Toppling Things as Memorial Contestation: Spectacle and Affect of Monument Removal (Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race)

Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, monuments became a focal point: protestors toppled or spray-painted them, even danced on them. These politically, visually, and emotionally potent events may have looked instantaneous, yet frequently sprang from years of activism, as well as protracted political and academic debate. Toppling Things challenges stereotypical notions monument topplings as riotous, spontaneous, or irrational. Bringing together the ideas and emotions, the uncertainty and convictions, of artists, activists, and academics, the volume rejects a neatly tied-up, distant narrative. As it sheds light on the global, personal, immediate, and historical processes around the fall of a monument, the volume engages directly with the complexity of toppling activism and monument removal as a form of lived experience.

Tomas Macsotay is a Senior Lecturer at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, holding a PhD on eighteenth-century sculpture (Amsterdam, 2008). His six books and edited collections include, The Hurt(ful) Body. Performing and Beholding Pain (2017) and Recepción de Richard Wagner y Vanguardia en las Artes Españolas (2024).

Nausikaä El-Mecky is tenure-track professor in Art History & Visual Culture at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Since her PhD (Cambridge 2013) she has been developing her self-defined field of “dangerous images,” e.g., in the monograph The Creation of Dangerous Images in Iconoclasm, (Routledge, forthcoming).