The future of monuments

Abstract

Today, many want to pull down memorials as expressions of bad politics, especially those memorials that legitimise evil and injustice. What memorials need to go what can stay? Are their 'good' memorials—and who decides? Can we make use of 'bad' memorials? Is the form of the memorial itself now compromised? How do we understand miscellaneous contemporary memorial projects, like Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin and Ground Zero in New York, or Weta and Te Papa's The Scale of War and Peter Jackson 'colourising' World War I footage? Do memorials have a role moving forward? What form could future memorials take?