Colonial and Slavery Memorials for the Future

Abstract

We are living in an age of deconstructing history, realizing our past is not as black and white as we once thought it was. By slowly peeling off the different layers of the past, our historical awareness grows and we gain a broader perspective on what has actually happened. Movements such as Black Lives Matter have sharpened our lenses massively, which inevitably had impact on our perception on monuments and memorial architecture. In this history thesis we dive into the current scenery of monuments and memorials in Dutch public spaces, that refer to our colonial and slavery past. The present palette of statues, monumental buildings and memorial sites represent a distorted balance of these historical colonial narratives, since they are massively underrepresenting the dark side of the story from the slavery perspective. Monument Indië-Nederland is a great example of such a one-sided colonial reference, causing society to interfere and give voice to the shifting societal perspective on historical representation. However, the hidden design intentions of sculpturer Frits Van Hall reveal something surprising: the monument was actually intended to be adjusted overtime by removing and adding elements to the memorial site. He intended to give society the opportunity of slowly shifting the original meaning of ‘honoring former commander Van Heutsz’ into ‘celebrating the freedom of the East Indie colony’. There are also other memorial examples that emphasize additional perspectives and spatial flexibility. This inspires us to think of monuments as being more than just a ‘static’ object, but rather dynamic and flexible elements in our built environment that give space to add other perspectives to the narrative, and to be subject of societal change overtime. And so, we should be expanding the currently represented one-sided narratives with adding new perspectives to the monuments together with society. In this way, a variety of perspectives is being represented, without ignoring or denying our history. For that matter, these additions overtime will actually even enrichen the current memorial scenery, by also representing our changing societal perception on history over the years.