MISSING MONUMENTS

Graz, Institute for Art in Public Space Styria, 2007/08

Kristina Leko in collaboration with David Smithson

With the participation of Aminau Banna, Ileana El-Kholy, Emanuel Nkrumah Kwabena – ENKS, Hermine Kurzweil, and Ana Ludvik as well as Albena Angelova, Bogie Balint, Marie-Louisette Douatsop, Mandoffane Faye, Herbert Fuchs, Martin Gjecaj, Francisco Santiago Nino, Valentina Nistor, Peter Presinger, Carlos Escobar Pukara, Veada Stoff; Interkulturelle Frauen, Österreichisch-Kroatische Initiative, Österr.-Russische Gesellschaft, Indish-Österr. Gesellschaft, NIL, Ägyptischer Verein.

Five sculptural portraits in public space, along related biographical notes, honor five distinguished personalities who come from the local migrant minorities. While the atrium of the regional parliament serves as a prominent exhibition site for this intervention, the artifacts (sculptures, texts) have been created in collaboration with members of several migrant cultural organizations. The project aimed to highlight migrant communities of Graz and their standing in the city’s cultural landscape. It posed the question to which extent the history of the city and its current life has been shaped by the people with a migrant background as well as to which extend is the dominant culture willing to acknowledge them and take their achievements into account in its official representations.

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Missing Monuments were dedicated to five individuals who significantly influenced their communities: Dr. Talat El-Kholy, Egyptian Cultural Club, active for over three decades in the integration process of immigrants; Fred Ohenhen, Nigerian, first president of the Immigrant Council/Parliament of Graz, active for over 10 years in carrying out anti-racism educational programs; Pawan Kohli, president of the Indian Cultural Organization in Graz; Ante Repušić, Croat, active for over a decade in working with refugees from ex-Yugoslavian and other countries; and an anonymous asylum seeker, an African woman living in the Caritas women’s shelter in Graz. Five portrait sculptures, seemingly classical monuments, each placed on an individual base were installed as temporary monuments over a six-month period in the atrium of the Styrian Provincial Parliament, highly representative well frequented space that connects two main shopping streets in the historical city center. Composed in a way to challenge social prejudices that wide audiences might have, five short texts positioned on pedestals narrated related biographies.

The five individuals were selected by their respective communities during a workshop that involved members from several immigrant groups. In the creative writing workshop, participants wrote five biographical texts explaining the accomplishments of the individuals being memorialized in the portrait sculptures. Additionally, biographical stories of other people with migrant backgrounds were also written during the workshop. When the writing skills shown did not permit of independent writing, texts were created on the basis of interviews carried out. More than 20 biographical texts were created during the project and posted on the website www.missingmonuments.eu (not active anymore).

My starting point of thinking for the project was the right to vote and therefrom derived right to self-representation and self-determination for individuals and communities equally. Furthermore, the project can be understood as an attempt to implement those democratic principles to creative artistic and participatory processes. The portrait-sculptures as well as texts were not created by professional artists, but by members of that communities – mostly amateurs interested in creative expression, who were (except for one person) introduced to modelling for the first time during our 10-day sculpture workshop led by sculptor David Smithson.

While plaster copies of the portrait-sculptures were donated to the participating community organizations, a set of copies made from marble powder – which is more durable – was used for the outdoor installation in the public space. Later on, this set of sculptures became part of the Landesmuseum Joanneum collection. A fortunate coincidence that those portraits ended in that rather conservative collection fills me with joy every time I think of it. A subversive act of deconstruction of dominant cultural representation practices that I see as our project’s victory. To create a new symbolic capital related to ‘other’ individuals and communities and pack it in the main museum depot was indeed more than what we had hoped to accomplish. Because, to critically examine the existing symbolic order of cultural-historical representations in the urban space of Graz, and then to, simultaneously, integrate a similar representation featuring immigrant minorities within that pre-established symbolic order of public space, was the primarily goal of Missing Monuments. But, that integration into the public space was back then possible only on temporary terms.

The sad fact is that there were also pragmatic political reasons why this intervention had to happen in that very year on that very place. The Missing Monuments project was wisely placed in the local political space thanks to curator Werner Fenz who commissioned it (I suggested the idea two years earlier) for the time of elections, in order to counteract a pre-existing racist campaign of a far-right party, their series of billboards that explicitly called for the "cleansing" of the public spaces. These posters contained a direct pictorial reference to the Nazi practices of ethnic cleansing i.e. on how these have been inscribed in the memory of the local public space.

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Offsite Graz, Institute for Art in Public Space Styria

CREDITS
Missing Monuments was commissioned by the Institute for Art in Public Space Styria, Universalmuseum Joanneum Graz, Austria and was installed in Landhaushof in the period September 2007/February 2008. Curatorial team: Werner Fenz, Sandra Abrams.
Concept, communication, community and participatory artwork: Kristina Leko.
Modelling workshop: David Smithson. Participants modelling workshop/sculptures modelled by: Aminau Banna, Ileana El-Kholy, Emanuel Nkrumah Kwabena – ENKS, Hermine Kurzweil, and Ana Ludvik. Writing workshops: Kristina Leko.
Participants writing workshops/texts written by: Albena Angelova, Bogie Balint, Marie-Louisette Douatsop, Mandoffane Faye, Herbert Fuchs, Martin Gjecaj, Francisco Santiago Nino, Valentina Nistor, Peter Presinger, Carlos Escobar Pukara, Veada Stoff. Cooperation partners: Interkulturelle Frauen e.V., Österreichisch-Kroatische Initiative e.V., Österreichisch-Russische Gesellschaft e.V., Indish-Österreichische Gesellschaft e.V, NIL e.V, and Ägyptischer Verein e.V. Photos: Kristina Leko, David Smithson, NN.

GENRE&FORMATS
Project: temporary intervention in public space; community art project; oral history; participatory-documentary art project; project with specific social groups.
Artwork/s and artifacts: workshops; sculptural installation, texts; a series of biographical texts and website.