From the toppling and removal of statues to ongoing debates about contested objects, buildings and landscapes, the series reconsiders the design and construction of monuments in relation to wider processes and the structures of memorialisation that reify social configurations. Architecture cannot help but inscribe sets of ideas, beliefs, events and figures into the built environment and suture them into the daily experience of history.

Part of the traditional function of monuments is to resist the passage of time and the subsequent transformation in meaning inherent in any form. But social relations can change to the extent that actions are taken to dismantle their reified configurations. The recent resistance and violence enacted against monuments, from public statues to buildings and street names, reveals their inherently democratic nature. Monuments are representations of people; they are meant to be identified with. Yet not all monuments represent everyone, and in their exclusionary potential, they enact political violence.

When the ideological function of monuments expires, the formal properties of the reified structure are laid bare. Such instances are often met with calls for the monument’s removal and destruction. Yet other approaches are also common, such as profanation – returning it to the commons – and re-signification through the establishment of new rituals and performances to make it mean something ‘other’. Such strategies fall within an expanded and experimental approach to the practice of preservation.

Preservation starts from the way things are today, but fundamentally, designates what is worth keeping for tomorrow. As a discipline, preservation has significantly departed from Unesco’s conception of “world heritage”, giving rise to a wider understanding of the importance of local and immaterial forms of historical meaning. Monuments are not always built as such, but can accrue significance over time. All it can take to write history today is an act of recognition and, for better or worse, reification.