Future Memory

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“Not Peaceable and Quiet” with Counterpublic Artists with Matt Joynt, Anthony Romero, and Josh Rios Jun 19, 2019

Show notes

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.

Their project, Not Peaceable and Quiet (Piñata Sound System), includes the outfitting of a bike with a booming sound system and other purposeful flair. It is part of the Counterpublic neighborhood triennal in St. Louis on and around Cherokee Street, organized by the Luminary. The artists call it a “counter monument.” It takes up space, physically, and also is fully realized when participants pedal it around, moving the soundtrack with them.

Not Peaceable and Quiet doesn’t just use any bike – they transformed a retired bicycle previously used by a bike-sharing company that had left the St. Louis market and its fleet of 750 dockless bikes behind. The artists’ goal is to call attention to the failings of “on-demand lifestyle,” and policing of black and brown communities around calls for silence and order. In turn, they want to mark resistance through sound.

“Music that we chose, becomes a way to map the resiliency of these peoples who are being exploited, who are being dehumanized, but who find a way to transcend,” says Romero.

We recorded this episode live at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in late May 2019, the night before Not Peaceable and Quiet premiered at Counterpublic.

Erasing the Border and the Wall in Our Heads with Social Sculptor Ana Teresa Fernández Jun 07, 2019

Show notes

This week, news leaked of the Trump administration’s deployment of an unspecified number of military service members to paint stretches of the border reinforcements in the California town of Calexico. The goal: to improve the border’s "aesthetic appearance."

There’s precedent to this. Wall builders go to great lengths to hide and distract from the brutality of border walls. For example, during the Cold War, the East German government ordered the Berlin Wall to be fully rebuilt more than once for the purpose of gaining prestige. That was before visual artists transformed that wall into the world’s largest canvas for expressions of resistance.

For contemporary artist Ana Teresa Fernández, the idea of painting the U.S.-Mexico border is not new. Fernández is a renowned artist and social sculptor. She was born in Mexico and is based in California. Back in 2011, she painted stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border fence blue to resemble the color of the sky for a project she called Borrando La Frontera (Erasing the Border).

Fernández has worked at the U.S.-Mexico border for over 15 years, before the Trump presidency, and has seen the border fence become increasingly militarized.

“Where I became aware and it completely just hit me with a huge bang in my gut when I first saw it and witnessed it.”

We spoke to Fernández about her life growing up in Mexico and Southern California, and what happened when she painted the border near Tijuana in a dress and high heels. 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.

The New Gatekeepers: Will Google decide how we remember Syria’s Civil War? May 01, 2019

Show notes

On Monument Lab’s bulletin, we recently published “The New Gatekeepers: Will Google Decide How We Remember Syria's Civil War.” Written by Global Voices Advocacy Director Ellery Roberts Biddle, “The New Gatekeepers” examines how big tech companies like Google and Facebook are shaping our view of the historical record of war atrocities and other traumatic events. These companies increasingly use artificial intelligence to handle and sometimes censor shared content on social media posted from the frontlines of conflict zones, impacting how we learn about and will remember historical events.

In her roles at Global Voices and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, Roberts Biddle reports on and defends the rights of journalists around the world. For Monument Lab, Roberts Biddle looked specifically at a counter example, the case of the Syrian Archive, a Syrian-led group of technologists based in Berlin, seeking to organize and backup more than five million images and video files shared online from the war, including devastating images of violence and chemical attacks on civilians. This archive can be used by journalists and perhaps one day in a war crimes trials, if the regime ever faces charges.

For this episode, we are also joined by Jacke 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.

Up With Ida: A Monumental Teach-In for Ida B. Wells at the University of Mississippi Apr 03, 2019

Show notes

Ida B. Wells was an investigative journalist, an educator, a suffragist, a truth teller. She was born in Holly Spring, Mississippi in 1862. As an African American woman, she moved to Memphis and then Chicago, as she built a national reputation for her civil rights work. She reported and revealed the horrors of lynching in pamphlets and publications including Southern Horrors and The Red Record. Today, her great-granddaughter, author Michelle Duster, carries on her legacy. She has retraced Wells’ footsteps in the pursuit of justice, including leading efforts in the city of Chicago to dedicate the new Ida B. Wells Drive and to fundraise for a monument to her late great-grandmother in the city’s Bronzeville section.

This week, Duster travels to the University of Mississippi, where scholars and students have organized the Ida B Wells Teach In: A Monument to Justice. We speak with Duster, and two of the organizers, History Professor Garrett Felber and graduate student Beth Kruse. The event was planned in response to an effort to rename the University’s journalism school after Ida B. Wells. It also occurs in the face of a struggle to remove a confederate monument from the heart of campus, all a part of ongoing efforts to seek what they highlight as “reparative justice” for the campus, sparked by Wells’ memory.

In Pursuit of the Confederate Truce Flag with Artist Sonya Clark Mar 27, 2019

Show notes

The Confederate Truce Flag is a little known piece of Americana. It was flown as a white flag of surrender and delivered to the Appomattox Court House, Virginia in April 1865. A piece of it is owned by Smithsonian. It is not as iconic as the Confederate Battle Flag. Artist Sonya Clark wants to change that through her new exhibition Monumental Cloth, The Flag We Should Know at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum.

Climbing the Statue of Liberty and Fighting Immigrant Family Separation with activist Patricia Okoumou Mar 13, 2019

Show notes

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. Okoumou will be sentenced on charges of trespassing, disorderly conduct, and interference with agency functions. In the days before her sentencing, we spoke with Okoumou from Staten Island. She offered detailed accounts of her time on the monument, her time spent recently near the US-Mexico border, and her climbs on other symbols of power — the Eiffel Tower and the headquarters of a For-Profit Immigrant Detention Center operator in Austin Texas. She also shared glimpses into her broader struggle to end family separation.

Creating a Record of California Wildfires and Climate Change with Photographer Stuart Palley Mar 06, 2019

Show notes

In November 2018, a series of violent fires throttled California and its surrounding landscape. Outside of Los Angeles, the Woolsey Fire resulted in a three casualties and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of residents. The Camp Fire, decimated the town of Paradise in Northern California, a small retirement community, which killed at least 85 people and cause 16 billion dollars in damage. It is one of the deadliest natural and social disasters on U.S. soil.

This episode of Monument Lab our guest is Photographer Stuart Palley, a photographer of the wildfires. We found Palley through his Instagram page, where during the Woolsey and Camp Fires, 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. Over the course of 5 years he documented nearly 100 wildfires in his home state of California. Palley is currently working on a book of fiction writing, and continues to document the wildfire crisis. You can follow him on social media @stuartpalley.

You can read the full transcript of every conversation we have on the podcast thanks to our partners at Rev.Com who are supporting us with on-demand transcripts all season long. Anyone can use it to transcribe interviews, first drafts, or almost anything recorded for just $1/minute.

There’s a Spirit in Everything” with Scholars Salamishah Tillet and Grace Sanders Johnson Live from the Free Library of Philadelphia Feb 20, 2019

Show notes

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.

Tillet is Professor of African American and African Studies and Creative Writing, as well as Associate Director of the Clement Price Institute at Rutgers University–Newark. She is also the Founding Faculty Director of the New Arts Justice Initiative at Express Newark and Co-Founder of A Long Walk Home. Tillet regularly publishes as a critic in the New York Times. She is the author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination, and two forthcoming books on Nina Simone and the Color Purple.

Sanders Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently completing her first book manuscript entitled, White Gloves, Black Nation: Women, Citizenship, and the Archive in Early Twentieth Century Haiti. In addition to her study of gender and politics in Haiti, she is the founder of “Harriet’s Hike,” an ecological literacy program for girls and elder women in North Philadelphia.

You can read the full transcript of every conversation we have on the podcast thanks to our partners at Rev.Com who are supporting us with on-demand transcripts all season long.

Taking Down the Columbus Statue in Downtown L.A. with Organizer Chrissie Castro Nov 29, 2018

Show notes

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 an 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.

Mapping the New White Flight in Georgia with Journalist Brentin Mock Nov 20, 2018

Show notes

Brentin Mock, staff writer for CityLab, 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.

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