Seminar kicked off the research project The Everyday Life of Urban Monuments

The seminar included talks Andrew M. Shanken (Berkeley, University of California), Charlotte Sprogøe (Senior Curator and Researcher, KØS), Mathias Danbolt (Professor, University of Copenhagen) and Jakob Ingemann Parby (Senior Researcher, Museum of Copenhagen).

In his keynote Andrew talked about The Works of Memorial and the transformation of memorialization from early modern to modern times. He then used a number of case studies from cities around Europe and the US to unfold the uses and misuses, placements, displacements and misplacements of Modern Urban Memorials focusing on similarities and dissimilarities across the urban scale and the role memorials play in the structuring and reconfiguration of urban spaces and communities over time. His talk eloquently displayed the traditions and juxtapositions that redefines the work of memorials and highlights how, why and when memorials are turned on and off.

Charlotte Sprogøe took her starting point from her practice as a curator and researcher at KØS – the Museum of Public Art in Denmark. Based on her PhD and her curatorial practice she argued that recent public artworks indicated new pathways for the renewal of memorial practices by turning away from the traditional monumental formats towards more temporary, collective and active ways of commemoration as f.i. in the case of Lingotto Fiats old factory in Turin now turned into The Pinacoteca Agnelli art hub and La Pista 500, a new public art space on the old highway on the factory-roof. And that using a language referring to contemporary artistic practices rather than more traditional notions of commemorative acts could improve or nuance contemporary debates about memorials and commemoration.

Jakob proceeded to discuss the monumentalisation of Copenhagen between 1875 and 1930. A process intertwining urbanization, urban planning and metropolitan ambition and a process that gave birth to the majority of the city’s current monuments. According to him a more diachronic analysis of the sites and biographies of monuments could be generate new perspectives on the function and uses of monuments in urban history and everyday life. The adornment of parks, streets and squares of Copenhagen so common for the era was not one-off commemorative acts, but rather interventions in the urban space that were continually reinterpreted and inscribed with new meaning by processes of placemaking, forgetting and repurposing. The monumental history of Sankt Annæ Square, recently the site of a new monument for author Karen Blixen, was one case in point. The Stork Fountain at Amagertorv, site for public protest both after its inauguration in 1894 and during the youth revolt in 1968, another.

Mathias, finally, dived into the materiality and surfaces of statues, unfolding his intriguing exploration of an archival photographic material of statues and monuments in the Ørsted Park being painted with different graffities and words celebrating homosexuality. In the archives the photos had falsely been registered as homophobic graffiti, but even a brief look at the statements clearly indicates a pro-gay agenda. Through further research Danbolt had been able to identify the image as belonging to a campaign by Bøssernes Befrielsesfront in 1986 against homophobic violence following a series of assaults on gay men by homophobes. The campaign took the form of a reconquest of the Ørsted Park as a safe space for cruising and homosexual encounters as visualized by the moderation of the monuments. And the case study raises important questions on the archiving and restauration of monuments.

The talks supplemented each other well and served the purpose of presenting the field and pointed to both historical and art historical dimensions of monuments and memorials as well as possible approaches, cases, challenges, and methodologies in the study of their Everyday Life – not least, what we mean when we speak about that.

The monuments-walk-and-talk following the seminar took us from Kongens Nytorv and the Equestrian Statue of Christian V past the contested memorial plate for Hans Egede and his wife Gertrude Rasch to The Stork Fountain at Amagertorv. On to the Absalon Monument and Fisher Woman statue at Højbro Plads/Gammel Strand and then past the under-water sculpture by Suste Bonnén, the Equestrian Statue of Frederik VII (giver of the constitution from 1849 that initiated a limited democracy) to the burned-down Bourse and the peculiar monument of Christian IV from 2019 by Faroe sculptor Hans Pauli Olsen.

We concluded the tour at Christianshavns Torv with the Greenland monument by
Svend Rathsack from 1938. It was inspired by his first visit to the country in 1931 and consist of a central piece with an Inuit seal hunter with his kayak on a higher plinth surrounded by a bench and two groups of women next to it. The central plinth was destroyed in 1992 when an excavator tumbled it by accident and a new figure by sculpturer Hans Stub-Holm replaced it. The monument has become a point of assembly for Inuit migrants to Copenhagen. During a light festival in 2019 it was transformed into the work Inuit Nutaat (New People) by artist group SIIKU, (Rasmus Nielsen og David H. Péronard).

Dates of upcoming seminars:

23th and 24th September 2024: Stockholm – programme can be found here:

Biographies & methodological approaches

• 10–11 February 2025: Bristol
• 2–2 June 2025: Amsterdam

Detailed programs for the workshops in Bristol and Amsterdam are in the making and will be circulated shortly.

Concluding conference in Copenhagen: November/December 2025

Dates, program, and CFP will be circulated in the Fall of 2024. Following the conference, we aim to publish selected papers. The network is supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.

More information about the research network:

The Everyday Life of Urban Monuments