Stadtkuratorin
Leipzig

In Leipzig, a debate is underway about the war memorial at Neustädter Markt, which includes the physical appearance of the monument. The sculpture itself and the graffiti which covers the kneeling soldier with a steel helmet, sword, and iron cross have sparked discussions among residents, politicians, authorities, and the community about what is permissible, possible, and appropriate when dealing with controversial but historically important statues. The curatorial initiative 2 Tonnen Kalkstein (2 Tons of Limestone), realized by the IDEAL Art Space and Stadtkuratorin Leipzig 2025, developed new interpretations of the monument through an exhibition and an event series. Marlene Oeken and I also contributed to the program with the workshop toolkit “Monumental Bag,” which we developed in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Washington, D.C., and in doing so realized once again that one of the greatest challenges of such projects is reaching and involving different population groups. A look at another case may open up new perspectives here—despite or perhaps because of its distance in terms of content and location.

One such case can be found in Bristol, where a monument also repeatedly provoked unauthorized interventions and debates, until its toppling. On June 7, 2020, despite the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, around 10,000 Black Lives Matter protesters gathered around a bronze statue of Edward Colston, a merchant who was involved in the abduction and trade of enslaved people from West Africa in the 17th century. The police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis had triggered worldwide protests against racism and police violence, starting in May 2020. In Bristol, protestors pulled the statue of Colston from its pedestal with ropes. The damaged monument was sprayed with graffiti, rolled across the ground to the harbor, and thrown over a railing into the Avon River. Shortly thereafter, at the instigation of the city administration, the statue was pulled from the harbor water and, the following year, presented for discussion in the exhibition The Colston Statue: What Next? at the city’s M Shed museum, to examine citizens' perspectives on the city’s culture of remembrance. The newly formed We Are Bristol History Commission curated the exhibition together with the M Shed team, and was tasked with making recommendations for the future treatment of the monument.

© Wikimedia Commens / CC BY-SA 4.0 / Greenhill22

Protestors with the toppled statue 

The case of the Colston statue highlights the potential of curatorial work for addressing controversial issues of memory culture, both inside and outside museums. How do cultural institutions respond to conflicts surrounding monuments? And how, conversely, do they shape the debates? Can an exhibition facilitate democratic participation in the design of urban space? What responsibilities for curatorial projects can be derived from this? And what role do local political and monument preservation institutions play in this process?

© © Giulia Spadafora / Alamy Stock Foto

The statue of Colston is pushed into the river Avon

Edward Colston and the Creation of the Monument

Born in Bristol in 1636, businessman Edward Colston was a member and, for a time, deputy governor of the Royal African Company, which held the monopoly on British trade in West Africa, in the name of the Crown. Colston had an active role in trading around 84,000 enslaved people from West Africa, over 19,000 of whom died during the Atlantic crossing. Colston’s reputation as a philanthropist was based on his financial support for schools, churches, hospitals, and poorhouses in Bristol. As a result, several streets and a concert hall in his hometown were named after Colston during the Victorian era, before businessman James Arrowsmith proposed the erection of a statue in Colston’s honor in 1893—a project that was implemented in 1895, privately financed by Bristol businessmen.

© © Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0 / RedSquirrel

The statue of Edward Colston in 2018 in the northern part of downtown Bristol

Literary and cultural scholar Aleida Assmann says “that there is no historiography that is not also memory work, i.e., inextricably linked to the conditions of meaning-making, partiality, and identity formation.” According to Assmann, monuments serve the retrospective legitimization and prospective perpetuation of power.1

Based on this logic, they are both the result and the means of a struggle for power, because they represent a version of history that has temporarily prevailed over other possible versions. The Colston monument is no exception here: the erection of the statue, designed by sculptor John Cassidy, coincided with a period marked by social unrest and strikes in response to the poor living conditions of the city’s poor population. The paternalistic philanthropy of wealthy business families seemed increasingly inadequate to address the situation, and against this backdrop, the erection of monuments in their honor can be interpreted as a gesture of defense of commercial and bourgeois supremacy against a growing socialism and the formation of trade unions.2

Memory Never Stands Still

The history of the Colston statue up until its toppling shows how our view of monuments changes over the years, and how their significance shifts even while they are still standing on their pedestals. Alongside the prevailing culture of remembrance in a society, there are counter-memories, including the memories of those who perceive the existing conditions as oppressive and want to change them.3 Which of these memories gains the upper hand when viewing a monument changes over time. This was also the case with the Colston monument.

For many years, passersby saw little more than the image of some respected citizen of the city in bronze, because statues are, according to historian David Olusoga, first and foremost “a way of saying that this was a great man.”4 But since the late 1990s, activist, academic, and artistic voices have called for a critical examination of Colston’s role in the slave trade. In 1998, the Bristol Slave Trade Action Group marked the statue on a city tour as a site of slavery history, and in 2015, the Countering Colston campaign was founded to end the veneration of Colston in public space.5 There were repeated unauthorized interventions: the monument was spray-painted, an unofficial plaque designated Bristol as the “Capital of the Atlantic Slave Trade” in 2017, and in 2018, artist Faith M installed a red woolen shackle on the bronze statue. In the same year, an installation made of concrete parts, called Here and Now, was added to the square in front of the statue, complementing the monument with the floor plan of a slave ship complete with its human cargo. 

© Mr Standfast / Alamy Stock Foto

Art demonstration in front of the statue of Edward Colston on Anti-Slavery Day 2018

According to Aleida Assmann, the statue thus underwent a change in status: despite its physical presence, it was relegated from an affirmative symbol of an elite, to a dormant memory, and finally transformed back into an active functional memory as a medium for critical debate.

The Challenge of Toppled Monuments

Between 2018 and 2019, Bristol City Council planned to add a new plaque to the monument addressing Colston’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. The

, an association which Colston belonged to, which had co-financed the erection of the statue, still exists today as a not-for-profit organization. It influenced the wording of the inscription, so that, among other things, the word “trafficking” (as in human trafficking) was replaced with “transportation,” in reference to enslaved people—a change that obscured the violence and exploitation of the slave trade. Bristol’s Labour mayor, Marvin Rees, subsequently stopped the installation of the plaque, which had already been cast in bronze, and announced a resumption of the project without such extensive involvement from the Society of Merchant Venturers. However, toppling the monument preempted the completion of this project. 

Bristol’s democratic institutions were challenged by the toppling of the statue: there was an urgent debate about who is allowed to deal with monuments, under what circumstances, and how. Is damaging a statue a form of violence? How can democratic approaches to monument practices be facilitated that offer alternatives to the controversial concept of civil disobedience?6

These questions also posed a particular challenge for the mayor of Bristol, concerning the functioning of the democratic structures against which the toppling of the monument must be viewed. This becomes clear in a conversation between Marvin Rees and journalist Krishnan Guru-Murthy:

Rees: “What I cannot do as an elected politician is support criminal damage or social disorder like this. But I would never pretend that the statue of a slaver in the middle of Bristol, the city in which I grew up and someone who may well have owned one of my ancestors, was anything other than a personal affront to me.”

Guru-Murthy: “Well, why was that statue still up in the way it was then? I mean, is that a failure of democratic politics or is it the result of democratic politics?”

Rees: “Well, it’s been a point of debate for the city and tension in the city for some time. But Bristol only really started to talk about its slaving history in a meaningful way at the turn of the millennium. And dare I say, politicians, but not just that, journalists as well, did not cover this in a mature way. And the city struggled to cope as they did when it got to Abolition 200 year as well. So the city has not been equipped to have that kind of debate about what the statue is and the place it holds in giving the city meaning today.”7

Rees describes a lack of structures that could have enabled an open-ended debate about how to deal with the statue. Many observers attribute the forceful removal of the monument to the obstacles that stood in the way of even a rather modest gesture, such as adding a plaque. The toppling of the monument highlighted a lack of trust in the democratic institutions that could have enabled a legal recontextualization, modification, or removal of the statue. This dissatisfaction erupted vehemently in the unauthorized attack on the monument. Labour politician Lisa Nandy commented:

“Why was that statue removed in the way that it was removed? Because for 20 years, protesters and campaigners had used every democratic lever at their disposal, petitions, meetings, protests, trying to get elected politicians to act, and they couldn’t reach a consensus and they couldn’t get anything done.”8

Can curatorial work fill the gap which Rees and Nandy identified in the democratic handling of the Colston monument, in order to restore citizens’ trust in their elected representatives? This question was also asked by the We Are Bristol History Commission, led by historian and university professor Tim Cole, which made an exhibition project at the city history museum an important cornerstone of the project The Colston Statue: What Next? 

The Exhibition The Colston Statue: What Next?

The exhibition displayed some of the protesters’ placards, explained Colston’s biography and the history of the statue itself, and showed press reactions to its toppling. At the center of the presentation, stood—or rather, lay—the bronze statue itself, laid out horizontally, complete with the damage and graffiti that bore witness to its fall. It was separated from the audience by a low glass barrier, which not only protected it but also marked it as a museum object. Above it, a fictional dialogue between supporters and opponents of the monument’s toppling was projected onto the wall of the exhibition space, based on emails that had reached the museum during the preparation period for the exhibition. At the end of the elongated exhibition space, a panel with a QR code invited visitors to participate in an online survey.9Visitors to the exhibition and the project website were able to express their opinions on whether the statue should be permanently displayed in a museum, why they were in favor of this or why not, and what other ways of dealing with the monument they would suggest, if any. 

By being able to express their views on one or the other approach to dealing with the remains of the Colston monument and also to write longer text contributions, visitors underwent a role change from recipients of a curatorial narrative to senders of personal assessments and recommendations. The distribution of participants across age groups, ethnicities, and places of residence was roughly representative of the respective proportions of Bristol’s population. In order to avoid a major demographic imbalance, the commission conducted paper-based surveys and events, including visits to schools and exhibitions with community leaders, to more actively involve the age groups and residential areas that had been less involved. The survey, in which around 14,000 people took part, formed the basis of a public report by the History Commission, which made recommendations to Bristol City Council based on the survey results.10 Among other things, the Commission recommended that the statue be added to the city museum collection in its current state, displayed horizontally, and accompanied by information about histories of colonialism and enslavement. The statue's pedestal should remain in place and be supplemented with a new plaque, explaining when and why the statue was erected and toppled. The city council accepted all recommendations in a vote, and today the reclining, spray-painted, and damaged statue is part of the permanent exhibition at M Shed.

Should an Exhibition Take Sides?

Curator Maria Lind associates curatorial work with the aspiration to change the status quo. She advocates promoting conflictual negotiation processes between competing ideas.11 So if a museum wants to take on a mediating role in the conflict over a monument whose removal was also caused by a lack of democratic participation, then it must promote the productive negotiation of this conflict. But what position does it take in this process?

Tim Cole describes how the role of the History Commission in the project differs from political activism:

“Every voice would be listened to and then represented in the final report. Our methodology therefore was a little bit different from an activist methodology as it was working within the system, partnering with the city council, partnering with the museum.”12

The fact that the History Commission’s claim to neutrality was not entirely fulfilled is illustrated by Tim Cole’s assumption that the majority who voted in the survey in favor of keeping the statue in the museum did so because the temporary display of the statue in the museum made this option conceivable in the first place:

“People overwhelmingly said it should be in a museum, eight out of ten. And I wonder if that was partly swayed by the fact that it was in a museum. Actually putting it in a museum opened up the imagination and the possibility for people to feel like, ’Oh, it’s okay, actually. Displaying it in the museum is okay. It feels right. This is what to do with these kinds of problematic statues.’ Maybe until you see something like that, you don’t necessarily imagine how a museum could be a place to reinterpret statues.”

The decision to display the statue in the state it was in when it fell was therefore highly effective. By transforming the damaged monument into a museum object, made tangible by the glass barricade around the bronze, M Shed not only added a statue to its collection, but also the materialized fall of the monument. The museum used its own normative power to unsettle and re-examine collection categories and understandings of history. The curators showed solidarity with the concerns of BLM activists by composing the exhibit in such a way that it bore witness to the links between colonialism and structural racism that the toppling of the monument had made visible. 

Nevertheless, the History Commission felt obliged to give a voice to contradicting opinions. Visitors encountered the statue in the exhibition space, and they encountered each other. These encounters, as well as the fact that the QR code for the survey in the exhibition only followed viewing a wide variety of statements from others, enabled a multidirectional discussion which a survey alone would not have achieved, despite the suggestive nature of the temporary display. Listening to other opinions was just as important as expressing one’s own. Conversely, the demographic data collected through the survey made it clear which population groups still needed to be addressed and included. Despite the attitude expressed in the presentation of the statue, the aim of the project was to facilitate a well-informed discussion with an open outcome. Tim Cole describes the risk-taking associated with the project:

“In some ways, I think, there was always a bit of nervousness on the part of the city: ‘Hang on, what if people don’t give the answer we want them to give?’ My sense was that we’ve got to trust people. That’s a really important principle in democracy.”13

The Colston Statue: What Next? strengthened citizens’ expertise through its informational content, but also required representatives to trust their decisions. At the same time, citizens were called upon to trust their elected representatives on the city council, who had the final say on the statue’s fate. 

Bristol’s Special Circumstances

The project in Bristol required considerable resources: the convening and funding of the History Commission as a transdisciplinary team of historians, curators, and mediators; a budget for public relations; and the infrastructure for digital and analog participation formats. This made it possible to address different communities in a targeted manner. The transdisciplinary project is exemplary in that the museum as an institution did not have to shoulder the task of mediation and participation alone, and in that the city administration drew actual conclusions from the project. 

And Elsewhere?

The Bristol project cannot be easily transferred to other cities. There are different monuments, memories, and conditions there. The media attention that the toppling of the monument brought to Bristol also made political leaders particularly aware of the need for action.

Nevertheless, some principles can be identified that are transferable: the realization that expert knowledge alone is not enough to decide on the cultural memory of public space; the vision to see conflicts as productive rather than something to be contained; the willingness to take risks by initiating open-ended processes whose outcome is not predetermined; the intention to use curatorial work to create spaces where urban societies can negotiate their past and present; the insight that the right conditions must be created for this. When these conditions are met, curatorial projects can open monuments up for debate, and embed them in new narratives that are aware of their own provisional nature. In this way, they can keep statues in motion through democratic participation even without toppling them, and strengthen confidence in a democratic politics of memory.