Context
This conversation features Robert Nilsson Mohammadi, Associate Senior Lecturer at Malmö University and theme leader for Urban Humanities at the Institute for Urban Research, in dialogue with Oana Nasui, a cultural researcher. Their discussion explores contested heritage, public monuments, anti-racist memory work, and the complexities of community-based artistic interventions in public spaces.
The Anti-Racist Monument in Malmö: Background and Genesis
Malmö emerges from Robert’s description as a city marked by profound contradictions and challenges. It is a post-industrial, post-migratory city where half the population is born outside Sweden, making it simultaneously Sweden’s youngest and poorest major city, with poverty levels that continue to increase year over year. This demographic reality exists alongside a problematic political discourse that has consistently linked multiculturalism with street violence and criminality, creating what Robert describes as a particular “social imaginary” around the city.
Against this backdrop, a racist serial killer operated in Malmö for seven years, systematically targeting racialized members of the population. The devastating aspect of this case was not only the violence itself but the institutional response: police and media consistently assumed that victims were involved in criminal networks simply because of how they were racialized. Even after the killer was apprehended and imprisoned, the racist motivation behind his crimes was never legally confronted as a hate crime. This absence of official acknowledgment of the racist nature of these attacks became a catalyst for the anti-racist monument project.
Robert’s Research Positionality and Methodology
Robert’s involvement with the anti-racist monument project reveals a thoughtful approach to balancing activism and scholarship. He was part of the group that initiated the project but made the deliberate decision to step back from active participation in order to research and document the process objectively. He did not participate in jury work or monument selection, choosing instead to create distance that would allow him to gather materials and document the processes as they unfolded.
This methodological choice reflects a recognition that the activist community involved was already powerful and effective, while the documentation and research dimension was lacking. By positioning himself as a researcher-observer rather than participant-activist, Robert could contribute something unique to the process. Additionally, he expanded his research to compare similar processes internationally, particularly in Germany, seeking to understand the comparative dimensions of how different urban contexts address racist violence and memory.
Urban Dynamics vs. National Memory Culture
One of Robert’s most significant theoretical contributions in this conversation is his observation that addressing racism, grievability, and reparative processes shows more similarities at the urban level across different nations than within national memory cultures. While we tend to think about addressing racism and its afterlives within the context of national memory culture, Robert argues that urban dynamics are actually more decisive in determining whether good memory culture and reparative processes will succeed or fail.
This insight reframes memory work as fundamentally an urban phenomenon, shaped by the specific dynamics of cities, their demographics, their economic conditions, and their political discourses. The comparison between Malmö and German cities reveals patterns that transcend national boundaries but are deeply rooted in the particular conditions of post-industrial, post-migratory urban environments.
Personal Stories Within Collective Memory
The conversation turns to the specific story of Kamal Masri, which illustrates the human dimension of the monument project. Kamal was shot in the head at age 16 while biking to football practice on the first day his father allowed him to go alone. He survived the attack but then faced a secondary victimization through media coverage that framed him as a criminal. His only prior “criminal activity” was driving friends on his moped without helmets, but media reporting made it seem far more serious.
The impact was so severe that Kamal and his mother fled to Lebanon, where they felt safer than in Malmö. When the serial killer was tried, Kamal’s shooting was brought up but the killer was not convicted for it at that time. The breakthrough came through an unexpected channel: Kamal’s older sister Manal, a stage producer and documentary filmmaker, began corresponding with the serial killer in prison. After an extended period of exchange, the killer confessed to shooting Kamal in one of his letters. Manal documented this entire process in her film “Letters to a Serial Killer.”
This confession led to the case being reopened, and the killer was ultimately convicted for the attack on Kamal. Kamal has since returned to Sweden and is now actively involved in the anti-racist monument process, transforming from victim to agent in the creation of public memory. His story illustrates how personal narratives become woven into collective memory work and how individuals can reclaim agency after experiencing racialized violence.
Master Narratives, Counter-Narratives, and the Coding of Spaces
A central theme in the conversation is the concept of master narratives and how they shape collective memory and public space. Oana introduces this concept early in the discussion, asking about how different stakeholders see the same story from different perspectives. Robert responds by developing the idea of “coding spaces” as a methodological approach to creating counter-narratives and alternative forms of common knowledge.
Robert’s concept of “coding” refers to the intentional creation of specific types of spaces through cultural and social practices that establish clear expectations and relationships. He illustrates this with the example of a theater director friend who initially failed in community theater work by trying to present himself as “just a common guy” who happened to be an artist. This approach didn’t resonate with the youth he wanted to work with. He only succeeded when he changed his approach to explicitly state his expertise: “I’m one of the best stage producers in Sweden, and now I want to work with you.”
This shift exemplifies the principle of coding. By establishing clear terms of what the relationship would offer and what it would demand, the director created a special type of space with particular expectations. As Robert explains, the coding communicates: “If you’re in this relationship or in this space, it will give you something special and it will expect something special from you.” This reciprocal understanding is what transforms an ordinary space into a coded space with particular meaning and possibilities.
Exhibitions as Technologies for Creating Common Knowledge
Robert describes his use of exhibitions not merely as displays of information but as “technologies for creating common knowledge.” This reframing of curatorial practice emphasizes the social and epistemological dimensions of exhibition-making. Exhibitions become spaces where collective understanding is generated through shared experience rather than individual consumption of presented facts.
This approach works particularly well in enclosed spaces where repeated visits by a community create what Robert describes as an “aggregation of experiences and knowledge.” The room itself becomes an archive, accumulating the traces of interactions, conversations, and shared learning that occur within it. Each return to the space builds upon previous experiences, creating layers of meaning that would not emerge from a single visit or from isolated engagement with exhibition materials.
Robert acknowledges that he has never attempted this approach in outdoor spaces and expresses curiosity about whether it could work in public environments. The challenge is that outdoor spaces lack the contained quality that allows a room to function as a collector of experiences. However, he suggests that community kitchens might provide a way to code outdoor spaces effectively, as they create both a practical function and a particular type of community gathering that could accumulate meaning over time.
Public Space: Contested Definitions and Legal Frameworks
Oana brings extensive practical experience to the conversation regarding the contradictions inherent in public space. Her work across Romania and Moldova has confronted fundamental questions: Who owns public space? Who has the right to intervene artistically? What constitutes legitimate use? The tension she identifies is particularly acute: public space is theoretically “ours,” belonging to everyone, yet any action within it requires authorization from administrative bodies.
These questions become even more complex when considering community-based artistic practice. If an intervention is genuinely community-based, emerging from and serving the community that inhabits a space, why should external authorization be required? Yet without some form of regulation, how do we adjudicate between competing claims to public space? The legal frameworks in different countries provide different answers to these questions, but the fundamental tension remains.
Oana also raises the question of artistic legitimacy: Does being an artist grant special privileges to intervene in public space? Is the appropriate response after an unauthorized intervention simply to apologize? These questions probe the relationship between artistic practice, legal frameworks, and community rights in ways that resist easy resolution.
Critical Spatial Practice: Beyond “Public Space”
In response to these questions about public space, Robert introduces Jane Rendell’s concept of “critical spatial practice” as an alternative framework. Rendell suggests abandoning the term “public space” altogether because the category of “public” is itself contested and unclear. Who constitutes “the public”? What differentiates “public” from “semi-public” spaces? These questions reveal that “public” may not be a useful analytical category.
Instead, “critical spatial practice” focuses attention on the qualities, possibilities, and relationships that different spaces enable. Rather than trying to define spaces by ownership categories or access rules, this framework asks what kinds of practices, encounters, and forms of knowledge different spaces make possible. It differentiates spaces based on their actual function and potential rather than their nominal designation.
This conceptual shift has practical implications for how we think about monuments, artistic interventions, and memory work in urban environments. Instead of asking whether a space is “public” and who has rights within it, we might ask: What kind of critical spatial practice does this space enable? What forms of encounter, memory, or collective knowledge-making does it support or prevent?
The Living, Evolving Nature of Monuments
Toward the end of the conversation, Oana articulates a crucial insight about the temporal dimension of monuments and public memory. Even after extensive processes involving all relevant stakeholders, carefully gathering community archives, and working to embody particular concepts or issues in material form, monuments continue to evolve. Communities that were not involved in the original process may respond with “this is not what I think.” Artistic interventions may be made on the monuments themselves. The monument continues to tell stories beyond what was originally intended to be embodied in it.
This observation challenges conventional thinking about monuments as fixed expressions of settled collective memory. Instead, monuments emerge from this discussion as ongoing sites of negotiation, interpretation, and contestation. They are not end points but rather focal points for continuing dialogue about memory, identity, and collective values.
The challenge Oana identifies is how to encode something within an art form while remaining open to the inevitable reinterpretation and evolution of meaning. How do you create something substantial enough to anchor memory while acknowledging that its meaning will continue to shift? This is perhaps the central paradox of any public memory work: the need for material permanence exists in tension with the fluidity of social memory and meaning-making.
Conclusion: Urban Humanities and Ongoing Questions
The conversation concludes with acknowledgment of the rich field of urban humanities as a framework for continuing to explore these questions. Robert’s work at the intersection of urban research and humanities scholarship provides tools for understanding how cities become sites for memory work, how urban dynamics shape possibilities for reparative processes, and how spaces can be coded to enable particular forms of collective knowledge and experience.
The questions that remain open at the end of the conversation are generative rather than frustrating. How can outdoor spaces be coded with the same intentionality as indoor spaces? What is the relationship between legal frameworks and community-based artistic practice? Who ultimately has authority over public memory and public space? How do we create monuments that can hold meaning over time while remaining open to reinterpretation? These questions do not have simple answers, but the conversation demonstrates sophisticated frameworks for continuing to engage with them in both theoretical and practical terms.
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Knowledge transfer discussion, within the project ”Nordic Insights: addressing cancel culture in public spaces through artistic dialogue and cultural innovation”. More about the project here
The “Nordic Insights: addressing cancel culture in public spaces through artistic dialogue and cultural innovation” project is implemented by the Formare Culturala platform from Romania. It is funded by the Nordic Culture Fund through the Globus Opstart+ program.
