two sites of sixties pop: Denmark Street, London’s Tin Pan Alley, and the Roundhouse, monument both to Victorian industry and to the sixties counterculture. Why were these sites memorialised and by whom? What exactly is being remembered? And what can we discern the meanings of these sites of memory for different groups such as musicians, tourists, locals, or for those who may have been there at the time and those much too young to even remember the 1960s?        

Simon Gunn was Professor of Urban History at the University of Leicester from 2006 to 2021 and is now Professor Emeritus. His work has focused on British and European Urban History in the postwar era, particular the effect of material structures on the everyday life of cities. He is currently editing a multi-authored volume on The Modern British City with Peter Mandler and Otto Saumarez Smith, as well as authoring a book on the birth of pop culture in the later 1950s and 1960s as seen through the infrastructure of music – audiences, venues, fan clubs, the music industry and the institutions which fostered pop. The aim is to explain how and why pop developed as a major creative force (and cultural export) in mid-twentieth century Britain.

A century of the everyday life of a memorial: (Re)Using the Paddington Station war memorial at multiple scales, 1922-2025, Professor Tim Cole, University of Bristol

In contrast with the dominant view on war memorials of war memorials as increasingly invisible and underused objects, this paper traces a century of the everyday life of one memorial: Charles Sargeant Jagger and Thomas Tait’s GWR War Memorial (1922) in London’s Paddington Station. A century of maintenance, remaking and reactivation as well as the history of everyday, individual encounters with this work. Strikingly, the work was the subject of two separate artistic interventions in 2014 – Letter to an Unknown Soldier and Talking Statues London – that are important not just as moments of activation but also because they afford evidence of longer histories of everyday interactions.

The paper offers three contributions to the wider literature on urban monuments. Firstly, it suggests that the declinist narrative of war memorials fails to reckon with the more complex chronology seen in a longer history. Secondly, it makes a methodological contribution through bringing a diverse range of fragmentary sources together to tell the history of the everyday life of a monument – a history that tends not to have the kind of archival richness that accompany histories of planning and inauguration. Thirdly, by intentionally adopting multi-scalar analysis, it demonstrates the value of thinking with scale in monument and memory studies. Writing the everyday life of this monument means not only engaging with the work itself, but also with wider changes taking place on the platform and in the station and neighbourhood where it is located, as well as within everything from the rail industry to the nation.

The Monument Adjacent, Professor Andrew M. Shanken, University of California, Berkeley

From the revival of monuments in the modern world, artists, architects, and patrons have been using them to address issues that stretch well beyond their commemorative foundation. They have turned to monuments to exploit their traditional association with permanence, authority, elite culture, commemoration, so that they might turn them on their head. This recalls Rosalind Krauss’s nearly off-handed wisdom that in its traditional role “sculpture is a commemorative representation.” In some sense, these exploitations, most of which are decisively, even definitionally, non-commemorative, reinforce her point. They gain their political charge, emotional poignancy, or social meaning from the presumption of commemoration and its subversion, diversion, or perversion. Moreover, this process reveals the formulation of the everyday as a historical phenomenon. It is not just the monument as medium that becomes an index for the historical everyday, but also the place where these installations land: the emerging urban public sphere and its simultaneous transformation across the modern period. Through a series of examples, this paper sketches out the development of this process from the French Revolution through the present moment.

Grounded Memory: Everyday Voices in Malmö’s Master Narratives, Associate Professor Robert Nilsson Mohammadi, Malmö University and Postdoc Adam Lundberg, Malmö University

Set to be inaugurated in Malmö, Sweden in 2026, the monument Master Narratives by artists Susanna Marcus Jablonski and Santiago Mostyn commemorates the victims of a far-right racist serial killer active in the city in the early 2000s. The work seeks to acknowledge the social and cultural conditions that enable racist violence, while also creating a public space where experiences of racism in Sweden can be shared, affirmed, and transformed into action. By paraphrasing the nearby sculpture Arbetets ära [Glory of Labour] (1931) by Axel Ebbe, Master Narratives situates present experiences of racialized violence within a longer local history of social struggle, while simultaneously challenging progressivist understandings of history. This engagement with memory and temporality also informs the lead-up to the inauguration, during which the group of survivors who petitioned the municipality to fund the monument will organise a series of public gatherings. Concurrently, Jablonski and Mostyn will invite Malmö residents to participate in a “ritual” of sorts, involving the collection of handwritten letters reflecting on everyday experiences of racism, deposited in boxes across the city and later buried beneath the monument, where they will decompose and become part of the urban landscape. This article documents this evolving monument-making process, offering a critical discussion on how artistic expression and participatory practices in multiple ways connect the everyday and the monumental.

Living with Monuments: From Postwar Synthesis to Everyday Participation, Angelique Campens, independent curator and researcher

This paper suggests a fresh look at the modernist synthèse des arts—the postwar goal of integrating art and architecture into public space and asks how its ideals might be reimagined today. Building on my forthcoming book Beyond Brutalism and the Postwar Architecture–Sculpture Network (Routledge, 2025), I argue that André Bloc's idea of synthesis was always an ongoing flexible dialogue that still shapes our interactions with monuments and urban spaces.

To study these themes, I draw on my nomadic pedagogical project On Experiencing Art in Public Space (2022–2025), which consisted of eight Think Tank workshops and podcast sessions in highways, metro stations, housing estates, and parking garages across Belgium. These sessions paired students with artists, architects, philosophers, sociologists, and local residents to examine public art in situ, guided by Juhani Pallasmaa's belief that using all our senses is key to understanding space. By turning public space into a temporary classroom, the project initiated encounters that revealed how monuments are not simply observed but lived with, negotiated, and at times resisted in daily life.

Seen through this lens, a clear change emerges from mid-century ideals of lasting unified synthesis toward today's focus on working together and participation. Instead of making static objects to commemorate, contemporary artists and architects create works that spark encounters and shared learning. Examples include Simona Denicolai and Ivo Provoost’s edible commemorative cakes—temporary monuments activated through shared rituals of consumption—as well as SUPERFLEX’s Superkilen (Copenhagen, 2012). Together, these works exemplify what I call a “contemporary synthesis,” in which monumentality becomes plural, permeable, and context-responsive—balancing lasting presence with activation.

This paper combines field observation, podcast transcripts, and discourse analysis. By tracing this move toward what Pascal Gielen calls semi-public “trust spaces,” I propose that monuments’ everyday life is best understood as active, shared terrain: a site where art, architecture, and society continue to negotiate meaning and where Bloc’s interdisciplinary vision finds new relevance under today’s ecological and social conditions.

‘Goodbye my beloved pacifiers’ – practising everyday temporalities of an urban grassroot memorial, Professor of European Ethnology Tine Damsholt, University of Copenhagen

The paper analyses an everyday urban monument and how it is practiced within multiple and affective temporalities. The case is the so-called ‘pacifier tree’ in the urban garden Frederiksberg Have in Copenhagen. It is a tree where children come and give away – or ’sacrify’ – their pacifiers to the tree, once they are considered ‘too old’ or too big for such everyday comforters.

The tree is a ‘grassroot memorial’ – an improvised memorial, a makeshift memorial, that only exists by being practised repeatedly (Margry & Sánchez-Carretero 2011). It is placed in a romantic garden from 1801, full of original or reconstructed elements meant to foster different sentiments and affects. But even if the tree and its rituals are of recent (1990-es) the tree works as an organic part of the landscape garden, and the way it is practised every day (by walking the dog, joggers, tourists, and kindergartens etc.)

In a performative perspective this monument can be seen as facilitating a multitude of practising the past, connecting with the past and negotiating pasts, presences, futures, but also non-linear temporalities. As such, the tree makes up a temporal and commemorative assemblage. It is a memorial to a stage in life that has been completed, it hosts a multitude of individual life stories (materialised in bunches of pacifiers and farewell letters), apart from biographical time also family time and the cyclic time of mundane routines meet or sometimes clash with the lost time of care, of comfort, of feeling safe, and with tourists visiting this strange monument grown from below. Other cyclic temporalities practiced at the tree are ritual time – where a new epoch is created - organic time, the temporality of shifting seasons, and the epochal time of the plastic age and the chronological times of historians.