This week sees the launch of NUMENT: an open-source mapping project for recording and publicising civil unrest.
“Thousands of protests, uprisings, and actions happen every year; however, many of them will never be memorialised. Millions of people put their voices and energy into moments which in many cases leave no marker behind. By relying on state-sanctioned digital platforms to log our public histories, memory of these moments is often lost or suppressed.”
The NUMENT project invites participants to take a direct role in the process of memorialisation, by inserting their own virtual monuments into Google Maps. The NUMENT is a monument against forgetting, and it may be pinned as a user-submitted image at any place deemed worthy of remembrance.
NUMENT is run by a small group of artists based in Europe, and since last year I have also been contributing words and ideas to the project. It is intended to be provocative, as it asks the question: Who has the right to make a monument?
The Problem of Top-Down Memory
This Saturday is 11 November – Remembrance Day in the UK.
The same day, the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign (PSC) has scheduled a pro-Palestinian demonstration in the heart of London. The PSC have said that their planned marching route won’t take them anywhere near the Cenotaph, the war memorial on Whitehall which is a focal point of the British Remembrance ritual. Nevertheless, the security minister called the intended march “a matter of great concern,” while the prime minister warned on Twitter:
“To plan protests on Armistice Day is provocative and disrespectful, and there is a clear and present risk that the Cenotaph and other war memorials could be desecrated, something that would be an affront to the British public and the values we stand for.”
There is an implicit assumption in this statement. (A condition that underpins all memorialisation, as discussed in my previous post What is a Monument?)
The majority of wartime dead are buried close to where they fall, and the Cenotaph in London is, as its name means in Greek, an “Empty Tomb.” We then fill that tomb with the meaning that we project on it. The prime minister’s statement above only holds true if the British public collectively agree that this particular empty stone box on Whitehall serves as a repository for our national values. Does it? Do all national monuments?
On 15 February 2003, I joined a demonstration in London. Around a million people (according to the BBC’s estimate) shut the city down, marching in solidarity against the imminent Iraq War. It was the first time I felt truly democratically involved in anything political, joining this endless sea of people all using their bodies as voting ballots against violence. In the end the war happened anyway, with hundreds of British deaths and almost half a million Iraqi deaths resulting from that conflict and the disastrous subsequent occupation.
There is a monument in Victoria Embankment Gardens to the British citizens who died in that war. But there is no public marker remembering those who tried to avert it. There will be no monument for those marching on Saturday against violence in Palestine.
Only successful revolutions get a monument.
None of this is to criticise the dead, many of whom were heroes and/or victims, nor to diminish their memory. It is simply to remind that the national ritual of remembering is a tradition curated by incumbent power structures, rather than any direct or spontaneous representation of public will. It is a top-down process: we are told what to remember, Lest we forget. Other things though, we may be conditioned to forget.
Hacking the Landscapes of Remembrance
“NUMENT uses open-access mapping tools to record and publicise protest – by inserting our own monuments into virtual public spaces. In the process of democratising the memory of these events, and while still vulnerable to removal, NUMENT challenges traditional top-down approaches to public memory, and asks: Who has the right to make a monument?”
The NUMENT website features a form by which users can propose their own sites or events to be commemorated with a NUMENT. Once successfully added to Google Maps, new memorials will be listed on the project’s Instagram feed.
I think of NUMENT as an experiment. There is no desire or expectation as to what happens next. Will people engage with the idea and add their own experiences to the map? Will it get hacked or spammed by politically-motivated trolls? Will it go viral? Will Google exert their power to remove public-submitted monuments from their globally adopted – but corporate-owned – mapping software?
Or will NUMENT simply fail to engage people’s interest and naturally fade out of existence on its own?
There might be something to say about any of those outcomes.
Interesting idea.
And what happened on Remembrance Day? A load of right wing morons caused trouble at the cenotaph and almost all disturbances at the pro-Palestinian demo ("a hate march" according to the truly odious Suella Braverman) were also due to bigoted rabble rousers.