Public Parking
A journal for storytelling, arguments, and discovery through tangential conversations.
Making of a monument: in conversation with Hannah Somers
Tuesday, May 10, 2022 | Nawang Tsomo
The last couple of years has seen an immense surge in the toppling of monuments of white European colonizers across the Americas. The monumentality of these long overdue take-downs is also met with mixed feelings, even for the communities who have experienced and continue to live with the atrocities of centuries of “new world building.” It goes without saying that the repair, the re-building, the re-imagination of world orders does not happen overnight. I am reminded of the many who go on living, resisting colonial figures well outside of their bronze bodies and into the aftermath of their fall. Much of the conversation in mainstream media focuses on the taking apart and breaking down—the theatricality—of colonial structures. What remains and what persists after the fact is seldom addressed.