Context
This knowledge transfer conversation, within the project “Nordic Insights: addressing cancel culture in public spaces through artistic dialogue and cultural innovation”, features Rebecka Katz Thor, researcher and head of museum development at the Swedish Holocaust Museum, with experience at the Swedish Arts Council and Public Art Agency Sweden, in dialogue with Oana Nasui, cultural researcher.
Their discussion explores the concept of post-monuments – a new framework for understanding how contemporary monuments in Sweden address difficult heritage, moving beyond both traditional commemoration and the 1990s counter-monument approach.
The Post-Monument: A Conceptual Framework
The concept of post-monument emerged from two research projects: a three-year study on vulnerable memories – examining how difficult heritage can be addressed through contemporary monuments, museums and memorials in Sweden.
The theoretical framework draws on Marianne Hirsch’s work at Columbia University, specifically her concepts of postmemory and vulnerable time. In Hirsch’s usage, the prefix “post” does not simply mean “after” but signals an intrinsic connection to what came before – just as we cannot understand the postmodern without understanding the modern. Vulnerable time, as opposed to trauma, has no clear end: it remains open-ended. These concepts were brought into very concrete processes of monument-making in Sweden, where something different from both traditional monuments and 1990s counter-monuments appeared to be emerging.
Two Case Studies: Malmö and Gothenburg
The anti-racist monument in Malmö began in 2019 as an initiative by five local activists, responding to the case of Peter Mangs, a racist mass shooter who targeted people in the city for over a decade while police failed to recognize the racist pattern. The initiative quickly evolved from a memorial for specific victims into a broader anti-racist monument – a site for both remembrance and resistance. The municipality responded positively and funded the project, which will be inaugurated in spring 2026 after a seven-year process.
What distinguished this process was its elaborate pre-study phase. The city curators organized a public art exhibition titled “The Entire City is a Monument,” inviting six artists to create temporary works corresponding to the theme, alongside city walks and a program of public talks. Crucially, the Department of Education was involved from early on – the monument is conceived as a site where teachers bring children to discuss racism, making it explicitly future-oriented. The monument itself, called “Master Narratives,” takes the form of a bronze sculpture with spikes carrying a large stone, beneath which a buried box will hold children’s written experiences of racism.
The LGBTQI+ monument in Gothenburg followed a similar trajectory. The initiative came from the city’s LGBTQI+ advisory council, responding to the city’s violent history as what was colloquially known as “bögarklackarstaden” – the “gay-bashing city” – during the 1980s, a time when Gothenburg simultaneously had a thriving gay community and clubs that provoked violent reactions.
The monument, opened in November 2024 and created by artist Conekin, is called “The Glade.” It consists of three superimposed floor plans: the dance floor of a nearby gay nightclub, the kitchen of a radical lesbian collective from the 1970s, and a bedroom used as a cruising site in the early 20th century. A bronze outline traces the equivalent length of the first gay protest march in Gothenburg. The monument is surrounded by trees – evoking the parks where encounters happened – and features heated marble pillows shaped after photographs submitted by contemporary queer people. It functions as a stage: visitors can sit on it, stand on it, interact with it, which is very far from the traditional statue-sculpture paradigm.
Both monuments raise a fundamental question: what does it mean to commemorate someone or something that is not absent but remains a living presence in the city’s fabric? Normally, monuments mark absence – someone who died, something that was lost. Here, the communities being commemorated are very much alive and present, giving these monuments a double function of acknowledging painful history while celebrating current presence.
What Distinguishes Post-Monuments from Counter-Monuments
The 1990s concept of counter-monuments, developed notably by James E. Young, involved directly countering a specific phenomenon – such as the Gerz’s anti-fascist monument in Hamburg, which reacts upon fascism. Post-monuments share this critical orientation but operate differently. Racism, unlike fascism as a singular historical regime, functions across a spectrum from mass shooters to everyday microaggressions. Post-monuments are not simply “countering” one thing.
More importantly, post-monuments carry a celebratory dimension alongside their critical one. They offer a site not only for visibility and painfulness but also for pride, joy, struggle, and future-oriented identification. When schoolchildren with immigrant backgrounds are brought to the anti-racist monument in Malmö, the hope is that it becomes a site of recognition for them as well. This dual function – acknowledging suffering while celebrating resistance and presence – is a distinctive feature.
The distinction between public art and a monument also matters. Contemporary art fundamentally should not have a single designated purpose, whereas a monument always has a given framework. An anti-racist monument can mean many different things, but it is still supposed to be an anti-racist monument – not whatever the viewer happens to feel. Naming something a “monument” rather than a “public artwork” carries weight: it signals taking responsibility for history and claims that this work has to do with the society we are and want to be.
Sweden’s National Narrative and the Invisible Difficult Past
This research is deeply connected to the Swedish national self-image: a country of peace for 200 years, a moral superpower, with almost no colonies and no participation in World War II. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, the narrative was clear – Sweden simply had a “good past.”
A telling example emerged when a new monument in Malmö celebrating cabaret actors placed bronze shoes along a canal – bearing a striking resemblance to the Holocaust memorial on the Danube bank in Budapest. When this similarity was pointed out publicly, the interviewer from Swedish Public Radio responded that “we don’t see that because we don’t have a history of war in Sweden.” This “we” is deeply problematic, especially in Malmö, which has a very large immigrant population for whom war is not an abstraction.
At the Swedish Holocaust Museum, opened in 2022 – much later than most such museums, which were built in the 1990s and early 2000s – the persistent notion that the Holocaust happened to somebody else, somewhere else, remains a challenge. This despite Sweden being one of the few European countries that doubled its Jewish population after the Holocaust, meaning many families were directly affected.
As Robert Musil famously observed, nothing is as invisible as a monument in public space. Sweden’s royal statues are old and anonymous – nobody knows who these kings were. The post-monument processes represent arguably the first time Sweden has tried to grapple with a difficult past in public space, understood within the broader global context of Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Contested Monuments: No One-Size-Fits-All
The conversation turned to a crucial question for Romanian and Moldovan practitioners: what to do with monuments that were “just fine” five or ten years ago but are now contested? The discussion generated three instructive examples of different approaches.
In South Africa, after one of the Rhodes monuments was toppled and only the plinth remained, a street artist spray-painted the shadow of the monument on the ground. The monument was gone but its shadow persisted – a brilliant guerrilla intervention conveying that history doesn’t disappear when statues do. In Vienna, a monument was tilted – an elegant artistic gesture but arguably insufficient, offering the city too easy an answer: “we did something.” In Bristol, the Edward Colston statue, toppled during BLM protests and thrown in the harbor, was retrieved and placed in a museum lying on its back, with the protest graffiti preserved. A public survey asked Bristol residents what to do, and the majority chose to keep it in the museum in this form. The historian Tim Cole’s work on this case created a new context that includes the history of the toppling itself.
The key principle emerging: removing monuments and pretending the past didn’t happen is pointless. Adding a plaque next to a plaque and declaring the matter resolved is equally futile. The fundamental question must always be: how do you achieve recognition of a violent or difficult past? Each context demands a different answer, but closure should never be the goal.
The Monument as a Starting Point
Perhaps the most significant insight concerns temporality. A monument should not be considered a closure – “now we dealt with this, we can move on” – but rather a starting point. After inauguration, the real questions begin: How do we activate this site? Can we bring schoolchildren? Can it function as a stage? Both the Malmö and Gothenburg monuments are producing books as knowledge outcomes, continuing the learning process beyond the physical realization.
This approach – involving pre-studies, temporary artistic interventions, public programming, educational partnerships, and post-inauguration publications – represents a fundamentally different way of commissioning monuments. Artists participating in the pre-study phase are not competing to be selected for the final monument; they are contributing to a collective learning process, which shifts how artists understand their role.
Every monument carries three temporalities: the time when it was made, the time it commemorates, and the time of the encounter. We look at monuments from our contemporary gaze, but how they will be viewed in 10, 50, or 100 years is unknown. Monuments carry the idea of permanence, though they are never truly permanent – as Eastern Europe’s experience with Marx, Lenin and Stalin monuments powerfully demonstrates.
Heritage as Fluid, Not Fixed
Swedish heritage law defines cultural heritage as “aspects of the past which are useful or valuable in the present” – a definition that makes heritage inherently fluid and contemporary rather than fixed and eternal. Heritage is not just Stonehenge. It can be many more things, constantly reshaped by each generation’s gaze.
The Romanian perspective brought a complementary dimension: nearly 36 years after the revolution, the selection of what “deserves” to be called heritage remains contested. Buildings are demolished and only photographic memory survives; artworks may be stored in museum deposits and potentially reconsidered in 20 years. When something glorious is marked in public space, it becomes a source of pride and belonging. But accepting that one’s heritage is not glorious provokes a first reaction of refusal – nobody wants to see their grandparents as the bad guys.
This raises a final, open reflection: how do you place value on heritage from a contemporary perspective, knowing that your own contemporary viewpoint will itself become the past? Perhaps the answer lies in preserving and making visible the successive layers of contemporary approaches, so that future generations can see not only what was commemorated but how each era understood and contested its own heritage.
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Knowledge transfer discussion, within the project “Nordic Insights: addressing cancel culture in public spaces through artistic dialogue and cultural innovation”.
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.
