/news/municipalities-need-know-more-about-controversial-monuments
Municipalities do not know enough about the monuments and statues in their public spaces, and their historical awareness is insufficient. As a result, they respond on a merely ad hoc basis to increasingly vehement discussions. At national level too, registration of public cultural heritage is inadequate. In its Unstable Pedestals [Wankele sokkels] report on controversial monuments, the Academy offers advice as to how administrators, policymakers, and members of the public can deal with such monuments more effectively.
The report concerns monuments in public space that are linked to the Netherlands’ colonial past and to slavery (such as those commemorating the military officer J.P. Coen in Hoorn and the missionary Peerke Donders in Tilburg), and to wars and genocide (such as the Holocaust Names Monument in Amsterdam and the temporary Srebrenica Monument in The Hague). The Academy concludes that controversy regarding such monuments arises from a lack of understanding of history and imagery, location, ownership, and decision-making procedures.
Recommendations in the report
- Take account of the history of the monument itself; the reason why and when someone or something was portrayed; and how previous generations used to think about it. The Hoorn statue of J.P. Coen – an early-17th century governor-general of the Dutch East Indies – for example, was already controversial when it was erected in 1893.
- More attention needs to be paid to form, imagery and location, making use of the expertise of artists and art historians.
- Administrators have a responsibility to organise discussions with serious involvement of all relevant parties (local residents, relatives, pressure groups). A lot of opposition arises due to a lack of communication and information.
- Municipalities should develop a policy for the "memory landscape" of their area: which statues and monuments exist and which are lacking? Deciding who should or should not be commemorated by a statue or the name of a street is a delicate matter that may also exclude certain groups.
- The Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE) can provide increased support in the form of a properly maintained national register of monuments, linked to a database of images and links to other municipal websites.
What should be done with controversial monuments?
Various solutions are possible:
- leave the monument as it is – this doesn't usually work;
- provide context with explanatory signboards and QR codes – this has only a limited effect;
- rename the monument or give it a different function – this often erases part of history;
- move the monument to a museum – this is possible but it happens only rarely;
- demolish the monument – this means erasing a piece of history;
- a promising approach is conceptual renewal, with the monument being provided with a new context, such as critical framing, a contrasting image, or an artistic transformation.
Chair
Maria Grever, Emeritus Professor of Theory and Method of History and Historical Culture, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Members
- Ann Rigney, Professor of Comparative Literature, Utrecht University
- Paul van Geest, Professor of Church History, University of Tilburg
- Gert Oostindie, Professor of Colonial and Postcolonial History, University of Leiden, former director of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV)
- Hans van Houwelingen, visual artist
- Uğur Ümit Üngör, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Amsterdam, Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies
- Jennifer Tosch, founder of Black Heritage Tours in Amsterdam, Brussels and New York
- Harry Tupan, art historian, general director Drents Museum