“Why bother with relics of the past? How does history matter? … struggles over statues are battles over meaning, and to change the meaning of something is to change everything …”
Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse
Ghosts of Solid Air is an innovative public engagement project enabling diverse audiences to understand and participate in discussions around contested heritage. The project has been developed by award-winning immersive design specialists We Are Anagram.
You can download the app and read about the background to the experience on the project website.
“Heritage inevitably reflects the governing assumptions of its time and context. It is always inflected by the power and authority of those who have colonised the past, whose versions of history matter. These assumptions and co-ordinates of power are inhabited as natural — given, timeless, true and inevitable. But it takes only the passage of time, the shift of circumstances, or the reversals of history, to reveal those assumptions as time-and context bound, historically specific, and thus open to contestation, re-negotiation, and revision.”
Stuart Hall, Whose Heritage?
Ghosts of Solid Air responds to a simple proposition: that commemorating the past through statues can only ever lead to a partial and distorted view of history. This distortion works in two main ways. First, statues reduce complex historical processes to the actions of individuals, celebrating lone figures over the experiences of the many. This approach is particularly problematic when the history in question relates to a collective struggle, such as suffrage, abolition, revolution or even war. As author and journalist Gary Younge has recently argued, statues ‘skew how we understand history itself. For when you put up a statue to honour a historical moment, you reduce that moment to a single person’. Ghosts of Solid Air aims to address this view of the past by digitally (re)populating the streets and squares statues inhabit with the stories of those who are not remembered. Audiences will encounter a multitude of historical ‘ghosts’ jostling for their attention: a stark reminder of the countless narratives overshadowed by one-dimensional statues and monuments.
The second way statues distort the past relates to the process of historical interpretation. As recent events in the UK and across the world have highlighted, statues are often lightning rods for wider debates around injustice, inequality and discrimination in society. Such protests are inherently collective and dynamic, and yet their outcome is all-too-often reduced to one of two options: either the statue is removed, or it is retained (perhaps with some new plaque attached). Again, this represents a radical simplification of history and historical knowledge. As Raphael Samuel – one of the leading figures in the history from below movement – put it, history is ‘a social form of knowledge; the work, in any given instance, of a thousand different hands’. Understanding and re-interpreting statues should be a collective and – crucially – ongoing process. Ghosts of Solid Air will offer a platform for dialogue about the role of statues in public life and the constantly shifting meanings that may accrue around these supposedly mute and static objects.
These two intersecting concerns also relate to the broader meaning and purpose of heritage in society. In recent years, a wide range of projects have sought to rethink or reimagine the monument to address painful histories of, for example, genocide, slavery and colonialism. While many of these initiatives involve whole new forms of commemoration, others subvert existing statues and memorials. Both these trends speak to a critical engagement with the past in the present, and a growing awareness that thinking differently about heritage might help to shape more just futures. In Nancy Fraser’s terms, culture is a ‘legitimate, even necessary, terrain of struggle [and] a site of injustice in its own right’. To understand statues – and heritage more broadly – as both sites of injustice and terrains of struggle is to recognise that what has been passed down should not define what might be taken forwards. Traditions, meanings, stories and material worlds are all open to negotiation. The question then becomes: who gets to play a role in this remaking? Ghosts of Solid Air aims to encourage greater participation in these discussions, especially from those who may feel alienated from debates around history and heritage.
References and Further Reading
Fraser, Nancy. 2000. ‘Rethinking Recognition’. New Left Review May/June, 107-120. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii3/articles/nancy-fraser-rethinking-recognition
Ghosh, Amitav. 2021. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. London: John Murray
Hall, Stuart. 1999. Whose Heritage? Un-settling ‘The Heritage’, Re-imagining the Post-nation. Third Text 49, 3-13
Rao, Rahul. 2016. ‘On Statues’. The Disorder of Things 2 April. https://thedisorderofthings.com/2016/04/02/on-statues/
Samuel, Raphael. 1994. Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso
Younge, Gary. 2021. ‘Why Every Single Statue Should Come Down’. The Guardian 1 June. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/jun/01/gary-younge-why-every-single-statue-should-come-down-rhodes-colston
Ghosts of Solid Air was initiated during my New Trajectories in Curatorial Experience Design fellowship. Its second phase has been funded through an AHRC Follow-on-funding for Impact and Engagement Award (AH/W006146/1, Principal Investigator: Rodney Harrison, UCL Institute of Archaeology).
Colin Sterling 