Monumenting

As monuments continue to be toppled, relocated and reassessed all over the world, this documentary takes an experimental approach to explore what monuments are and what they could become in cities across the Arabian Peninsula. A series of participants are invited to engage in a research process through a game-type protocol, building a kaleidoscopic collection of monument stories. Architects, sociologists, artists, geographers, engineers, lawyers, curators, historians, graphic designers, political scientists, anthropologists, photographers, filmmakers, and even a middle school student offer their perspectives, guessing rather than asserting what monuments need in order to become monuments. Convened remotely or on-site and residing in the region, having resided there or maybe neither of them, these diverse voices exchange ideas around maps, archives, fieldwork materials and images of monuments. Through their exchanges, they engage in a game-type approach that weaves together fieldwork materials and archives offering new insights into cities such as Dubai, Kuwait City, Abu Dhabi, and Sanaa among others.
This non-linear documentary proposes a unique lens for understanding the politics of memory in cities rarely studied through their monuments, whether they are state-sanctioned or private interventions in public space. By associating a variety of multimedia materials collected and produced through fieldwork research, this documentary makes virtually understudied monument stories accessible to a larger audience who is also invited into a research journey.

Context

In recent years, monuments worldwide have gained increasing attention, sparking debates and actions ranging from dismantling and toppling them to extravagant constructions, relocations, and socio-political reassessments of their historical significance. From Kuwait City to Abu Dhabi, Sana’a or Dubai and mostly since the 1970s until present-day, cities across the Arabian Peninsula have been both transformative and transformed settings for monument stories, where myriad gestures and actions by a constellation of actors contribute to reimagining the symbolic work monuments do. Among these are stories of bifurcations, omissions, transformations, and decisions that make these monumental objects somewhat inaccessible or invisible.
There are the stories that have particularly captured my imagination. What started as a research puzzle reconstructing one of these stories through drawings and miscellaneous documents from an artist’s personal archive, unearthed complex and multilayered narratives that over time connected with other similar monument stories across varied sites of research. These monument stories exposed the dynamic interplay among a rich variety of actors involved in the life of monuments, from private and public commissioners, artists, engineers, and government officials, to every-day passersby, city inhabitants and observers of public space. Exploring objects meant to commemorate sites, events and figures of the past, also opened up new imaginaries of futurity. The idea of sharing a variety of multimedia materials and archives gathered through fieldwork also became central and so did the possibility of showing an alternative fieldwork methodology within a research-creation process that intertwines social sciences research with creative audiovisual writing.