Site-Specific Art
A Discussion with Elke
Krasny (Vienna), Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch (Vienna), and Mechtild Widrich (Chicago)
If monuments
are public expressions of what societies care to remember, they also have to be understood as evidence to what societies choose
to forget. Deadly colonial imperialism and patriarchal power glorified in stone or metal are the memory infrastructure of
our cities. Can public space be freed from the violence of monuments? Can a democratic public space become the site for representing
monumental worries? We argue for an activist ethics of im/permanent material articulations, spatial and visual solidarity,
shared concerns, and planetary care.
Theorists Elke
Krasny and Mechtild Widrich and artist duo Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch discuss new forms of collective care
ethics and public aesthetic practices in relation to the current monument debate. Moving away from the discussion around individual
monuments and the removal/approval of monumental objects, we argue for a broader concept of Monumental Cares and Activist
Ethics that think about our spatial surroundings on a broader scale: the immense loss of human and non-human life under
current anthropogenic, pandemic, and war conditions, might need to use different kinds of ‘monuments’ to help us not
to forget and care collectively.
Elke Krasny is Professor of Art and
Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is a feminist cultural theorist, urban researcher, curator, and author.
She co-edited Radicalizing Care. Feminist and Queer Activism in Curating (Sternberg Press, 2021). She is
currently working on a book examining global Monument Activism.
Nicole Six &
Paul Petritsch working as an artist-duo have realized films, photographs, displays, artist books, site- and
context-specific installations as well as projects in institutions and public space.
Mechtild
Widrich is a professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, currently
Guest Professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, author of Performative Monuments (2014)
and the forthcoming book Monumental Cares, which is in production with Manchester University Press.
