Artist Projects / Monument to Forgetting

Although the concept of “monumentality” has over time become associated with form—with a sense of exaggerated physical scale—the word itself actually points toward function, derived as it is from the Latin monere, meaning “to remind or warn.” In this, the word is aligned with monuments’ more familiar cultural presence—structures designed to commemorate a person or event. Ubiquitous in public space across the centuries and in every part of the world, monuments pronounce against the inevitability of forgetting because, as conventional wisdom has it, a failure to remember is one of the most dangerous failures of all.

For this issue, our question was whether a monument could be designed to memorialize the very thing that it is designed to prevent—namely, forgetting. This was the brief given to the artists featured here: to imagine monuments that were not intended to memorialize things, people, or episodes that either have been historically suppressed (some forgotten hero, some forgotten atrocity) or were insufficiently consequential to meet the criteria for conventional historical inscription (a lost glove, say). Instead, the editors asked the participants to consider monuments to the act of forgetting itself—to erasure, amnesia, Nietzschean “active” forgetting, Freudian repression, and more. The resulting projects appear—and, in one case, disappear—below.