Moving Monuments in the Age of Social Media

Abstract:In order to understand whether there is any specificity of site left today, which would allow us to even consider terms such as ex situ, we need to see how history and its construction is parsed through new engines of reproduction. This essay does not just claim that contemporary engagement with monuments and contemporary artistic practice includes an extension of history construction through social media; there is no doubt about this. Monuments are already a mediation that reshapes constructions of past events for the present. Real-time digital documentation makes possible different levels of engagement, resistance, and re-mediation, on the side of production and later in the many layers of reception, in various (often newly constructed) public spheres, which are of course not less regulated. How do artists take into account this social media reality, how to understand social engagement, and how to define site-specificity in such a situation?