 Good morning, with a panel under the rubric of urban moves. And we're going to continue this afternoon with two panels, the first one under the rubric of political moves. I'll be introducing the speakers one at a time as they come up. Our first speaker is Constance Silver. Constance Silver is a fine arts and architectural conservator, with 35 years experience. She was educated at Marlboro College via Schifanoia, Italy, and Columbia University. And she's a proud graduate of the master's in historic preservation here. So we welcome you back. It's wonderful. She specializes in the analysis and treatment of mural paintings and decorative finishes and conservation planning. For 24 years, she was the president of Preserve Art, Inc., a pioneering woman-owned firm that carried out major projects in historic buildings in the United States and abroad, including the US Capitol Building, Wisconsin State Capitol, New York Supreme Court, French Cultural Institute of New York City, and the world's oldest intact mosque, Shebam, Kokobam, and Yemen. She's pioneered conservation treatments for decorative mud plaster finishes and rock art. And she's the author of several peer-reviewed papers. Today, she is going to be speaking about the relocation of the sanctuary walls and monumental mural painting of the Shia Dam synagogue. Please join me in welcoming Connie Silver. You can also go forward by hitting the space button. Let's get this going. Ah, there we are. Oh, thank you all for coming. I'm very sorry that my co-author, Rick Kirschner, could not come. I give him virtually all of the credit for putting together this lovely presentation, which we also gave to the American Institute for Conservation annual meeting in Montreal. On this project, Rick, who is the emeritus conservator of the Shellborn Museum in Burlington, Vermont, was really the supervising conservator, and I was really the practicing conservator. But in fact, I'd say we were kind of joined at the hip for this whole event of the mural project. I also want to thank, before I begin, our master carpenter on the project, whose name is Ray O'Connor. He's not only just a brilliant carpenter, but he was a wonderful person, and there wouldn't have been a project without him, because as this project progressed, as you'll see, it got more and more complicated. And without Ray, I don't know what we would have done. So why did it get so complicated as it progressed? Well, let me just go back to the presentation you're about to see. I spoke with Rick a couple of days ago, and my only complaint about this presentation is that it actually makes it look like we knew what we were doing as we did this project. In fact, I would have to say that we were all the crafts. We were pretty much making it up as we went along about 70% of the time. And colleagues, let me tell you, that's no way to do any kind of project, especially a major project. So why did we find ourselves in that predicament? Well, there really is a huge void of information on moving buildings and components of buildings. So I really thank you, Jorge, for spearheading this topic. It's something that I've been talking about for a long time as well. So what I'm gonna do is just run through the slides because time is limited and tell you about the project and be very honest about where we all had our nervous breakdowns. So what you're seeing here is, well, let me back up. In the late 19th century, small groups of Jewish immigrants came to Burlington, Vermont from Lithuania. And they actually recreated their Jewish village life in a little area called Little Jerusalem. They built three synagogues. And this one, the Hayadam Synagogue, really is virtually a replica of the very wonderful wood and eccentrically decorated and painted village synagogues of Lithuania. There were once hundreds. By the end of the Second World War, not one existed. They were all destroyed. It was a complete genocide of the Jewish population and of Jewish culture. The synagogues were destroyed, the Yashivas, the publishing companies. And that's how the only surviving painted Lithuanian synagogue ended up in Burlington, Vermont. What you're seeing here is the main mural of the sanctuary in 1986. Now, the synagogue was built around 1890. Let's try this. There it is. And in 1910, an artist from Lithuania Benzion Joseph Black was brought to Burlington, Vermont to decorate the interior of the synagogue. He came, he was brought over from Lithuania so that this particular Jewish population could have their familiar Jewish synagogue. And you can see it's a really interesting combination of sort of Art Nouveau and village painting. The building, the synagogue building does still exist today pretty much as a shell. But you can see that this is the sanctuary from the outside where the mural is. After the end of the Second World War, the congregation moved to a new synagogue, which is really the exact opposite of this sort of shtetl synagogue in Burlington. It was actually the first example of modernism in Burlington. And renamed themselves Ohave Zadek. The building itself was sold, the synagogue building, and was repurposed. And at that time, tragically, it pretty much was gutted. And yet the mural painting remained. And at one point it was a carpet warehouse. And I'm told that you could go in and buy a remnant of a carpet with this giant mural of the 10 commandments looming over you as you picture your carpet. So in 1986, the building was repurposed again. It was sold to a family who decided to turn it into apartments because it's very close to the University of Vermont. And they saw, wow, a market, students. And the Ohave Zadek successor synagogue had always had its eye on trying to save the mural. And at this point, I really have to credit Aaron Goldberg of Ohave Zadek. I think as it says in the book of Isaiah, Isaiah says to the king of the Israelites, place a watcher on the wall. And Mr. Goldberg was certainly the watcher on the wall for the mural. And at that point in 1986, they were very concerned about trying to remove the mural because it was very clear, once you're gonna rent to undergraduates, you can't leave this exposed. It wasn't possible to do anything. So an attempt was made to protect the mural by putting it behind a false wall with insulation. Unfortunately, just bad luck. The mural was already starting to deteriorate because as I learned subsequently, it was not very well made. But by putting it behind the wall, it changed the environmental conditions. And by the year 2010, when the building was sold a second time, also to somebody who wanted to use it as apartments, this buyer was approached by the congregation of Ohave Zadek because this time the congregation really didn't want to remove the mural. This owner said, fine, you can do what you want with my building, just put it back the way it was. Pretty amazing. So an attempt, so the mural was then exposed. And that was around 2010. And you can see how poor the condition was. It had pretty much, the paint had been pretty much reduced to hundreds of thousands of little curling, detached fish scales. And I've worked on some pretty damaged works of art over the last 35 years, but this was pretty much about as bad as it gets. And this gives you some sense also of the deterioration. Here it is 1986, and then here it is by about 2010. So this is what it looked like after it was uncovered. And you have to understand that really the whole painted surface was just fragmenting. Plus we then learned pretty quickly that the mural had just been covered with multiple layers of old varnish and grime. So it was in very bad shape. I was brought in as the conservator to first of all stabilize the paintings. Well there I am working on it. And I also suspected at the time that the plaster itself was really very weak. In fact, I really suspected that the entire structure of the mural and the building was pretty shabby to begin with and that had become very desiccated and brittle. Our analyses by our conservation scientist, Susan Buck, did confirm that the plaster was weak and that there were multiple layers of earlier unstable paint. And so the artist, as I am back, had already painted on an unstable layer. Layer. And part of the challenge of really conserving the paint was simultaneously I had to conserve the and strengthen the underlier layers. So I developed a technique and I don't think we need to go into the details it worked. I have used this technique before. It's using a product called Beva D8. And it's very low tech, but what you can see here is it works. This shows you how bad it is. Here's untreated and then here's the treated area. And so what you can see here is this is what it looks like before it's treated. This is what it looks like more or less after it's treated. So we could stabilize the mural. And this is the complexity of the structure of the mural as defined by Susan Buck using microscopy of samples. The mural was really covered in all kinds of horrible discoloring coatings. And here's a cleaning test. Here it is uncleaned and here's the final test. So what is really a kind of a cream color kind of starts out as looking like a kind of a mustard color. So we at that point, the client suddenly had to be informed that this was gonna be a major art conservation project as well as a moving project because of the multiple layers of disfiguring coatings. So here it is 1986 and then here is what it looked like after the first cleaning that I carried out in situ because there were a number of reasons why this initial cleaning was done. One of them just being that I had to use solvents and the solvent load was really so tremendous that this wasn't a project that you could really do after the mural was relocated to Ohavi Zidek synagogue, which was its ultimate destination. And you can just really see how extraordinary this the color sense is in the mural and the tromploi. So this does give you a basic sense of everybody who had to be involved in the project. And this is really working with a lot of different skills and trades and everybody has to be able to work together. And again, I really have to credit Ray O'Connor. At one point in his career, he had been the building inspector in Burlington. So he knew everybody, he knew everybody who, the best people and they all wanted to work with him, which says a lot. So how did we actually end up doing the work? Well, one of the issues that came up was the worst winter, I mean, Burlington is known for bad winters, but this was one of the worst winters in years. It was really terrible and really, running at five below zero Fahrenheit. So what we really had to do, our goal was that we had to cut away this entire area where the mural is located, move it as a structural unit to the 1950s synagogue. And when you really start going through all the steps, you really see how complicated it gets. So the back of the outer cladding here is slate, decorative slate, and I'm just gonna keep going through this, what we actually had to do was to build a building around the building so that we could really work inside. And this is actually detaching areas of the inscription, part of the Hebrew inscription at the base of the mural. At one point, we realized that the plaster was really terrible. I had to ask Norman Wise to come up and help us on a kind of an emergency basis. This was very complex plaster restoration that had to be done pretty much at the last minute. We found out that the wood structure was not very well attached. This all had to be fixed by ray. Then I really decided that we just weren't keeping, we weren't gonna be keeping the mural and the structure rigid enough to survive the move. So I really insisted that we cover the entire surface of the mural in something called cyclodotocaine, which had to be specially manufactured for us in Stuttgart, Germany, and then air lifted to us at the last minute. It's a very interesting material that solidifies and then evaporates away. So here is the day of the move and how did we do the move? Well, the entire structure had to be excised and then a metal cage built for it. Here it is ready for the move. We're doing the cage, supported from the front. Here is the new synagogue. It's going into the lobby of the new synagogue. And they had to build an access to the new synagogue. The crane came, took the top of the new structure off, and then moved the caged mural, which had been excised and cut away from the building with a crane, put on a truck, and this gives you some idea of the complexity of the whole support system. And then the top was put back on the building so that the building could be repaired. The mural was moved about a mile in the truck. Last minute realized had to build a little access road in front of the synagogue. There we are acting like, oh, this was easy. That's Rick on the left of me going, yeah, no, no, we didn't suffer at all. Here it is being moved into the synagogue and it was actually done by manpower because we only had about under an inch of clearance all the way around. And the design, there's the young engineer looking very relieved. And yeah, so here it is now in the lobby, being hoisted up into the lobby of the, oh, Javi's a dex synagogue. There it is in place and it was hoisted up by hand and in such a way that it can be removed in the future if there is a better way to display it. And you see here the cyclodotocaine facing which evaporates off. And here is the sequence of evaporation. It's a wonder material for conservation. Goes away, leaves, no residue. So here it is in its damaged state from the damage that it had sustained while it was behind the false wall. And this gives you a sense of how it's in place and the sort of infrastructure, the supports that had to be built to keep it in place up there. The next step is actually to do the final restoration which will entail final cleaning and in painting of the areas of loss. And we're doing a study for that now and this just shows how it will be. Once it is, this is a treated area or an area under treatment compared to the still soiled, untreated and un-in-painted area. This just shows you how it was, same area now, how it is but without the in-painting of the loss. So you can see how bad the surface was. And I will tell you truthfully that when we did the move we didn't lose a flake. It was really very, very successful. So here it is as it looks right now in the lobby of Ojavi Zidek. And the next phase will be to do the final cosmetic restoration treatment. And well, that's me still tinkering with the mural. And these are the people who we really, really want to acknowledge, especially at Ojavi Zidek's synagogue for raising the money and taking on such a scary project. Thank you very much. Our next speaker is Dean Sully, Senior Lecturer in Conservation at University College London Institute of Archaeology where he coordinates the Master of Science in Conservation for Archaeology and Museums. The program teaches a values-based approach to the conservation process and prepares students for entry in the conservation profession on graduation. He joined UCL in 2000 after studying conservation at UCL and working as a conservator for the National Heritage Board of Singapore. The Museum of London, the British Museum and Monmouthshire District Council Museum Service. Since 2001, as the National Trust Conservation Advisor for Archaeological Artifacts, he's been involved with the conservation of the Himnemiehe, the Maori Meeting House at Clendon Park. Really fascinating building which was taken by the Governor of New Zealand as a sort of souvenir back to his home in Clendon Park. And which led, Professor Sully, to the publication Decolonizing Conservation in 2007 and the development of a peoples-based approach to heritage conservation. He's also a co-coordinator, I'm sorry, no, a co-coordinator of the Curating the City Research Cluster in the Center for Critical Heritage Studies and his research examines conservation as a critical heritage practice. This advocates for a shift in conservation practice from a specialist technical service aimed at preserving heritage to an innovative process in the creation of the world. This enables heritage conservation to address the social issues of the present and making a human future rather than merely seeking to fix the past. He investigates new understandings of conservation practice by prioritizing the relationships between people, places and objects as a primary responsibility of conserving heritage. Dean is going to be speaking today with the title of Situating the Hindmihi as a Maori Space and Heritage Place. Join me in welcoming him. Thank you very much for that long and detailed introduction. You probably said more than I'm gonna say in my presentation. It's a great privilege for me to be here and talk to you about probably what's one of my most favorite things in the world, Hindmihi, the Maori Meeting House at Clandon Park. I've entitled this Situating Hindmihi as a Maori Space and a Heritage Place really to sort of challenge some of the ideas of geographic location as the thing that we're moving here and how heritage itself is a process of transition of the contextual state as well as the physical state and the temporal state of heritage objects in which we're engaged. And I want to start with this quote from Olivier. We cannot restore it because it never existed in the form we encounter it in our present. All we can do is create something that is meaningful for us now. So any attempt to encounter something the past in its own present is flawed. We can only do that in relation to our own present. And I want to talk about two case studies really, the Hindmihi case study which is a personal, political, but professional project for me. And the coal bar, which is purely personal. And I wanted to kind of step outside of the heritage world, if you like, and think about how people receive the work that we do in transforming heritage places. And I feel myself very much as a kind of a consumer of a moved building in that case. And hopefully I'll get on to sort of tell you a little bit. I'm not going to focus too much on the case studies themselves, unfortunately. So I hope you don't mind if I think about more of the conceptual changes that have happened for me as a result of being involved in these case studies. I'm being a bit selfish there, I know. The out of place, out of time, becomes anything that's not in the here and now. So the present moment of the past is all that we can acknowledge the reality of our past. And we hear a lot about paradigm shifts and academics are kind of really greedy to gain ownership of paradigm shifts in the work that they do. But the kind of the work that I do is more about how these things are applied in terms of practice. And even though I'm going to talk about the technical aspects of the work that I do as a conservator, I see these as necessary tools. So the intellectual tools that we need to do our job are equally important. And I'll talk about what the authorised heritage discourse is. For some of you that will be very familiar, but for those of you who don't work within a heritage context all the time, not so familiar. So the transformation of Henomehi is between the past and the present and between a space and a place. And I'll talk about that, what that actually means for me a little bit. But this is the process that I've gone through working with Henomehi over the past 15 years. It's to theorise conservation within a colonial and post-colonial response and utilising tools like decolonisation methodologies, transcultural practice and participatory mechanisms. And these are used to kind of challenge the boundaries of the authorised heritage discourse, the established conservation theory and practice. And this has meant shifting from a focus on maintaining material authenticity of heritage places towards curating active things and spaces with which contemporary cultural practice can be performed. So this idea of curating active sites rather than mitigating change in material sites becomes the focus for what we're terming critical conservation practice. So the authorised heritage discourse, if it's unfamiliar to you, comes from Laura Jane Smith's work, which is the prevailing intellectual, professional, political and legislative framework in which heritage practice operates. So these are the justifying narratives, the tools, the ideas, the concepts that we use in order to claim authority over the work that we do. And Rodney Harrison, I think, came to the Fitch Colloquium last year, who's based at UCL, has been instrumental in developing these ideas of critical heritage approaches. So the authorised heritage practice is the application of those authorised heritage discourses, those established ideas. The reasons why students come on my course to be trained to be conservators is that it authorises them within a specific discipline to carry out proper practice. An authorised conservation practice critically can be thought of a method of purification. So it essentialises the heritage in a division between the past and the present, separates heritage from the nexus of connections that are a mesh culture in the everyday lives of people. And it replaces it with relationships that are proper for heritage objects and places. This is sort of a tautology, if you like. We separate things in order to gain control over looking after them. We create the problem and then heritage professionals provide the solution. So it's good for us because we get employed to do it, but maybe not so good for everybody else. I'm just thinking in terms of this transition between space and place. So dessertos are playing with these ideas. So place is not a kind of geographic location, but it's a terrain that is administered with the power to authorise what is proper and what is not proper. So these administrative boundaries. So a heritage place is the location in which the heritage discourse takes place. It's a field of operation in which heritage making takes place in time and space. And this is the kind of conventional idea of time passing in conservation. So there's a golden past and there's a rupture between that past and our present. And therefore we have to look after and care for those things in the past because they're non reproducible and valuable to us. So we have to do our bit for future generations by preserving them. So that's a mitigation strategy that we impose. But a space is something which is the coming together of the world as a moment in the present. This is a fluid process in flux. And this relates to more an idea of continuity and I realise I give the impression that this is sort of a linear process. It's not a linear process. It's not a teleology here. It's a sort of circular process cyclical up and down. Time doesn't move in one direction. But the idea of culture adapting to its circumstances and therefore conservation being more about adaptation than it is about mitigation. It's being about what's permissible rather than what's prohibited. And as a kind of a framework, this is the framework that we use at UCL to kind of understand this. And Erica's work around values based conservation has been really important. That's why I'm proud to define the work that we do at UCL as a values based process. But if you just look at the different types of conservation that I'm framing, something that focuses on the materials, the physical properties of heritage, something that focuses on heritage values or cultural significance, and something that focuses on community values. So framing these within a slightly different focus. It's not necessarily an evolution. It's not one replacing the other, but it's expanding what's possible within the constraints of an authorised heritage discourse. Each of these have their own kind of properties based on the international conventions and legislative frameworks. But just to highlight one which probably is the most dramatic in terms of our approach to the physical remains of the past, is the different focus and priorities that are given to the material heritage and the contemporary needs of people. So in a material based approach, we're likely to value the welfare of material heritage over that of contemporary needs of people. In a values based approach, the welfare of material heritage is balanced with the contemporary needs of stakeholders, but still has a priority. And then what I'm proposing in terms of a people based conservation approach is the welfare of contemporary communities take precedent over material heritage. Now that conflicts with some kind of ideas of universal value and sustainable development, but is consistent with ideas of human rights, which don't acknowledge the rights of future generations, only those of contemporary generations. So as a definition of conservation, what does that mean? Well conservation as the careful management of changes is something that certainly the National Trust uses to define what it does. It's not stopping things happening, but it's managing how those changes occur. Some people prefer the careful management of continuity to reflect that idea of a progressive process. But the term that we're using more and more is curating change. And this is problematic for my museum colleagues who define themselves as curators or conservators separately, but I'm aware that conservation as a concept within heritage broadly has been utilized in a number of different fields. So I think that idea of curating, which is about assembling things in the present, it's not necessarily about managing them in a linear fashion, it's about assembling certain aspects of the world that enable people to make their own future worlds. And in doing so, we make our world and we make ourselves in that world. So the focus of conservation for me is about temporality. It's the continuous changes that translate things from the past into newly fabricated places and objects in the present. And this is something that Jorge has written about himself. So we're not preserving the past, we're not perpetuating it by preserving it, but we're transforming it. So that allows me to get to my case study and talk a little bit about this because all of those approaches, that transformation from a material focus to a people's based focus occurs for me in relation to this particular project. And this is the geographical relocation of Henemeke from for those of you who don't know where New Zealand is down in the Southern Pacific Ocean and this is the North Island here and this site just outside Rotorua on the North Island is a small village called Tawarawa which where in 1880 this beautiful building, Henemeke, was constructed. And then in 1892, as Jorge mentioned, that Lord Onslow transported 23 carvings which constitute the building from Tawarawa to the Klandon estate just to the Southwest of London. And for those of you who don't know where Britain is, that's us floating off the coast of Europe heading more towards you I would think. And this is what Henemeke looks like at Klandon Park today. So we can, we're very lucky archivally we have lots of information about Henemeke because when Henemeke was set up in 1880s it wasn't in some kind of primitive in Maori tribal backwater. Henemeke was an international tourist destination, one of the wonders of the world, the volcanic landscape in Rotorua and Victorian tourists would stop off in this particular area and Henemeke was constructed to receive people, visitors at that time. In 1886, so just six short years after Henemeke was constructed there was a devastating earthquake of that volcanic landscape which led to the decimation of the area and the people. And that allowed Lord Onslow to salvage and protect Henemeke because she wasn't being looked after, she had been abandoned. And that's the narrative from a sort of a Western conservation perspective. From a Maori perspective it was that Henemeke was left alone out of respect because people had died there and it was a burial ground and therefore tapu rather than as something that could be managed and maintained. So the life of Henemeke in the 20th century at Klandon Park, going through many of the kind of travails that Britain during the 20th century went through in terms of decline of country estates, loss of colonial powers. Till in 1956 the National Trust, which is the largest UK charity in Britain and in Europe I think, took over and then has managed Klandon Park for the Palladian mansion rather than Henemeke ever since. And then in 2015 a devastating fire of the Palladian mansion took place which from my point of view was fortunate that Henemeke wasn't damaged. But it has led in the past two years to significant changes which have occurred with Henemeke. So you can see us here deconstructing Henemeke's carvings and removing them to storage. So this is my chronology. These are selective place events which create some kind of chronological narrative but they're self-selecting. It's not a truth about Henemeke but the things I'd like to point out really from her beginnings in 1880 is this period which is 2004 to 2010, which was a values-based consultation that took place between the National Trust and Henemeke's people, which led to a failed funding bid in 2010 so we didn't actually do the work and which has resulted in 2017 where we have very high level international negotiations about the repatriation of Henemeke back to New Zealand. So full circle, if you like, that idea that Henemeke is now going back to her people and I'll probably try and explain why. So for the National Trust, this has been a period in which they've tried to understand a Maori worldview on a Maori building and they've done that because in Britain, not only do we have the source community connections with the people in New Zealand, so the Nati Henemeke tribe are connected with Henemeke. It doesn't matter where Henemeke is, it's like being related to your grandmother. Just because your grandmother lives in a different country doesn't mean that you don't have any responsibility for her or relationship with her. So the responsibility of the source community in using endures and they invest in Henemeke at Clandon Park or wherever else she would be. But there's also the British public. There's a range of different organisations, the Onslo family, the National Trust, people who have been involved in Henemeke which are amalgamated into what we call Henemeke's people. So these are the heritage community, an object-centred community, if you like, that come together as a result of activities around heritage. And then there's the extraordinarily large Maori diaspora in UK. So we have a resident Maori community, 8,000 Maori live in London and have adopted Henemeke as their own meeting house. And so that enables the performance of a Maori world to take place. As a result of the consultation, we narrowed it down in terms of getting specific guidance about what the focus of our conservation responsibilities would be. And this was the consensus view to redevelop Henemeke which is not a kind of restoration, it's not a conservation approach, it's a development approach in which architecturally Henemeke is significantly altered into a new state. So not returning her to something she was but adding to her in order to add to her ability to perform as meeting houses would in New Zealand with the necessary facilities. So I would advocate, this is focusing on the aspirations of Henemeke's people to design a conservation response. And what does people's pace conservation look like? Well, we've got our own cross-sections too. These are our paint cross-sections which allowed us to kind of define Henemeke's designs at different periods. So this is the earliest one that we could come up to, quite bright colors. And I just draw your attention to this large canvas which was part of our capacity building activities over a number of years we worked with the community about their relationship with Henemeke. And we set up a painting by numbers for all of you who are old enough probably. This is where you have a design with numbers written in the different designs and then paint pots with numbers on them and you paint number one where it says number one. So this is our kind of information gathering planning process. And this is what we would anticipate from an expert-driven, linear closed expert process, say in a values-based conservation process, that what we expect to happen happens. So the colors are painted within the lines, the right colors are painted within the lines. So we expect the outcome to be very similar from our expectations at the beginning of the project. This is actually what happened when we did, we are painting by numbers activity at one of the community events. You can see that the paint hasn't stayed between the lines and the colors are slightly different. No less beautiful, but it's different from the expectation. So the outcomes of engaging with people produce less predictable outcomes. That's problematic within a kind of unauthorized heritage process and a funding process which expects you to do what you say you're going to do. And I'll just very briefly cover my personal response to the movement of a building. And this is, I was lucky enough to work in Singapore for several years and for those of you who don't know where Singapore is, it's at the Southern Peninsula of Southeast Asia. And this is Singapore here. And this is the location of the cold bar. So this is a cold bar, it's an eating and drinking place. But a kind of historic one if you like because it's associated with the British occupation. And this is where we used to live when I was in Singapore, a green grassy area where people would go to enjoy themselves. After 2000 it was slated as a development of a science park and the development of this road meant the relocation of the cold bar from, it's a five minute walk, so probably about 250 meters down the road to another location. Now I left Singapore in 2000, but when we lived there, the cold bar was a very important social place. It's where we used to walk the dog, where visitors would come, we'd stop and we'd have a drink in the hot zone. And I hadn't returned for 17 years. So when we returned in 17 years, I was rather anxious about finding this relocated building and what it'd actually be like. But actually the experience was really pleasurable. So the experience that I had was very similar to my memory of that place. But interestingly, when I think about it, well, it was a transition, the presence of the cold bar was there for me in my everyday life. So I have a print of this cafe in my flat in London. On the internet when I was looking to find old images of cold bar, it was very difficult because when people are interested in the food or the drink, they're not interested whether they're showing the building of 20 years ago, 10 years ago, or contemporary buildings. It's the cold bar for them. And this is the passing of time. When I was in Singapore as a younger man with my younger son and a previous dog, my son's now 17. The Labrador has been replaced in our lives. So the Labrador-sized hole has been replaced. And this is how time moves on, not by preserving in aspect, but allowing things to evolve and grow and therefore for things to die. And what was special about this experience is that the place, the people, the menu had all remained. And that was the important thing. It was the activity of the building which allowed me to reconnect with that building. So just finally, some conclusions. So heritage is a resource for the people we serve rather than a resource for us. And sometimes because we're inside the heritage world, it's difficult for us to remember that. But this reflects the ability of heritage to contribute to sustainable development, human rights, diversity, equity, peace and security, which are UNESCO-driven goals. So unfortunately, we won't have your support in that process. And then we ask people what they want. So rather than assuming that we know what they need, and there's a new people-centered approach to nature and culture conservation, which is a UNESCO again, so I'm sorry you're not invited, but ICAMOS, ICROM and IUCN that are driving this process. And that forces us to look for diverse methods to expand possibilities rather than prescriptive methods that restrict our opportunities. And conservation as being adaptive, the response is to change, not constraints to how the future flows from the present. So rather than look at origins and mitigation, we look at destinations and adaptation. And then this, the most difficult question, probably for us all to solve today, but should we try? Maybe we won't. Is how to develop effective living spaces within the conservative constraints of preserving what was there before, rather than creating something that is totally new? Thank you. Thank you. Our next speaker is our very own Mabel Wilson, professor here at GSAPP. She is also appointed as a senior fellow at the Institute for Research in African American Studies in Koderex Global Africa Lab. Her design and scholarly research investigate space, politics and cultural memory in black America, race and modern architecture, new technologies in the social production of space, and visual culture and contemporary art, film and new media. Her transdisciplinary practice, studio and, has been a competition finalist for the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture with Dilsko Fidio and Remfro. And was recently selected to complete the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers with Halloran Yoon at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, about which I'm sure all of you have heard a great deal over the last few months, because that is of course the elephant in the room, which is all the debates that we've been having in this country about the relocation of monuments in Charlottesville and other places around this country. She is a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture, YBYA, an advocacy project to educate the architectural profession about the problems of globalization and labor. In 2011, she was honored as a United States artist, Ford Fellow in Architecture and Design and received awards from Getty Research Institute, New York State Council of the Arts and I.D. Magazine. She is the author of Negro Building, Black Americans in the World Affairs and Museums, 2012, and is currently developing the manuscript, Building Race and Nation, How Slavery Influenced Antebellum American Civic Architecture. Today, she will be speaking on the last stand of the lost cause. Please join me in welcoming Mabel Wilson. I'm actually not gonna be talking about the last stand of the lost cause, but it's related and we can maybe talk a little bit about that in the Q and A and yeah, in this kind of question of moving on moving monuments. But I wanted to sort of talk instead a little bit maybe about the kind of problematics of how we think about history, culture, and also the public sphere. And I think that on moving monuments asks us to consider how the relocation of monuments, buildings has been a part of the modern preservation practice since the 19th century. But I think it also assumes that we understand the concept and I'm gonna talk specifically about monuments and I'm wearing the hat of a historian here. I'm not a preservationist, conservationist, but an architect and historian so I thought I would speak to you in my historian voice. So it also presumes that we understand that the concept of monument references a construct that was intended to be in situ in perpetuity. Now 19th century practices of monument building and this refers to the Lee, what I'm gonna say now, particularly the project of erecting civil war monuments by the victorious grand army of the republic and the vanquished United Daughters of the Confederacy in the post-reconstruction era and later, I think demonstrates the power enacted in symbolically marking territories, whether they be with memorials, monuments, or buildings. I think the recent fiery debates and now deadly protests around the removal of Confederate monuments around the United States raises important questions about the relocation of monuments, for instance, who and what they honor. So thinking about what that might mean, both in the past and in our current moment and what criteria should be used to evaluate their past, current, and also future status. Now this past Monday evening, I had the pleasure of joining a lively panel at the historic Great Hall at Cooper Union on this timely topic. One of my fellow panelists, art historian, Michelle Bogart has argued that moving monuments diminishes their historical significance and destroys the aesthetic intent of the artist and all of those involved. She's very, very, very fierce about this position and it's an interesting one. I thought Michelle deployed the sanctity of artistic intent as a bulwark against removal. This is certainly one criteria to consider, however it presumes that Americans' public spheres possess a sacred timelessness and transcendence that is beyond politics. But a scholar, Roslin Deutsch reminded us in the mid-1990s, public space is a political space and also a space of contestation. Deutsch also debunks aesthetic criteria as one of those that actually works to veil the social inequalities that should be seen and debated in the public sphere of politics. So my presentation this afternoon, now called What is the Fourth of July, takes up the question, what is one's relationship to the public realm? What if one's relationship to the public realm was not predicated on its occupation but constant mobility? What happens then to monumentality to the representation of history culture in America's public spaces, which for black Americans was not yet and some would still argue not yet truly public. This for the purpose of this celebration is the Fourth of July. It is the birthday of your national independence and your political freedom. Began the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass in an 1852 speech in Rochester, New York about the promise of liberty and the wake of its absence, slavery. Douglass also asks what to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer a day that reveals to him more than all other days in the year the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. Born enslaved in 1818, Douglass lived to see the end of slavery and the granting of the full rights of citizenship to former slaves by the time he passed away in 1895. Douglass was also keenly aware of the potential of photography to circulate his image to every nook and corner of the nation in order to dispel degrading stereotypes of black men and women that circulated widely. A former slave, Douglass's tiring activism before, during and after the Civil War made him both a celebrated and reviled figure depending on what region of the nation one traveled. He however, regardless, was a widely recognized figure because of these numerous engravings and photographs that had been produced of him. Now Douglass was keenly aware of the possibilities of the new technology of photography and gave several lectures on the topic. In 1861, Douglass delivered a lecture titled Pictures and Progress where he argued that photography could depict the black man as he really was rather than how whites imagined him to be. Referencing the degrading and exaggerated depictions of dancing coons, mammies, bogeymen, and hot and tots that often appeared in print media, on products, and at entertainment venues. There was even a movement amongst white residents in the South beginning around the 50th anniversary of emancipation to erect a large black mammy monument on the National Mall, an homage to the Southern institution lost after the Civil War. But Douglass, at the time of his life, saw the tool of photography as a powerful medium of self-representation, observing that, quote, men of all conditions may see themselves as others see them. What was once an exclusive luxury of the rich and great is now within the reach of all, end quote. So he's thinking about paintings, he's thinking about statuary, when he says that all of a sudden this is accessible to everyone. So what Douglass astutely recognized as somewhat later W.E.B. Du Bois would as well was that these new technologies would be accessible by what is becoming known as the masses, the growing population of cities that were being linked via telegraphic technologies. Through photography, Douglass' celebrity circulated on a monumental scale with many black Americans purchasing pictures of Douglass to hang in homes and businesses. So what interests me about this kind of question of photography and the question of African American memory is precisely because of Jim Crow segregation, because you couldn't claim space to build, the photography became a means by which those histories become basically preserved and accessed for memory. So upon his death in 1895, residents of Rochester, New York, the town from where Douglass had published the anti-slavery newspaper The North Star for several years and also where he made that speech erected a monument to the great orator, publisher, and activist. This monument, an eight foot tall likeness by sculptor Sidney W. Edwards, unveiled in 1899, stood for many years in one of the city's main public spaces in front of the New York Central Rail Station. Now, Douglass' figure circulated in other forms on buildings in exhibitions. But all of these in fact were temporary ones. Instead of being cast in bronze on a granite pedestal, materials of permanence and perpetuities, these representations of the great abolitionists were temporary, a consequence of black Americans being all but exiled from the mainstream public spaces around the country. Douglass appeared on the pediment of the first Negro building, designed by white New York architect Bradford Gilbert for the Atlanta Cotton States in international exposition in 1895. The exposition is best known as the national venue where a young Negro industrial training school head named Booker T. Washington delivered his famous Atlanta compromise speech. Washington, also known as the Sage of Tuskegee, rocketed to national prominence once held by the recently deceased Douglass by advising his race to continue to dutifully labor for their white employers to be accommodating to the rising animosity and vengeance from their fellow white citizens. And also the fellow white citizens. Cast in white staff, Douglass' borrally figure in the pediment represented the future of the race to be learned and respectable. Now, Douglass' robust visage was juxtaposed next to an unkept Mammy figure signifying the history of the race as feminized, illiterate, and disempowered. Once it's content, once the Negro building's content of machine engines, needle point samples, and other evidence of industrial training had been shipped from Southern schools and association and all of these things were gathered together and then shipped back to their various owners, the 10,000 square foot Negro building was torn down at the close of the fair in 1896. So the building, I argue in my book Negro building was only built precisely because it could be temporary and wasn't making a sort of stake or claim in the mainstream public sphere, public spaces of the city. Now in their award-winning American Negro exhibit at Paris' Exposition Universale in 1900, T.J. Callaway and W.B. Du Bois who organized this exhibition included an interesting enough a maquette of the Douglass monument among the various books, patents, photographs, and sociological studies that represented the progress of black life in the United States and this was a direct follow-up to what had been collected in the Negro building but this time very much on the international stage. So for Du Bois, the American Negro exhibit represented an opportunity to exhibit the scope of the black Atlantic world and its contributions to world history to an international audience in the ideologically charged public spaces of the world's fair. Du Bois would describe their monumental endeavor as quote, an honest straightforward exhibit of a small nation of people picturing their life and development without apology or gloss and above all made by themselves. In a way, this marks an era in the history of Negroes in America, end quote. In an overview of the American Negro exhibit published in the American Monthly Review of Reviews, Du Bois wrote that the entire exhibit recorded black self-determination as a portrait of people who were shown studying, examining, and thinking of their own progress and prospects. That black consciousness of a people who understood themselves in a particular time and place boldly refuted that the Negro, the American Negro, but also the African, had no history, no civilization, and hence no culture. By positioning world history geographically, George Willem Frederick Hegel and his seminal lectures on the philosophy of history, which was published earlier in that century in 1837, had observed of Africa that quote, the condition in which they live is incapable of any development of culture and their present existence is the same as it has always been. The earliest reports concerning this continent tells us precisely the same. It has no history in the true sense of the word, end quote. Now, Du Bois's George of Negro study, which is included in this exhibit and the American Negro exhibit as a whole, was a rebuke to such beliefs that had circulated widely to become foundational to the modern ethos of social progress, particularly the claim that black existence was steeped in Hegel's sensuous arbitrariness, that blacks lack the reason and the moral capacities to be citizens, or poets, or philosophers, and a host of other modern subjectivities. So the American Negro exhibit, with its central focus, the Douglas Maquette, albeit a temporary display, nonetheless showed that black Americans possessed a history and a culture. Now, the American Negro exhibit traveled to others' world's fairs. It stopped in Buffalo, New York at the Pan-American Exposition in 1901, where the Maquette of Douglas anchored the prominent corner in the exhibition. Later that same year, the American Negro was also on view outside of the Negro building at Charleston's Interstate and West Indian Exposition. Outside of the colonial-styled Negro building, Bradford Gilbert, this is the same architect of the one in Atlanta, commissioned the design who had been commissioned to design the main pavilions of this fair as well, had also planned to install the Negro group, one of four sculptures in an homage to the four racial groups that had first settled the region around Charleston. And this included, these are his categories, the Huguenot, which referenced colonial whites, the Europeans, the Aztec, which defined the Spanish settlers, interesting term, the Aborigini, which was Native American, and the Negro. Gilbert had also planned for there to be dependencies as well, so slave cabins outside the Negro building. So that's how forceful they were trying to harken back to what was now being imagined as the lost cause in this moment. So in the final version, artist George A. Lopez carved a stalwart negress in full stride, balancing a basket overflowing with cotton pickens on her head. She stood adjacent to a crouching blacksmith hammering away at an anvil, his well-worked sinews telling a life dedicated to manual labor. Rounding out the trio set a jovial banjo player, smiling, strumming away on his cherished instrument. This animated, larger-than-life trio possessed distinctly African features, negating the historical reality that many blacks in the South, because of centuries of rape of enslaved women by their white male masters, possessed decidedly Euro-American features. Now, black residents protested against the erection of the offensive statue. In fact, they launched a boycott, which I argue is, I think, one of the first civil rights boycotts, actually. But the white fair administrators, confident and proud of their homage to Negro progress, simply moved. They relocated their gift to a more prominent site on the fairgrounds before the commencement of the fair. Now, seen by even more visitors in this new location, jurors awarded Lopez's depiction of the Negro race a silver medal in the sculpture category for fine arts. It's interesting to note that the Douglas statue was the first monument dedicated to an African-American in the United States. This achievement was 30 years after emancipation, and even then, it was an unusual civic gesture given how the tactics of Jim Crow segregation in the South, but also stealthy, racially discriminatory practices in the North curtailed black Americans' right to access public spaces, to travel freely, to cast votes, and a host of other privileges that had been unconstitutionally denied. In fact, before the 1990s, only a handful of monuments or memorials to and about African-Americans, many dedicated to Civil War soldiers were erected in public spaces around the country. So as I have shown in the book, Negro Building, the ability to permanently claim space in the nation's public spheres was ruthlessly policed and therefore temporary, was ruthlessly policed and therefore temporary public spaces, what I call counter-public spaces, like Negro buildings and emancipation expositions, were one of the few public spaces because they were temporary where black Americans could mount presentations of black history and culture. So while black Americans had full rights after emancipation, to paraphrase Douglas's query, what to the African-American is your fourth of July in light of the historical exclusion from public representations and not just politically, and efforts to use degrading and intimidating representations in those public spaces to keep blacks dutifully in their place, as the Negro group in Charleston represented. These monuments to Douglas, those built in situ, but also the ones that circulated widely, served two purposes, one, to demand social equality and two, to demand equal rights. The accomplishments of Douglas countered the Euro-American perception that the Negro lacked the capacity to contribute meaningfully to the advancement of the nation and the race. To black Americans, just 40 years post-emancipation, his figures provoked a recollection of Douglas's demand for equal treatment. Douglas had dared to chastise white Americans that quote, the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed. The Douglas monuments in their various representational forms, did what historian Jean-Vier Fabre has argued emerged from the black commemorative practices that were quote, not just the memory of past events, but memory of the future in anticipation of action to come. End quote. Thus we can understand the Douglas monument as a political act to evoke a historical consciousness that Fabre suggests quote, of a people who are often perceived as victims rather than historical agents, end quote. So the monuments did not signify past events, but were meant to evoke future ones yet to happen. So therefore how do we understand our current landscape of American history in those public spaces not as timeless and transcendent representations of American-ness, but also recognize the roles that monuments and memorials have played in the historical manifestation of domination, discrimination and whitenesses, vestiges of which continue to resonate today. Thank you. Thank you, Mabel. Our next speaker is Ryan Mendoza who couldn't make it because of health reasons, but has prepared a presentation that he sent over and has been following secretly spying on us. Hello, Ryan, on the live stream from Berlin and will be joining us if all works well through a type of magical connection plug that will happen at some point, you know, right? For the conversation. Ryan is a Berlin-based, New York-based artist. After studying painting at Parsons, Ryan left the United States for Europe. A move Milan Kundera described as a historic rarity following the enduring tracks of the early 20th century American writers and artists. Ryan continued to negotiate his relationship with the United States from afar through his artistic practice. Primarily as a painter, Ryan's artistic project moves between expressionism and realism, engaging Americana and historical reference. His work often depicts perverse or obsessive scenes illustrating questions of his hypocrisy and repression. For most recent projects, Putin, my Putin, Ryan painted the facade of a Moscow house in American red, white, and blue and created a series of photographs that stage a haunted and stylized confrontation between the two countries. In addition to his collaboration with Rosa Parks' niece, Maria Macaulay, to bring Rosa's house from Detroit to Berlin, his pieces, The White House and The Invitation, also address the Detroit housing crisis. Ryan has shown with a range of European galleries, and he lives and works between Naples and Berlin with his wife Fabia and son Dylan. And so, without further ado, here is Ryan's presentation. This house, I suffered two debilitating strokes. Thank you for the invitation to participate in this colloquium. Earlier this month, while finalizing certain elements of the Rosa Parks' house, I suffered two debilitating strokes. It is indeed a miracle for me to be here, even if only via Skype. For those of you not familiar with the project, with the help of Rhea Macaulay beneath Rosa Macaulay Parks, the house Rosa Parks lived in from 1957 to 1959 in Detroit was successfully dismantled, placed in shipping containers, and transported to Berlin, Germany, where it was restored and awaits its return to the States. Today, I would like to talk about the preservation part of this XC2 project. My intention being to leave up to an eventual institution, the conservation of the Rosa Parks' house. Thomas Jefferson, regarding slavery, spoke thus about preservation. I can say with conscious truth that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach if, in that way, a general emancipation and expictreation could be affected. But as it is, we have the wolf by both ears. We can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in the one scale, self-preservation in the other. Jefferson, it seems, worried the flesh would be ripped from the face of the nation, revealing an unsavory truth. Subsequent systematic transfer of enchantment from slavery itself to segregation through the Jim Crow laws, the privatized prism system, kept the wolf in chains, and the so-called preservation of the face of the nation intact. But with mounting evidence of systemic racism and with clarity over what the Confederate monuments actually stand for, having been created in a reactionary way to the advancement of civil equality, an opening for this house to be preserved and possibly celebrated as a monument, contrast with its near demolition at the hands of the local government in Detroit. Before getting involved in the Rosa Parks' house project, I was 25 years an expatriate living in Berlin. Having lost touch with my country, I thought rather than distancing myself further from American values, I would embrace them fully in the attempt to epitomize a quintessential American by colonizing Europe with actual American houses. This was the start of the White House project. The house donated by a friend of mine, native Detroiter, Greg Johnson, was first located on Stopel Street, just off of 8 Mile, the road that divides the segregated Detroit. After the White House was brought to Europe to the Feveca Foundation, I gained adequate knowledge of how wooden houses could be disassembled and reassembled. On my trips back and forth to Detroit, I met through Greg Johnson at a performance at the Charles H. Wright Museum, where the Rosa Parks' house might possibly be conserved in perpetuity. Greg Dunmore and Joel Boykin of Pulse BTV, who, on hearing my endeavors, put me in contact with Rhea McCauley. We met then on a wintry day in front of 2672 South Deacon Street, where the three-bedroom house, Rosa Parks had lived in with 15 family members, stood in decaying stoicism. I remember the floors were dipping, and the house moved ever so slightly with the wind. The back wall was patched together with the doors of the house. For lack of a more appropriate place, Rosa Parks' house currently sits in its afterlife in my garden, between my studio and my home in Berlin. Last winter, the house arrived to my doorstep as planks of wood in a shipping container. I rebuilt the house from sketches I had made when it was disassembled in Detroit. Reconstructing the house alone and underfunded during the winter of 2016 was a physically challenging and somewhat dangerous experience. Handling the planks of wood, I forgot at times what my mission was. Was my mission that of preserving history? Or was it that of attempting to free the ever ensnared Jeffersonian wolf, therefore upsetting a national myth? In the end, I realized I am just custodian and messenger. The actual message, I myself being born white and after the civil rights movement can only in a limited way comprehend. The projects I had completed in Detroit dealt with the housing crisis going on there, a subtext that is also inextricable from the Rosa Parks house project. Ria McCauley, who lived in the house with her aunt, had recently bought it off of the demolition list for $500. When local government and institutions showed no interest in helping her restore the house as a monument, she approached me and suggested we work together. Our petition for local support was also turned down, so we decided to ship the house to Berlin. It proved essential that the house be extricated from its location for the world to pay attention. In situ as opposed to ex situ, literally means in its original location. The phrase implies a sense of stillness. There is little stable about the status of house or homeowner in Detroit. Rosa Parks came to Detroit fleeing death threats but experienced little refuge in Detroit. After living for two years with her brother, sister-in-law and their 13 children, in the house that is at the center of our conversation today, Rosa Parks moved multiple times. She suffered an assault in her home at the age of 81 and was threatened with eviction at 91. While Detroit was briefly renowned as a place where black residents reached significant levels of home ownership, Rosa Parks never owned a home. She called Detroit the northern promised land that wasn't. Housing issues centered around segregation and displacement due to urban renewal were central to Rosa Parks activism her entire life. Detroit is ranked among the 10 most segregated metropolitan areas in the United States since the mid 20th century. By the early 1960s, urban renewal and highway construction destroyed 10,000 structures in Detroit, displacing over 40,000 people, 70% of whom were African-American. More recently, since the housing crisis, foreclosure and demolition swept the city, leaving more than 70,000 banning buildings, 31,000 empty houses and 90,000 vacant lots. For over 40 years, these four walls and roof were home. It was the place that Rosa Parks brothers sought to create a better life for his family after returning from World War II, where Rosa Parks nieces and nephews grew up and where Rosa Parks lived for her first two years in Detroit. When the family left in 1982, memories continued to cling to the clabberts, but the home became a house. When it was put on a demolition list in 2013, the meaning attached to the building and changed again. It became a number on the list, a statistic in Detroit's decline. In its ensuing incarnations, the structure blurred lines between monument and art object. Ultimately, this is a project about memory. By taking the house apart and then piecing it back together, literally remembering it. Rhea McCauley and I invite the American consciousness to remember a house it did not know it had forgotten. Art often plays with a shift in context to inspire the viewer to look. The houses stay in Berlin leveraged this discordance to get the viewer to pay attention. The house offers a unique opportunity to consider how we remember Rosa Parks, and in doing so begin to renegotiate how we memorialize American history more broadly. Recent debates surrounding the dismantling of Confederate monuments indicates the persistent significance of how we inscribe memories into the topography of our surroundings. 700 monuments of Robert E. Lee and other Confederate generals still parade across public squares and school grounds across the United States, despite a recent wave of dismantling. Confederate monuments rely on erasing context of their construction to foster nostalgia. Confederate monument construction peaked in 1910 a year after the NAACP was founded. Another flurry of buildings began in the 1950s as the civil rights movement gave momentum. The Little Rock Nine and school integration prompted a disturbing spike of Confederate monuments on school campuses. Many Americans are under the illusion, however, that the monuments were built during reconstruction. The anachronistic material and design veils the racism that is inextricable from these totems. I highlight this disconnected context in order to introduce the way the Rosa Parks house can offer a mode of memorialization where context is paramount. Of course, the version of Rosa Parks incorporated into the American mythos has also relied on obscured context and idealized narrative. In her biography, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, Jean Theoharis exposes the ways in which the historical narrative surrounding Rosa Parks has reduced her lifelong commitment to activism, to one afternoon on a bus. Fabricated a story of a quiet seamstress who demurely kept her seat and relegated Parks to be a hero for children. Theoharis emphasizes, quote, one of the greatest distortions of the Parks fable has been the ways in which it has made her meek. When Parks died in Detroit in 2005, she was held up as a national heroine but stripped of her lifelong history of activism and anger at American injustice. The Parks who emerged was a self-sacrificing mother figure for a nation who would use her death for a ritual of national redemption. Parks Memorial Services also took place in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. In honoring Rosa Parks, the nation was able to glaze over the racial and economic inequality exposed by the government negligence during Katrina. The public memorial leveraged a romantic fable of Rosa Parks to quiet contemporary injustice. My hope is that, by contrast, the dissonant context that play in the Rosa Parks House project will impede nostalgia and obstruct simplification. The cognitive dissonance of this house's journey across the sea inspires questions. Addressing history and the present day with Christians rather than assumptions or generalizations is a mode of demanding a fuller version of history. When the house comes back to the United States, Brown University is asked to go to their campus for a temporary exhibition. Brown University itself named after the Browns, a prominent mercantile family who were in fact Rhode Island slave traders with 1,000 voyages to their name. The 100-ton brigade Sally and Hope traveled back and forth from Africa to Rhode Island from 1740 to 1790, creating 100,000 slaves. In 1764, the same year the College of Rhode Island was founded, 196 Africans were taken prisoner, but only 109 survived the journey. The College of Rhode Island was so taken by the generosity of the Browns that in 1804, they renamed it Brown University. In 2006, these facts came to light, creating the need for dialogue to challenge the complex historical discourse. This will be the backdrop in the presentation of the repatriated Rosa Parks House with Brown students acting as a kind of jury, the University of courtroom, and the house as evidence in a trial where Jefferson's idea of self-preservation will be put to light. In the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, Trump commented, so this week it's Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. No wonder, is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know you do really have to ask yourself, where does it stop? Belying his rhetorical intention, Trump's comment, it touched upon an important question. As Americans, we have accepted the mythology of our nation's founding for so long. Without sufficiently grappling with the violence against those, the country is built upon. Can he hear us? Do we have to use a microphone so that he hears us or we can hear him? Thank you all for wonderful presentations and especially to Ryan for making that extra effort, giving his convalescent to participate in today's colloquium. There were a number of issues that I wanted to start off with in our discussion and one of them has to do with this question that Mabel brought up of monuments in a sense, the relocation of monuments or the mobility of monuments having to do with a certain anticipation of the future, that the very act of moving the monument already in a sense brings the question of what will happen or what will have happened to mind. And so with that thought, of what it means to actually use preservation as a way to put the sort of long view on the future, to try to shape a future, I wanted to ask Connie actually about this notion of the mural now being not fixed to the building because it seems like a really big deal, right? That this is now a mobile, anticipating a mobile future. What does that mean for the congregation? Well, in a perfect world, the mural would not have been moved. In a perfect world, the synagogue building would have been taken over by a nonprofit and restored back to its original appearance because it is the only surviving example of vernacular Jewish, Lithuanian, synagogue art and architecture. I'm pretty much involved in the practicalities of projects and the amount of money that that would have taken because it's not just restoring the building, but you would have to have an endowment to ensure that it could be preserved and utilized. So the mural, this is really, I think a practical issue more than anything else. The mural really had to be moved to save it. It couldn't go back behind a wall because putting it behind a wall for how many years that was, 20 some odd years had come pretty close to destroying it. So this was really a practical solution was to treat the mural, stop the deterioration and to value it as the important and unique work of art that it is to have it within a Jewish context and to see what the future brings. I have always seen that as really the first role of conservation and preservation which is to make sure that significant cultural property is preserved and at some point in the future, it will either go back into the synagogue building if some benefactor comes along or if that doesn't happen, we did have discussions about trying to put it in a new building that would be built on the property of Ohavi Zidek, the post World War II synagogue where it is now. They have about five acres. It's amazing in downtown Burlington. So they have the room. You see, the problem with it in the context that it's in now is that this large mural of the Ten Commandments was part of a holistic trompe-loy of design for the entire interior and I think had a lot to do with certain aspects of Jewish metaphysics. So you can't obviously appreciate this trompe-loy effect when this mural, which was at the end of a long rectangular building, is now squeezed into a small lobby that you have to look up to. My answer really, Jorge, is that I think it's just a practical solution of the moment and time will tell where it goes and that we took as many steps as we could to ensure that it could be taken down if it needed to be taken down. There were so many beautiful echoes between Dean's presentation and your presentation and the sense of this question of a community having a feeling of responsibility towards an object regardless of where that object is and feeling like that object is part of the family. And I'm not sure whether this was picked up by some of the audience in the way that you referred to him and he as a person, which I think is really within Maori tradition. And so I was struck to the degree that as a non Maori, this object also, let's say draws in another constituency, which like yourself begins to think differently. I think for some people, thinking of an inanimate object as inanimate being could be crazy. And we talked a little bit about madness at the beginning of the day. And so, but you're clearly sane. At least in my interactions with you, you seem sane. And there is no madness in treating the object as an inanimate object. And so I say that because there seems otherwise to be a kind of anthropocentrism to your shift away, what appears to be a shift away from objects to people. But in fact, you're talking about objects as people. And so could you tell us a little bit more about that because when an object is a person, we interact with it in a very different way and it can establish relationships with people who are not part of the family, right? I suppose they're free to talk. So could you talk to us a little bit more about your notion of critical heritage? You said as people-centric heritage in light of the fact that this particular object is actually a person. So certainly within a Maori world, there isn't a distinction between animate inanimate and human and non-human. So the way that the world is divided up is different from the way that my world is divided up. So when confronting my separations, the way that I separate the past from the present and human culture from natural culture, forces me to consider that those are arbitrary categories that we use in order to understand the world, talk about the world, and also to gain control over the world. And I think within that sense of a Maori world being a real world rather than being a cultural perspective. I mean, we're often talking about multiple perspectives on something. Well, what this has taught me is there are multiple worlds. So it's not a perspective on the world, a Maori world view. It is a world in and of itself. So the realities of buildings being animate and having to be mutually cared for and caring for other people is completely consistent with that world. And I've been fortunate to have experienced that world and I'm uncomfortable with the idea of me appropriating a Maori world or Maori ideas or speaking for Maori people or Maori culture because I'm not from that particular world. But I suppose it breeds an empathy and a sympathy for those other worlds and how those would conflict with how we might see the world and therefore we have to give them due credit in our processes. I'm struck in the way that you're describing it as two different worlds, the separation, the segregation of world. I use the word segregation intentionally. Is there a possibility, and I may shift that, to Mabel, is there, if it is, let's say, hypothetically true that certain worlds require certain objects to exist, as in the case of the Maori, that our world requires certain objects to be real in a certain language and that certain worlds are, how do we think of the relationship between worlds when we think of black America and white America and we think of the segregation of these worlds? Do they, are they, is there a possibility for a contamination or, I mean clearly, there's a fear of contamination, certainly in white America. How do we move beyond the notion of worlds as segregated realities with different objects, different monuments, different stories, in how do we begin a sort of contamination with, given, given the fact that you're, I need a martini for that. But you are doing a monument in Charlottesville that is dealing with this. Yeah, I mean, I think kind of Ryan's point about Jefferson is an interesting one and I've sort of been obsessed about sort of Jefferson in many ways, Jefferson as a politician, natural historian, as an architect, as a plantation owner, a slave owner, owner, and he left a body of work that is extraordinary, like we know, I always tell, you know what Thomas Jefferson ate on the morning of July 3rd, 1803, like I mean obsessive archive in a way, and yet you don't know anything about the person who might have brought or made his breakfast, right? So there are already, you know, people call silences in the archives that we have to contend with, and I do think that there was something about the sort of European Enlightenment worldview as a universal one that has come to almost transparently stand for all of the, like every framework can sort of sit within that world as it literally colonized and took up the world, and it absorbed those things, and I think the production, the construction of a concept of history, which is why I read Hegel, is really critical because it does shape a certain kind of worldview that is allowed to stand in for everything, even though we know that there are ways of understanding time, place, you know, relationships to what we call nature or culture in many different ways, it's just that we have this predominant one that seems to be transparently true and everywhere, and I think that has to somehow be recognized, I always say history has a history, and so if we start to understand that, then we can kind of see, oh, that's where that's coming from, and are there other ways in which we can kind of think about time or think about the built world, right? That has a kind of malleability or it doesn't have to have transcendence constantly. It was striking in the presentations, not only now, but also in the earlier ones, how just the cast of intelligences that have gone into being a preservationist has shifted in the last 10, 15 years. It used to be that it was a predictable cast of architects, of planners, of historians, possibly a lawyer here and there, possibly an engineer here and there. Now we're seeing artists. We're seeing anthropologists who were once dealing more with folklore studies being more central to historic preservation, and so with that comes this, what does it mean to preserve? I mean, what kinds of actions can be considered legitimate preservation actions? And with that in mind, I wanted to get Ryan's thoughts on this question of preservation as a marking of territory, something that Mabel brought up in her presentation. The project that you did, Ryan, where you moved this house, it was a marking of an American territory. You talked about it as a colonization of Europe, but it was in a way a reverse colonization of trying to really enter the American mind or bring this object into the American mind by bringing it to Europe. And so I was wondering if you could comment on that, this question of as an artist being a preservationist and using a building to mark a territory, an intellectual territory, an ideological territory through this move, and perhaps whether you saw any echoes there with the Maori meeting house and that sort of expanded territory that Dean made allusion to. And I think we have to wait a little bit for Ryan's response because there's a delay clearly. So. It's we fixed it. Can you hear me? Okay. Well, the question is quite difficult for me considering my current state, but I'll try. I often think about cultural appropriation when I work on this project because I'm accused of being a white person. And I didn't know that before I started this project, but apparently I am. And it would be important to make a distinction. Cultural appropriation is often misapplied to situations that don't actually accurately fit. Conversely, cultural appropriation of or borrowing can be viewed as inevitable and contribution to diversity and freedom of expression. This is done out of appreciation for the cultures being imitated with no intent to harm. So, I mean, trans-cultural diffusion has occurred throughout history. Most of the world adopted Hindu Arabic numerals as ways of standardized ways of describing numbers. So, a lot of good can come out of cultural appropriation. I don't know if that answers your question. Yeah, I think that does. And in a way, it presents us with a really interesting nuance to the question of moving monuments, which is a sort of a positive spin on the possibility that they might serve also as vessels of some sort, for a kind of trans-cultural contamination in the best possible sense of contamination. Not as something that makes you sick, but as something that makes you stronger, maybe like a vaccine or something like that. What can we learn from what Mark Yarsenbeck is called First Societies, in terms of the relationship to objects in Clendon Park? You've done so much work. How can we decolonize conservation? It's through these trans-cultural relationships. And I think you're right to point to the potential of these buildings as vessels that can maintain communication and open up relationships between people, so that hybridization of these sort of category boundaries and your contamination word is so horrible, isn't it? That sense that we have to purify sort of a culture in order that it has an identity. But cultures do that in order to define themselves against something that they're not, something that is other. And I think that's what heritage has been very much engaged with that process of purification, so that it's able to separate those things out and to talk about things that they have some control and some authority over. And it's been interesting, there's been a lot of movements within conservation management looking at traditional knowledge systems and traditional management systems, certainly within Africa. And my scientific colleagues have sort of proposed that, actually if you don't consider traditional knowledge systems and then that's bad science. So that idea that there is this one objective way of understanding the world, this true knowledge about the world that comes from a scientific methodology, I think is deeply problematic. And that's where the idea of appropriation and absorbing all other knowledge systems, all other views of how the world is become particularly problematic because there are other ways and those ways have to be allowed to have their own self-determination and their own ability to evolve and change and to be used in the way that we use our cultural identity in order to access resources in the present and into the future. Even if that means, for example, letting go of those panels, letting them go back into... Yes, absolutely. I mean, my role with managing the conservation of Hinamihi is not to hold on to the physical property of Hinamihi at all costs. In a way, some of the things that have been suggested in order to conserve the painting on the carvings is almost, I don't want to use religious terminology, but it is sacrilegious. And it would be deeply destructive to what those carvings are as living embodiments of the Maori world. So the way that we would think about caring for something can be deeply destructive to other people's views of what's valuable to them and how that reflects their world. Yeah, and I would say that, you know, sometimes the, you know, these... The forms through which we try to enact memory, you know, for example, the memorial and the monument when we've been working on the memorial to enslaved African-Americans at UVA, one of the challenges, you know, we did an extensive public meeting, essentially outreach. So we didn't design without public input and it was a very interesting kind of ongoing dialogue, right? So, but one of the things that we heard very early on is name names. We have to have names on the monument. And so we came up with this beautiful abstract thing. And we're like, where are the figures? We need figures, right? But all of those things, we don't know what people look like. They estimate there were over 5,000 enslaved that worked at the university in the period between when the university was founded, built, and then the period of slavery. And they only have the full names of maybe six or seven people. They have maybe the first name of a thousand, but you don't know if John in 1827 is the same John in 1828. There's no way of knowing. So the kind of questions, you know, the tropes, the things that we use to in fact, sometimes don't work. So they challenge the form itself in terms of how we utilize that to then represent or evoke a past. And also we don't know, you know, people don't know the ancestors also of those enslaved. There's no way of really very few making those connections back. So who is that community that will also be remembering very directly? And so these all challenge like literally the methods if you're thinking more architecturally instead of, you know, questions of conservation preservation. You know, it challenges the form itself in terms of what the kind of work it needs to do. If you have any questions, feel free to raise your hand and we can point you up to Sean and then you. Thank you very much. Thank you, wonderful, wonderful panel. Maybe I guess this question is mostly for you but maybe for everyone. So the Blue Ribbon Commission of the city of Charlottesville, right? I'm sure you know a lot more about it than we do. So it was basically this group of people reporting to the city council, right? And then they actually were composed of community members and but also some historians, professional or basically from the community. And then they ended up by basically thinking very hard about what to do with the Robert E. Lee monument and then Stonewall Jackson monument. And then, but also as part of a more comprehensive memory project for the city of Charlottesville for the purpose of basically telling the truth about history, all the history that has been basically somehow covered or somehow suppressed to try to basically tell a different narrative. And they, I mean, when you read that report, I'm really curious what's your take on the report but you see basically people really struggling with different perspectives. At the end, they end up by considering three different alternatives about what they can do with confederate monuments. And some are more like completely remove it and other could be maybe just intervene in it, change the context so that de-esthetize this. Right, I'm also asking in the context of the dualism that you set in your talk between aestheticization versus historicization of monuments. So I'm very curious about what your take, especially because now I think you will be designing the next monument. One small other thing is that Jorge's questions about how to desegregate the monuments. At the same time, it's related to his other question about how to decolonize conservation because segregation is always asserted and imposed by colonialism, right? And so I mean, I find this question incredibly important because unfortunately we are at the moment when different communities have completely distinct collective memories. So regardless of what happens on the public square in Virginia, right, the problem is we, if our memories remain so segregated that it seems that the battle is not won. Yeah, no, John, that's an, yeah, actually a really great question. I'm somewhat, yeah, I mean, I've read parts of that document and in fact one of our collaborators, Frank Dukes, who's on our team, was a part of this. So while we're doing the designs for this project, we're hearing all of this stuff about what's going on and I teach a class called Contested Grounds about the Politics of Memory and I pulled up the Lee statue on Breitbart back in March and I thought this isn't good because if it's visible on Breitbart it's going to get even more and more politicized. So I wasn't in the end sort of surprised this is where it went because the political process had been so fraught and contentious. But the question of aesthetics for the kind of work that I'm interested in doing and understanding these sorts of issues, both the question of aesthetics and history, in my opinion, are connected with the emergence of the concept of racial difference. That in order to even understand, this is why Hegel's interesting yourself, as a subject who can be, understand the world objectively and see yourself in time, you have to see yourself here and you see other people back here. So it creates the teleology of where you get the primitive and the modern and you can see time moving forward. So history already sort of builds in this understanding of who's at the vanguard of civilization and who's lagging behind. So history already, that's what I mean, is a problematic kind of, and aesthetics as well because when you read Jefferson you see he has this disdain for blackness. He aestheticizes blackness as undesirable and whiteness as desirable. He's thinking of literally, when he's thinking about the state house, he's seeing it as a kind of literally building American civilization. He says this to James Madison, right? And he's seeing it through a lens of kind of constructing American, Euro-American difference in a way. So the aesthetic category in the anthropological writings of, I mean, you could see this sort of being constructed as well. So I think those frameworks are already sort of kind of knotted up with some of these questions. So that's why I say, you know, aesthetics in history can kind of already be related. There's a question right here in the front. Sure, I was, one of those lawyers that you mentioned. So I got a question about language. Two questions. First of all, when you listed the people involved in preservation, you missed out grass roots advocates. And I was disturbed by that because I think that's sometimes why preservation looks elitist and is sometimes why people resent it. And so I'd like to know why you chose to exclude that. And my second question, again, about language, is you use the term contamination. I prefer cross-pollination, which enriches everyone. So I wondered why you chose to do those two things. Well, I guess I'm now on the hot seat. Well, the next question comes up. I'd say you're absolutely right. Grass roots, very important. And in some ways, I think Ryan is best suited to talk about that because one could think of him as a grass roots activist. And many artists are working as grass roots activists. So not to pass on the hot potato, but passing on the hot potato to Ryan. Do you consider yourself a grass roots activist? I never thought about myself as a grass roots activist. I was just thrown into the mix. But I also had a problem with the idea of contamination. I don't see the, well, for one, the Rosa Parks House is a very desegregated project. And for that reason, I feel a very successful one. My intent is to give value to something that had been deemed as having no value. So that's where I am in the project. Can you tell us, Ryan, can you tell us a little bit about you? The other issue about contamination is still one that I don't really understand fully. Okay, so could you just tell us a lot of the people that appear in your film? Who are they? So, Ryan, I'm not sure if you could hear, can you hear me? Yeah, now I can hear you. So I just wanted to ask you, in this question of grass roots activism, the people that appear in your film, some of them are identified, but there's clearly a large group that is participating in the project that are not clearly identified. And could you tell us a little bit more about that? There's obviously media clips of news anchors, but there's also film that you've taken or that your crew has taken on site. So can those people be considered part of the project? Are they spectators? Are they participants? Some of them are singing in front of the house. Yeah, it's true, it's true. Jonathan Palmerville, Greg Dunmore, Greg Johnson, even Johnny O'Malley, and these are all people who were part of the project, but they were not really, they were fundamental, but they were also fleeting elements in the project. So one day, one person would be there, another day, another person would be there. It was more organic and it was it was more something that was driven by a core force. And that was really the force of Rhea McCauley. Are there other questions? Yeah. Yes, hi, it's a really interesting discussion. Thank you. Speak into the microphone, please. Yes, sorry. Just wanted to say thank you, it was a really interesting discussion. I guess I have a question just to pick up on something that Mabel mentioned, which is about monuments that move, and the example of photography, early photography, and I guess how, whether that still has the same currency today when images circulate so freely and to the point of probably exhaustion, but I'd be happy to have anyone respond to that. Great. Connie, maybe I'll refer that one to you because out of all the projects, it seemed to me that yours had the least amount of mediatization, sort of, yeah? I mean, am I wrong? You just didn't show that. No, I didn't have time to show that. Actually, it had huge media coverage, including almost two page spread in the New York Times. Reporter for the New York Times came up. You just didn't mention it. Yeah, no. No, my presentation was really a technical, an attempt to be a technical presentation. I mean, that is my interest, and I think also because I wanted to be very honest about the fact that we really sanitized the presentation. There were times when we, all of us were just flummoxed about how to do the project and I see that Norman Weiss has come in and I, as I said in the presentation, I had to call him halfway through the project and hysterics come and rescue us. I had to call Kremmer, the maker of Cyclodotacane, three quarters of the way through the project. Can you rescue us? This kind of project is ultimately a technical project and a very complicated one. And again, Jorge, I really thank you for having this conference because I think what really got us into hot water is that there is no database on how you do these sorts of technical projects. It's just a big void. And I think that moving buildings and parts of buildings, unfortunately the way the world is going is really going to be a very big challenge for our field. Not just philosophically, but technically. For example, just what's been going on in the last 10 years with the technology of cranes, those of you who are architects and engineers may keep up on this. I sort of read up on it tangentially. It's just extraordinary what's been going on with the technology of cranes. From super low tech to mega cranes that can just lift an entire story of a building and just put it up on top of another building. So we did have a lot of media attention. It wasn't without media attention. And of course up in Burlington, it was covered really very heavily. Well, I'm afraid we have to stop it there because we have a scheduled coffee break for everyone to pick up your energy and get some fresh air. And we'll see you back here. 345.