M-O-N-U-M-E-N-T-L-E-S-S moments – Utopia of figureless plinths

‘How can we reimagine spaces previously occupied by monuments?’ ‘M-O-N-U-M-E-N-T-L-E-S-S Moments – Utopia of Figureless Plinths’ is an invitation to respond to this question. I provoke myself, before I invite the readers, to think of monuments beyond fabricated narratives and political propaganda, corporate values, social sentiment, and rehearsed, rhetorical academic vocabulary. The thesis re-imagines the sites of monuments as transformed spaces for active public negotiation through images, interviews, and poems as conversations between seagulls. Monuments are visual symbols of establishment formed on certain truth values which disallow disruption and paralyse our ability to question their legitimacy and necessity. I intend to clear the space the monuments occupy in our minds first. This thesis carries out an artistic exercise using (for want of a better word) “poetry theory” to disrupt the normativity of the establishment, even the anti-establishment intellectual industry which in itself is an establishment now. With an unconventional structure, the thesis employs content, argument, research, references, the author’s voice, and the reader’s mind to initiate an emotional and intellectual response also about the predicaments of the artist in the art world. The goal is to join the forces of conceptual academic enquiries and an arsenal of artistic methods – poetic, visual and narrative. Instead of the prose form, I use the poetic form because it can hold more nuanced information, contexts, and opinions with the act of suggestion. In order to communicate from the point of view of inanimate objects, as well as non-speaking living beings I have had to create the soil for my writing roots to cling to. The Non-living are thus converted into the Living and Non-speaking into the Speaking. This set of poems emerges from or is rather based on the seagulls’ capacity to scan the world while perched or gathered on the empty plinth. These poems encourage meaning-making in many experiential and abstract ways. Through the combination of argumentative and analytical memoir making, my experience in this city and the university can be looked at as a contribution towards the flexibility of thinking and creating possibilities of new forms of attention and understanding. A poetic gesture may never seem enough and may not satisfy existing canons of research methodologies, but if I can provoke people to chime in with my repeated query “Are Questions That Dangerous?” in the following text, I would personally consider my thesis goal fulfilled