(Counter)Monuments and (Anti)Memory in the City. An Aesthetic and Socio-Theoretical Approach

Abstract

This article reflects upon the possibility of the visualisationof different forms of collective memory in the city. It focuses on the evolution of the ways of commemorating in public spaces. It juxtaposes traditional monuments erected in commemoration of an event or an “important” person for a community with (counter)monuments as a modern, critical reaction geared towards what is either ignored in historical narratives or what remains on the fringe of collective memory. While following a theoretical exploration of the concepts of memory and their fruition in monumentsas well as (counter)monuments, the eventual multimodal analysis central to the paper looks in-depth at Ruth Beckermann’s work The Missing Image (Vienna, 2015). The latter is treated as an example of the possible and manifold interpretations of the function and multiplicity of meanings that (counter)-monuments bring to contemporary urban spaces.

Keywords

• (counter)monuments
• monuments
• city spaces
• collective memory
• narratives of the past