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As GEOGRAPHY: description of interventions within communal space(s); the responsability of a sociographer for the employed methods of description.
As CHOREOGRAPHY: prescription for interventions within communal space(s); the responsibility of a sociographer for the execution of the prescribed actions, as well as for the context in which these take place.
As LITHOGRAPHY: expression of interventions within communal space(s); the responsibility of the sociographer for the means employed to express the sociography as a whole.
The focus in the five works set together in Monument: A Liminal Sociography is the discrepancy be tween the monumental practice implemented by the state and the multiplicity of monumental practices initiated by groups that claim their 'own' interpretation of history. State monuments represent and communicate a specific order of history: the monument is fundamentally a 'mark' that orders the most 'important' events or people in relation to the prevalent modes of government and power. This is contested by other, growing movements of people that claim their 'unofficial' histories, creating displays for well- or lesser-known individuals and organising actions – be they monumental or counter-monumental – to empower this claim.
Recent public discussions on the contemporary monument (generally pigeonholed as being 'elitist,' 'expensive' and not acknowledging their 'own' heroes, such as family members who died in car accidents or populist politicians like Pim Fortuyn) have shown growing antagonism within the meanings and the audience that contemporary monumental practice addresses or used to address.
A 'new monumentality' should resist both the 'will to consistency,' that is, the materiality of modernist-historical approach to monuments, and the 'realization to come' of endless conceptualizations without ever entering the public sphere, or appropriating methodologies in use in the public domain, that resist monumentality as such: advertisements, graffiti, NGO campaigns, etc. This resistance is what we define as '(a) sociography,' both a context-specific approach, based on the responsibility of the sociographer to decide on interventions that occupy and are distributed over temporary sites as well as the set of the results that stem from these interventions.
Against Irony (2008)
Concept & execution: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei & Jonas Staal
Monument for the Chased-Off Citizens of Rotterdam (2008)
Concept: Ronald Sørensen
Execution: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, Sjoerd Oudman & Jonas Staal
Commissioned by Leefbaar Rotterdam (Right-wing Populist Party) in reaction to the initial proposal 'Monument for the Immigrant Worker' by Zeki Baran, member of the Rotterdam city council for the PvdA (Labour Party).
View animation here.
Plastering of the Dutch Constitution (Art. 1) (2007)
Concept: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei & Jonas Staal
Execution: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei
Location: Hofplein (square adjacent to the Parliament), The Hague (The Netherlands)
Preaching Sloganism
Concept: Harmen de Hoop & Jonas Staal
Execution: Harmen de Hoop
Locations: Amersfoort, Amsterdam, Leeuwarden, Zwolle (The Netherlands)
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