Sonic Monuments - Towards Inclusive and Dynamic Memoryscapes

“MONUMENT noun [ C ] / mɒn.jə.mənt. A structure or building that is built to honor a special person or event: in the square in front of the hotel stands a monument to all the people killed in the war.” Cambridge English Dictionary, ‘monument.’

A monument is a memory set in stone. It celebrates past triumphs and events, commemorates loss and grief, and, most importantly, builds a narrative. Monuments convey the story a community wants to publicly narrate, building a framework for what must be remembered. These memories are integral to the formation of communities: a shared past shapes a shared future. Traditional definitions of ‘monument,’ typically include three components. First, a monument is material. Second, it is a synthetic form of memory: monuments are never organic but built by people to materialize commemoration. Third, monuments are built with the purpose of commemorating something or someone.

However, as sites of memory, monuments have become contested in both academic and public debates. Who decides what to include in a ‘communal’ narrative? Whose memory do we preserve? And how do we preserve it? Monuments have been taken down, removed, defaced, and replaced. Even though monuments are fixed, the landscape surrounding them changes. What used to be a proud celebration of heroic achievement, has become a confronting reminder of the dark sides of history. The traditional monument has become the symbol of exclusive epistemologies. They are the physical manifestations of one-sided histories, artificially selecting the way we preserve and remember the past. It is time to rethink the pedestal.

Should all monuments fall? That might be too radical. But the definition of the monument is ready for some iconoclasm. Today’s monuments often transcend the contested stone assemblages of the past. From art installations to commemorative practices, this essay understands the monument as a (im)material object or practice that both reflects and shapes the way we remember the past. In what follows, I revisit the traditional study of monuments and add a sonic dimension to it. Traditionally, the visual prevails in the study and experience of monuments. Most scholarship on monuments discusses how their aesthetics relate to the memories it conveys. But we rarely think about the role of sound in our commemorative practices.

Over the last three decades, the field of sound studies has emerged as a separate field at the disciplinary crossroads of media studies, cultural studies, history, technological studies, sociology, musicology, and psychology. Working with a wide array of methodologies and vocabularies, the sound scholar takes the sonic as their analytical lens. As Jonathan Sterne explains, sound studies are not simply the product of today’s technological changes. It is rather the result of a long genealogy of thinking about the sonic dimensions of life that already started in antiquity and has now emerged as an academic field. Moreover, sound is inherently intertwined with knowledge production (Sterne 2012, 3 and 8). Therefore, a sound scholar is required to thoroughly consider questions revolving around who we hear, why we hear them, and how the sound concerned is produced. Sound is always shaped within specific epistemologies and cultural assumptions, and sound students should be careful to deconstruct both.

The relation between sound and memorialization remains surprisingly undertheorized. The first theoretical inquiries into sound and memory only set foot in 2013, when Jacques Rancière pointed to the acoustic materialization of history in the urban space, creating what he calls ‘memoryscapes.’ As Russel Skelchy and Jeremy Taylor note sound is therefore ‘not merely an object but the medium that structures remembrance’ (2023, 5). The sounds of the city frame our memories, creating memoryscapes in which our individual and collective memories come into existence.

Nevertheless, some works on sound and memory have recently been published. The volume Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory, and Cultural Practices, edited by José Van Dijck and Karin Bijsterveld (2009), explores how we keep ‘sound souvenirs,’ like recordings and dusty old vinyls, because they enable us to recreate sonic environments that remind us of the past. In The Memory of Sound: Persevering the Sonic Past (2015), Seán Street discusses how sound and memory are intertwined in electronic media, particularly with regards to radio. Taking a cognitive approach, Street notes that memory and sound are both a medium of self-identification, highlighting how we remember through music. Skelchy and Taylor’s Sonic Histories of Occupation: Experiencing Sound and Empire in a Global Context (2023) also provides a valuable contribution to the literature on sound and memory. Exploring how sound acts as a reminder of occupation, the volume contains several contributions on the sonic memories of occupation and the memories of sonic occupation, together showing that sound matters in understanding the histories of occupation and its aftermath.

Yet, while scholars seem aware of the significance of sound to mnemonic constellations, memory studies rarely touch upon the sonic realm. The Collective Memory Reader (2011), the standard companion for memory students, does not contain a single text on sound and memory. We have remained silent on the relation between memory and sound for far too long.

Robert Musil famously wrote that ‘nothing is so invisible as a monument’ (1930, 61). Many monuments have receded into the background, standing lonesome in neglected parks, covered in pigeon droppings, half-empty beer cans and candy wrappers. While we often think that a monument sets remembrance in stone, many warned of monumental amnesia. Ann Rigney, for example, writes that the installation of a monument ‘may in fact turn out to mark the slow beginning of amnesia and indifference’ (2008, 93). James E. Young points to the risk that we ‘encourage monuments to do our memory work for us’, which results in forgetting (2011 [2000], 374). However, as Rigney writes, ‘collective remembrance is like swimming: in order to stay afloat you have to keep moving’ (2008, 94). Memory must be performed and circulated by those who want to remember. And to do so, memory needs to be disruptive or controversial, at least to a certain extent. If not, memories fall into oblivion.

But invisibility does not equal inaudibility. Monuments that incorporate sound within their visuality are likely to be more disruptive. The sonic reverberations induce the circulation of memories and foster an inescapable soundscape whose horizon goes far beyond what the visual could ever achieve. One of the greatest examples is Fallen Leaves by the Israeli sculptor and painter Menashe Kadishman, which aims to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. The art installation, located in the ground floor void of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, consists of 10,000 iron plates in the shape of faces with open mouths. Visitors are encouraged to cross the ‘Leerstelle des Gedenkens,’ to walk over the iron faces with soundless screams and are then confronted with only the jarring sound of the iron plates jostling against each other. The sculptural piece is painful but poignant, not only because of the disorienting look of the metal disks, but more so because of the overwhelming and unsettling sonic experience. The combination of the visual with the sonic – the look of the disks and their sharp sound – results in an engaging mnemonic practice, wherein the visitor becomes part of the experience instead of a mere spectator. Being immersed in the installation means participating in its memories, whether that be memories of the Holocaust, or memories of human suffering and violence in general. In this installation, memory is performed. The combination of different sensorial experiences results in a mnemonic practice that fosters an active act of remembrance.

In its invisibility, a monument still ‘voices’ certain memories and narratives that do not necessarily apply to everyone. Especially in the case of contested monuments, such as the Hoorn monument of JP Coen, who was responsible for the murder of thousands of Indonesians in 1621, remembrance is enforced on communities to whom the pedestalled honouree is by no means a hero, but rather a painful reminder of (post)colonial violence, grief, trauma, and suffering. The traditional monument can also be problematic because of the physical space it occupies as Arno Haijtema reminds us in a recent op-ed (2023). Every mnemonic community aims for their monument to be implanted on public locations, like centres and squares (Rigney 2012, 93). The more public the space, the more outreach it seems. However, the power/space narrative is hazardous: monuments instate a hegemonic narrative in public space that otherizes the communities that do not identify with the installed mnemonic practices.

When a monument is more dynamic through, for example, a multimodality that combines the visual with the sonic, there is more room for different narratives. Whereas the visual relates to static quantities, such as stone, the sonic is more dynamic. Hence, sound (and especially silence) can potentially counter hegemonic narratives and pave the way towards ‘multidirectional memories.’ This concept, coined by Michael Rothberg (2009), refers to the idea that memories of different histories are always in dialogue with each other. Instead of commemorating one specific event or person, a multidirectional monument could commemorate different narratives at the same time.

One of the most common commemorative practices is the two-minute silence, which is often initiated to honour a specific event, such as an accident, or as a yearly tradition, like in the case of the annual Dutch commemoration of the victims of the Second World War on May 4. Although Steven Brown (2012) argues that a commemorative silence is a passive, performative act of memory that does not move towards a long-term commemoration of the person or event, I would argue for the opposite. Operating within a collective framework of silence-induced commemoration, the act of being silent is disruptive enough to induce active mnemonic circulation, but also allows multidirectional commemoration. A temporary monument is created through a short disruption of the social environment and far less exclusionary than its stone counterpart.

Sound is essential to the future of our memoryscapes. But what would a sonic monument look like? Or, more importantly, what would it sound like?

A monument is always a product of its time. Monuments should not fall, but they should be reassessed, reimagined, and reinstalled. Young coined the term ‘countermonument,’ proposing that, in response to the archaic traditional monument, countermonuments have been conceived, ‘born resisting the very premises of their birth’ (2011 [2000], 374). Also called ‘anti-monument’ or ‘nonument,’ the countermonument aims to commemorate the silenced histories, the narratives that resist authoritative memories. Adding a sonic dimension to monuments and to the study of the existing monuments allows for imagining a new type of monument, as well as a more inclusive, dynamic, and active memoryscape.

The first steps towards a sonic monument have already been made. In September 2023, Katriona Beales’ work Hope as an Act of Resistance: A Sonic Monument was exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The countermonument, commissioned by the Sotheby’s Institute of Art as part of the MA course ‘Reimagining the Monument’, consists of a sound artwork composed of people’s whispered hopes. Visitors can record their messages anonymously and are then invited to the ‘sound bath,’ a room where the visitor can listen to the whispered dreams and messages of hope. Beales stated in an interview with the Sotheby Institute that she wanted her work to reject the traditional idea of monuments as commemorating violence, but, instead, sought to create a monument that would be ‘soft, gentle, and hold people’ (2023). As Beales implicitly admits, her work does not directly commemorate anything, which makes its status as a monument debatable. However, it still prompts reflection on what monuments entail and what a sonic monument could look like.

A true product of its time, as advocated for by Young’s vision of monuments, the depicted AI-generated monument is also an example of a sonic monument. Midjourney.ai created an enormous sound installation, imitating the monumental tradition of a gigantic statue of a celebrated hero put on a pedestal. The monument is not very innovative or creative, but at least incorporates sound within its commemorative practice. It also points to the main obstacle of the sonic monument: how do we continue the tradition of the monument while moving away from its problematic architectural origins?

Consequently, the key question arises: how do we create a (immaterial) sonic monument that fosters a sonic imaginary that can both frame the formulation of collective memories and allows for individual, subjective interpretations of that mnemonic narrative? It is a challenge to artists, historians, memory scholars, and urban architects to rethink the way we commemorate our past – and how we want to do so in the future. Whether through song, sound, or silence, whether sonic in its representation of the past, or sonic in its disruption of ordinary life, there are countless ways to imagine a sonic monument. Monuments can whisper and shout. Our task is to give them new voices.

Memory studies need more research into the connection between sound and mnemonic practices. Memory has an extensive, but unexplored sonic dimension. And sound offers new opportunities for monuments. Shifting the focus from the visual to the multisensorial experience of mnemonic practices allows us to conceive more inclusive, active, and dynamic memoryscapes more appropriate to the mnemonic needs of our time.

Author Bio

Laura Tacoma is a student in the Research Master in History program at the University of Amsterdam. She focusses on the relation between heritage, memory, and politics.

Bibliography

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__, “An Exclusive Interview with Artist Katriona Beales.” Sotheby’s Institute of Art. September 2023, https://www.sothebysinstitute.com/news-and-events/news/an-exclusive-interview-with-artist-katriona-beales.

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