Although Pedro and Paul did not talk about monuments/art as environmental activism, I still greatly enjoyed their presentation and the discussion we had in class on Friday. Something that I had never even thought about was the question of what space do you put the monument on? You have to consider the demographics of the area and who will be walking by that monument. There are also questions of ownership; what defines a space as public and do we have a right to place anything we want to in this public space? These are all things I have never even considered as I’ve walked by countless monuments or even other forms of artful activism, such as graffiti. One Robertson alumnus dedicated her summers to looking at graffiti and art festivals’ impact on local communities. I thought it was pretty rad: https://www.startstreetart.com/about
Another question that I thought was interesting was what makes something a monument? Like Dr. Gould said, you can really make anything a monument if you give meaning to it. There is a whole market around American monuments; people spend so much money going to see the Washington Monument and the Statue of Liberty! I wonder what causes something to become a significant monument, like those ones are.
One last thing that I thought was SUPER interesting was the Data Refuge project. I definitely want to learn more about digital activism, because I think it has the potential to be somme of the most influential forms of activism out there. It is not flashy and in our face like a monument, and it may not be as raucous-causing protests, but it sure does have an impact. To think that our entire history of climate change data could have been deleted and unrecoverable is absolutely mind-boggling! I might even go so far to say that these Penn students have been the greatest activists we have learned about in this class. They obstructed irreversible damage and changed the fate of climate change discourse forever — in a positive manner. They also made the private data public, which I think makes it even more activism-like as it puts important facts/statistic out there for people to come across. As a total digital-dummy and lover of protests, I never thought I would say that the digital activists take the cake, but I think it’s true!
