Time is on the Artist’s Side: On the Possible Futures of Monument-Making1 min read

Elia Vargas
  • What are the differences between monuments and public art? 
  • How can the future of monument making be more participatory and community-driven?
  • How does the built environment contribute to or erase collective memory?
  • What kind of cultural exchange is expressed through the design of public space?

In 2020, artist and designer Cheyenne Concepcion founded the New Monuments Taskforce — a conceptual art project guised as a fantastical municipal agency — in the San Francisco Bay Area to create a speculative project that provides “a counterpoint to the top-down narrative we were getting about monuments.” At the time, the Bay Area and the nation as a whole, were reckoning with the often racist history of public monuments while the Covid pandemic had obliterated shared environments. The use, purpose, and memorialization of public space was amidst a significant crisis. In this Signals podcast conversation, Concepcion, whose larger body of work is about cultural memory, describes the current state of the New Monuments Taskforce to Elia Vargas as a movement away from monuments to public art more broadly. What is the relationship of speculative thinking to civic activism? How are monuments erected? Who gets to be memorialized? What counts as a monument? What does intervening in that process look like? Does the future of monuments lie outside theState? Listen to Signals Episode 6 for a meandering, thoughtful, poetic, and critical conversation about monuments, place, and cultural memory.

Disappearing St. Malo, 2022 

Podcast Music Credits: systemritual (Elia Vargas and Nathan Blaz)

Image Credits: Audrey Melton, Bob Krasner

Dr. Elia Vargas is an artist and scholar working across multiple mediums, ranging from video and sound to writing and performance. His work is critical, speculative, ecological, energetic, and technocultural. It is engaged in an interdisciplinary approach with contemporary and historical experimental media, digital cultural, and feminist science studies. Vargas collaborates widely with artists, musicians, and institutions. He holds a PhD from UC Santa Cruz. He is currently a lecturer at CSU Monterey Bay and is co-founder of the SF Bay Area art and technology organization, the Living Room Light Exchange.