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