Tipping Points - Toppling and installing statues - Seminar Presentation for the Public Pedagogies Institute 2021 Conference
presented by Debbie Qadri,
(Debbie Qadri and Deborah Madden
Seminar 1, October 8, 2021
2021 Public Pedagogies Institute Annual Conference)
My research interest is art in public space made by community
But
the focus of this presentation is:
community members or members of the public
becoming agents and curators of public art
through statue toppling or statue installation
In particular I am going to look at:
The toppling of statues during the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020
and
The Peace monuments which Commemorate the Survivors of Militarized Sexual Abuse in the Asia-Pacific War
Tipping points and moments of change
Materials used to install or topple statues -
Methodology
- Exploration of the topic led and biased by my own research interests: community making public art, public art, public space and public pedagogy
- Drawing of photographs (a method of noticing)
Short outline of the Toppling movement that gained momentum in 2020
- First of all we need to understand that this movement was happening anyway, but it gained a momentum at a particular point in time - just after George Floyd’s murder on 25 May 2020.
- Several things had also contributed towards this point.
- In previous years many community groups had formed to try and remove statues and monuments through legal means
- for example the Cecil Rhodes must fall movement began in 2015, initially focussed on a statue, but became broader to focus on decolonising education in South Africa
- 2017 there was a wave of protests against Confederate memorials in the USA
- In Australia there has always been a focus on colonial statues on Australia Day
- 2013 - The black lives matter movement since 2013 -after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of African-American teen Trayvon Martin 17 months earlier in February 2012.
- 2016 Justice pour Adama (Justice for Adama). after the death of a man in Police custody in France
- ‘the unique context of a global pandemic and attendant government responses disproportionally affecting marginalised and disenfranchised populations, communities and neighbourhoods’ (Fattore and Gleeson).
however, we also need to recognise that statues have a long history of falling and this is not a unique movement.
Selected timeline
- George Floyd’s murder on 25 May 2020 and the sudden momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement assisted in providing a moment where long simmering debates about statues could be acted on.
- may 29 . . .
- June 1 Sarah Parcak (an archeologist) gives advice on Twitter about how to pull down an obelisk
- June 1 That night, crowds protesting police brutality following the murder of George Floyd tried to tear down the 52-foot-tall obelisk, known as the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument, in Birmingham’s Linn Park.
June 2 the Mayor Randall Woodfin, said he would finish it off and had workers complete the dismantle whilst the city was placed in a state of Emergency.
June 3 - completely dismantled by authorities.
after this there is a momentum of about four to five statues toppled per day, and it spread across the globe
(theme of community agency and authority interacting with this agency to return power to authorities)
After the death of George Floyd the Black Lives Matter campaign gained momentum and became ‘a global movement involving public protests and toppling of statues and monuments commemorating racist and colonial figures in public spaces’ (Wahl, Seunghoon and Jamal 2020).
link to a more complete list of statues that fell in 2020:
Link to my drawings of statues
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qtWCZ7xNtRn5oWJgpHvID-Gci75mDw2k/view?usp=sharing
The statue of Edward Colston that was pulled down by a crowd on June 8, 2020.
Colston is remembered because he gave lots of money to the city of Bristol, other than that he is responsible for the death of around 30,000 people who died in slave raids and in the holds of slave ships (David Olusaga 2018).
There has been a campaign since 1990’s to remove the Colston statue in Bristol.
Listen to ‘Hollow’,
a poem by Vanessa Kisuule who witnessed the falling of Colston in Bristol,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3DKfaK50AU
Photo collage of the Robert E lee memorial, Richmond Virginia USA
I have assembled a lot of photos to show the range of events that happened over time to the statue
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XU4-oV6A9K1qNo_Muz465hNq37WqPt3e/view?usp=sharing
Video of Nina Simone singing, projected onto the Robert E Lee memorial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pmk29gVfBpI
......................................................................
Go to Tipping Points - Choose your own Adventure
Peace Monuments
Link to photo of Peace Monument
https://fortune.com/2015/12/28/japan-south-korea-comfort-women/
Peace monuments have arisen out of -
the International Movement to Commemorate the Survivors of Militarized Sexual Abuse in the Asia-Pacific War,
*These survivors are also known as 'Comfort Women', but for the remainder of this presentation, we will refer to them as the grandmothers or survivors.
Ruff O’herne says that the term comfort women is a euphemism,
‘We were never ‘comfort women’.
Comfort means something warm and soft,
safe and friendly. It means tenderness. We
were war-rape victims, enslaved and
conscripted by the Japanese imperial
forces.’(*see reference number 15, Mackie and Crozier-De Rosa, 2019)
The majority were also between the ages of 13 and 16 years old, and some were as young as ten. (Stetz 2019, p.65).
Stetz also points out that even the term sexual violence hides the brutal reality, which was ‘numerous daily rapes; to beatings;
to near-starvation; to sexually transmitted diseases and to the crude medical
treatment of them; and to forced abortions. (Stetz 2019, p. 65).
....
A short History of the movement - and the statues
This movement (International
Movement to Commemorate the Survivors of Militarized Sexual Abuse in the Asia-Pacific War)
which seeks acknowledgement and redress began in the 1970s and gained ground in the 1990s.
Many women began telling their stories in the 1970’s in biographies and an international network of feminists began working towards redress.
‘Until the 1990s very few individual survivors
had testified publicly’ (Mackie and Crozier-De Rosa 2019, p.3).
In August 1991, a moment in time occurred,
A key moment ‘On 14 August 1991, a Korean survivor, Kim
Hak Sun (1924–1997), held a press conference
to tell of her wartime experiences. This was the
day before the anniversary of the end of the
Asia-Pacific War on 15 August’ (Mackie and Crozier-De Rosa, 2019, p. 4).
Kim Hak Sun “announced her willingness to testify publicly about her experiences as
a comfort woman, raising the issue to the level of formal legal action.” (Stetz)
She was the first of the Korean Women who had been to tell her story as part of legal action. (Stetz)
‘The elderly women, who have been demonstrating and campaigning for decades are respectfully referred to as the ‘Grandmothers’.
We argue that these sites commemorate not only suffering, but also the activism of the survivors and their supporters’ (Mackie and Crozier-De Rosa (2019)
The Wednesday Demonstrations begin
In January 1992, then Japanese Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi (1919–2007) made an official
visit to South Korea. On Wednesday 8 January1992, Kim Hak Sun, other survivors,and their supporters gathered in front of the Japanese Embassy in downtown Seoul. They demanded that the Japanese government make an official apology and provide compensation, chanting ‘Apologize!’ ‘Punish!’ ‘Compensate!’.
There has been a Wednesday demonstration almost every week for over twenty five years.
Survivors and their supporters hold placards in ‘(Mackie and Crozier-De Rosa, 2019, p.4)
The House of Sharing
‘The House of Sharing From 1992, a group of elderly survivors shared a rented house in Seoul, known as the ‘House of Sharing’
Now the House of sharing is also a museum. As a museum, it has also become a public place and a place of learning.
There is a process from speaking publicly about the issue, to use of legal means to redress issue, to collaborative demonstration, to sharing a house, to creating a museum which is a place where the public is invited to enter and a place to share information with the public.
collaboration between women in Japan, China, North and South Korea, and other countries
culminated in the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery, held in Tokyo on 8–12 December 2000. ((Mackie and Crozier-De Rosa, 2019, p.5) (Although this was not a legally binding tribunal.)
‘Nicola Henry has argued that ‘the structure and practice of law is not only a site of memory preservation but also a medium for contested memory’.33 The Women’s Tribunal provided a forum for survivors to present their testimonies and contribute to a reworking of the historical memory which had been encoded in the original Tokyo Tribunal. In many ways the Women’s Tribunal could be seen as a massive transnational historical research project, with the aim of achieving historical justice for the survivors’ (Mackie and Crozier-De Rosa, 2019, p.5-6)
‘In their weekly attendance at the Wednesday demonstrations they make their demands visible in a public space on a Seoul street. Their placards in Korean, Japanese, and English show that they are addressing multiple audiences: the South Korean government and the South Korean
public, the Japanese government and the Japanese public, and an international community which often communicates in the English language’ (Mackie and Crozier-De Rosa, 2019, p.4)
Link to my drawings of the peace monument October 8, 2021
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c_iih99lMclgeZGvYDdvuG1NMTxFQ-MS/view?usp=sharing
The first Statue
In 2011 a commemorative statue was erected outside the Japanese embassy in Souel.
The statue commemorated the 1000th day of sitting in front of the embassy.
The plaque in English reads;
‘December 14, 2011 marks the 1000th Wednesday demonstration for the solution of Japanese military sexual slavery issue after its first rally on January 8, 1992 in front of the Japanese Embassy. This peace monument stands to commemorate the spirit and the deep history of the Wednesday demonstration. (Mackie and Crozier-De Rosa, 2019, p.7)
‘Placed at the very site where these demonstrations have now occurred for over twenty five years, the statue is a form of petition to the Japanese government and its diplomatic representatives.
At times other than Wednesday lunchtimes the statue is an it is an avatar for the elderly demonstrators. (Mackie and Crozier-De Rosa, 2019, p.8)
Even though it is described as a statue which represents the protestors, Stetz points out that ‘its
subject is not, in fact, a woman at all. It is instead an image of a young girl wearing the clothes of a schoolgirl – barefoot, with short hair and hands folded,
silently and impassively seated next to a second chair that is empty. There is nothing to indicate that the girl is suffering or has been injured in any way. But
what is plain, nonetheless, is that she is a very young girl, an underage girl, (Stetz 2019, p. 74).
The ‘Peace monument’ is cast in bronze and the The War and Women’s
Human Rights Museum in Seoul sell replicas in a range of sizes (Mackie and Crozier-De Rosa, 2019). This makes it easy for other communities to obtain a copy of the peace monument for their own community.
There are now Peace Monuments in many countries, often organised by local community groups.
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