ABSTRACT
Recent protests and acts of collective resistance around oppressive official state monuments have opened up key questions about what new material sites of memory and meaning could stand in their place. This essay proposes a rethinking of monuments through the work of feminist designer and educator Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. The collaboratively produced public projects of De Bretteville record and remember the forgotten in history and contemporary life – workers, women, and persons of colour – giving tactile material presence to the oppressed and effaced within urban capitalist spaces. De Bretteville’s conceptual and formal use of the mark of the ellipsis, an indicator of absent presence, opens up new ways of making public sites of memory as a form of feminist visual activism. These public artworks are ‘un-monuments’ that undo the authority of traditional monuments in favour of collective sites given meaning through the bodies of their communities.
