| Public space is not simple to define; analyzing how it functions is more productive. I describe it as existing in three domains: empirical (apprehended sensorily), discursive (committed to representation and shared), and imaginative (existing as idea). Because of its relationship to social visibility, public space is a crucial site for negotiating social relations. Partly, this involves intentional acts of placemaking, including those of expressing social memory. But memory-making itself is shifting. Never have the raw materials of memory been so accessible via technologies that store, manipulate, and transfer images and ideas. One common form of memory-making, public monuments, has followed largely quite prescriptive conceptual, artistic, and logistical norms to "fix" social memory, but this too is changing. Public monuments are now increasingly challenged via tactics (and designs) which stem from a geographic sensibility about socio-spatial interactivity, placement, foregrounding, and degrees of erasure.;This research addresses the intersections of public space, monuments and social memory by a deliberate focus on monuments that break monumental norms---of conception, design, funding, installation, placement, and use. Using case studies of three Vancouver monuments installed since 1997, my specific questions concern, first, how these monuments came to be built, and second, what they suggest about a "gradation" of visibility. I identify themes from literatures on public space, social memory, monuments, and the "new" monumental forms, and then describe the multi-method qualitative approach used for data collection and analysis of the origins and present uses of the three. I identify seven elements that the monuments appear to hold in common, but, to avoid implying there is a given procedure to make such monuments, I next articulate several aspects that they do not. Together, these form a "politics of visibility" (how, physically, discursively and imaginatively, a counter-hegemonic message can be made material in monumental form). Its components include: the need for a private issue to reach a larger social scale; the need to work consciously against a landscape of hegemonic symbols; the precipitation of random hybrid encounters; the conscious re-coporealization of space; the alteration of commemorative time; and a sensitive use of the power of specificity. |
