Future Memory

This episode of Monument Lab, we recorded live from the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, where Monument Lab has a research residency this summer. As a part of Public Iconographies, we are mapping monuments of St. Louis with a research team at the museum, in parks, and public spaces around the whole city, as a part of the Pulitzer’s Striking Power exhibition. To kickoff this project, we spoke to a trio of artists – Matt Joynt, Anthony Romero, and Josh Rios – as they prepared for their own exercise in mapping.

This week we spoke to renowned artist and social sculptor Ana Teresa Fernández about her life growing up in Mexico and Southern California, and what happened when she painted the border near Tijuana. We also discussed her continued artist’s practice at global border lines and crossing points for migrant families including the Mediterranean Sea, and her recent collaboration with writer and cultural geographer Rebecca Solnit.

This episode we are joined by Global Voices Advocacy Director Ellery Roberts Biddle, whose article “The New Gatekeepers: Will Google Decide How We Remember Syria's Civil War” was recently published on Monument Lab’s bulletin. We discuss how big tech companies like Google and Facebook are shaping our view of the historical record of war atrocities and other traumatic events. We are also joined by Jackie Zammuto of Witness, where she is a program manager focused on video and media to defend human rights. Zammuto works with community organizations on documenting police accountability, immigrant rights, and indigenous rights.

This week we speak with author Michelle Duster, great-granddaughter of the investigative journalist, educator, suffragist and truth teller Ida B. Wells. Duster talks about her upcoming trip to the University of Mississippi, where scholars and students have organized the Ida B Wells Teach In: A Monument to Justice. We are joined by two of the event organizers, History Professor Garrett Felber and graduate student Beth Kruse, and together we discuss the effort to rename the University’s journalism school after Ida B. Wells, a struggle to remove a confederate monument from the heart of campus, and their ongoing efforts to seek what they highlight as “reparative justice” for the campus, sparked by Wells’ memory.

We speak with Artist Sonya Clark about her new exhibition "Monumental Cloth, The Flag We Should Know" at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum.

This episode of Monument Lab features activist Patricia Okoumou, widely known as the woman who climbed the Statue of Liberty on July 4, 2018. Okoumou ascended the base of the statue as a direct action against the Trump Administration’s harsh and inhumane tactics of family separation at the US-Mexico border.

This episode of Monument Lab features photographer Stuart Palley, a documentarian of the California wildfires. We found Palley through his Instagram page, where during the Woolsey and Camp Fires in November 2018, he shared daily updates from the frontlines, alongside firefighters, and later, search and rescue teams. Palley is creating a record of wildfires and climate change, tracing how hotter, drier conditions on the ground increase the risk of fire. Palley has photographed for National Geographic Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and in his own book Terra Flamma, a five-year visual inventory of the wildfires.

This episode features two brilliant scholar-artist-activists Salamishah Tillet and Grace Sanders Johnson. It was recorded live from the Free Library of Philadelphia as a part of the 2019 One Book One Philadelphia festival. Tillet and Sanders Johnson have been friends of Monument Lab since the beginning, actually before the beginning. Tillet as a mentor, Sanders Johnson as a graduate school classmate and writing partner of host Paul Farber.

Together, they spoke about how they approach memory in their works, what kind of archives and artworks haunt and/or inspire them, and how history lives in the present.

On November 10, 2018, a statue of Christopher Columbus was taken down in LA’s grant park. City officials and members of LA’s Native American Indian Commission were present to watch. Hundreds gathered to witness the takedown. Chrissie Castro, vice chair of the commission, was there. “After, decades of demonstration and protests, and dialogue," shares Castro, "it was very emotional when the statue finally came down. You know, we had singers. Folks were clapping and yelling. And it was just a sense of release, of finally being heard; finally being heard.“ On this episode of Monument Lab, Castro shares insights behind the takedown, which was not isolated event, but a larger part of a decades long struggle for advocacy and representation among LA's diverse indigenous communities. Last year, Castro was one of the leaders behind the city’s official change from recognizing Columbus Day to its new title, Indigenous People’s Day. She also reflects on her history as an organizer, her work with the city, and the next steps that may follow from the takedown.

Brentin Mock, staff writer for City Lab, reports on the role of justice and civil rights in the laws and policies that govern our lives, particularly in the urban environment. He has a long history of reporting on environmental justice and voting rights, and voter suppression.  Monument Lab speaks to Mock about his recent piece for CityLab “The Strangest Form of White Flight,” a part of a larger series on the Cityhood movement in Georgia, which Mock describes as a Brexit-style secession to carve up new cities informed by racial politics and legacies of segregation.