ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the values realised through the social practices around the statue ‘The Destroyed City’ (De Verwoeste Stad) by Ossip Zadkine in Rotterdam. Adopting the value-based approach (VBA), the social practices around this public artwork were traced and associated with the values that disparate groups and communities have attempted to realise in relation to it were analysed. To do so, a corpus of 179 newspaper articles about the statue, published between 1948 and 2020, was compiled. The findings indicate that, over time, social, societal (political), and transcendental (aesthetic) values, which were often mutually incompatible, were realised by Rotterdam citizens, in practices that enriched and challenged the original meaning of the sculpture. The methodology developed allows us to tracing the evolution in terms of the values associated with the sculpture and realised within social practices around it.
