ABSTRACT
This essay analyses Lubaina Himid’s satirical performance piece “What Are Monuments for? Art of the Black Diaspora: Possible Landmarks on the Urban Map” (2009) and juxtaposes it with other memorial pieces. She uses collaged additions to manipulate a glossy guidebook to the world cities of London and Paris to imagine what might have been if the contributions of African diasporan peoples to the capitals had been fully taken on board in the memorial landscape over the last three centuries. Her commentary in the same self-satisfied style of the touristic voyeur populates London and Paris’s history in radical new ways. Through image and text, she subverts the imperial national narrative and makes the landscape speak its hidden and diverse history. The city’s amnesia and her act of remembrance are counterpoints that create new multiple possibilities in the often monological cityscape. This essay argues that Himid is working against the apolitical notion that a city gives up its meaning without any work on the part of its citizens. The essay shows how her work is related to that of Yinka Shonibare, whose dramatic Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle (2010) is the latest work to be introduced on the Trafalgar Square fourth plinth. Like Himid’s work, Shonibare introduces ideas of the absence of black historical memorialisation in London. The essay discusses Himid’s work in the light of recent London, Paris and Amsterdam memorials for victims of the slave trade by Michael Visocchi and Lemn Sissay, Fabrice Hyber and Erwin de Vries. These works exemplify how national memorials can be stymied by conservatism and how municipal memorials can be undermined by apathy when there is an absence of community involvement. The essay uses the author’s theory of “guerrilla memorialisation” developed from theoretical paradigms around memory and memorials by Pierre Nora, Édouard Glissant, James Young, Stuart Hall and Paul Ricoeur to show that the right kind of political response to amnesia can make art that is effective and dynamic, enabling nation states, cities and localities to create memorial landscapes that are affecting, truly radical and worthy of a transatlantic abolitionist legacy.
