In media res: Thoughts on Solidarity through Institutional Renaming, Monumentality, and Reenactment

December 28, 2020

Still from The Square, 2017 – ©Ruben Östlund, 2017

Workers remove an equestrian statue from a plaza in front of a museum. The statue is replaced by a neon-light square that metonymically represents a communal “safe space”. The above scene from Ruben Östlund’s The Square (2017) stresses the symbolic fall of monuments in relation to infrastructures of solidarity. Inspired by the role of performative acts in reshaping monumentality, this text considers the act of renaming an institution along with its infrastructural reframing.

In media res: Thoughts on Solidarity Through Institutional Renaming, Monumentality, and Reenactment

Still from The Square, 2017 – ©Ruben Östlund, 2017

Ioannis Andronikidis

is an Art historian, researcher and writer currently based in Greece. He graduated from the History and Archeology department of the Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, where his dissertation focused on Trauma as Means for Art Creation. He is a recent graduate of the Modern and Contemporary Art department of the Edinburgh Collage of Art, where he examined the intersections between documentary and video-essay practices, artistic autonomy, subjectivity reproduction and the commons, as seen in the practice of Forensic Architecture. His research includes lens-based practices, socially engaged art, contemporary political and critical theory, social movements, as well as twentieth and twenty-first-century literature and theatre. He is currently developing a research proposal around ‘politics of work and public space’ and writing a novel in Greek.

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