Falla monument by Fernando Sánchez Castillo, sent from Madrid to Moscow as part of the Ephemeral Treasures exhibition, held at the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow. A ritual burning took place on August 8, 2019.
| This project supported an exhibition in Moscow and a related workshop in Chicago at which artists and scholars considered what to do with monuments of the past and how to build monuments for the future. |
This project consisted of an exhibition in Moscow and a workshop in Chicago to explore a pressing problem of modern and contemporary societies: what should we do with monuments of the past, and how should we build monuments for the future? Through the reconstruction of a cardboard monument built in Spain and sent to the Soviet Union in 1937, the research team recovered a long-forgotten history of an artistic exchange and initiated a conversation about experimental monumentality from the 1910s to the present. The first part of this project included an exhibition at the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow, the final part of the reenactment of a performative monument built and destroyed during the Spanish Civil War. Following the Spanish tradition of Fallas, the monument was built by unions in Spain, sent to the USSR as a gift for the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and burned in a ceremonial bonfire. According to Spanish Communists, this was a model for how the monuments of international Communism should be: built by the community, movable, ritual, transient. The construction, journey, exhibition, and final immolation of the monument was documented. The resulting material was screened at the Neubauer Collegium in the context of a workshop at which invited artists and scholars discussed examples of experimental monumentality in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, and the College
University of Chicago
Robert Bird (1969 – 2020) studied the aesthetic practice and theory of Russian modernism. His first full-length book, Russian Prospero (2006), is a comprehensive study of the poetry and thought of Viacheslav Ivanov. He was also the author of two books on the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky,...
Assistant Professor of Peninsular Studies
Northwestern University
Miguel Caballero-Vázquez is Assistant Professor of Peninsular Studies at Northwestern University. He is currently finishing his first book manuscript, tentatively entitled The Monument of Tomorrow: Conservation and Avant-Garde in the Spanish Civil War. In the context of the 1930s total...
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In memory of Professor Robert Bird
Many different societies, East and West, North and South, have recently gone through great social turmoil when confronting their...
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
In memory of Professor Robert Bird
Many different societies, East and West, North and South, have recently gone through great social turmoil when confronting their...
