Submerged Histories - Statues, Stories, Salvage

Organised by the Institute of Advanced Studies and the Sarah Parker Remond Centre at UCL.

We are pleased to be hosting a panel to discuss artistic and cultural practices that address memorialization and historical legacies, especially in relation to controversial statues and public monuments. We are struck by the performative and aesthetic questions that public gestures, like the removal of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol suggest, and how these are imbricated by political and ethical imperatives. The image of Colston’s effigy descending into the harbour has invoked, for some, the image of a watery grave, resonant of the tens of thousands of African captives who drowned on the Atlantic Passage and the ongoing disaster of the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean.

While enslaved and destitute people have been left at the bottom of the sea, Colston’s statue has been dredged up to be restored and repurposed as a didactic or symbolic token.  In the context of the Black Lives Matter campaigns, ‘statue wars’ have been central, providing a spur for activism and reflection on historical narratives and their embodiment in public space. Artists and cultural activists have long addressed these totems, transforming, appropriating, altering and assaulting their visual rhetorics and material presences. Here they will reflect on their own practices in the intensity of this moment and will think together about how statues form part of a public archive that ostensibly belongs to all but only speaks for some.