Monument is a durational performance using plaster casts, bodies, consent, tenderness and sustenance.¹

Monument takes place overnight from February 8th 2020 to February 9th 2020, in the Great Court of the British Museum, London.²

Monument aims to embody the climate justice movement.

The movement is diverse and growing. The number of casts made will depend on an intimate consensual process the performers engaged in reciprocally, carefully co-creating an evolving sculpture drawn from their own bodies, histories and experiences.

Through Monument we offer an alternative to the colonial statues that cast shadows on cities the world over, embodying a vibrant rebellious living alternative. In making the artwork we imagined a world in which the stolen objects in the British Museum had been returned to their communities; the space transformed into a resource for those who have, are, and will be putting their bodies on the line to fight for climate justice.

On completion, Monument will be displayed in the museum, bringing to light the stains that seep through the fabric of the building for those who have eyes to see them.³

The community hall we practised in didn’t prepare us for the vast atrium of the British Museum nor for navigating the throng of visitors on a busy Saturday. Life never unfolds as neatly as rehearsal. We had thought carefully about the aesthetic and tone of the performance. It needed to be reverent, majestic, erotic. Visceral, fleshy, human. It needed to honour those who have died and are dying, both suddenly and slowly. It needed to honour Berta Caceres, the Honduran Indigenous leader and environmental activist murdered in her home in March 2016. It needed to honour the people of the Niger Delta who have lived with environmental catastrophe for decades. The known and the unknown.

We discussed possibilities, sat in a circle on uncomfortable plastic chairs. Which body parts would we cast? How might we ask for permission and discuss consent; flesh and fragility accentuated by the museum’s vast polished marble atrium. We rehearsed with skin-friendly plaster of paris bandages. Strips of cold, wet, chalky plaster laid delicately over warm skin and hair. Despite the joviality and palpable excitement, I winced on contact. The sensation that followed was cool, intimate, shocking.

As the performance plays out overnight at the museum each conversation is particular: a delicate back and forth between the person being cast and the person laying plaster on skin. There are whispers between cast givers and cast receivers as plaster strips are layered with attentiveness and care. The atrium echoes to the gentle hum of human conversation; a chorus of loving warmth transgressing the space. We sing, shattering the museum’s grandeur as night descends.

I lay plaster strips gently over the hand of a young climate activist. The skin around her fingernails is chewed to the quick. I worry that the plaster will irritate her red raw skin, and seep into her blood where dry cracked flesh leaves fissures. I’m acutely aware of how fragile and frightened she is, despite her steely determination. I take care to keep the paster away from her fingertips and pour fortitude into her casting, hoping that we can do her justice. Later, I lie on my back as a friend lays plaster strips over my chin, throat, sternum, and chest. As the layers build I feel increasingly entombed, my breathing restricted. Time slows with my breath.

We feel small in the museum’s vast atrium. But we are growing. Together, quietly, determinedly we are bringing into presence things which are unseen – things which are purposefully hidden from public view. The global movement for climate justice. Messy, imperfect, human. Diverse, beautiful, growing. The care among communities of resistance. The majesty of vulnerability. The radical imagination that has enabled over 500 years of struggle and continues to fuel it. The sponsorship of the British Museum by the oil company BP that gives the oil giant a ‘social licence to operate’, the ongoing oppression of communities the world over and the colonial foundations of the museum. All brought to light as cold plaster touches skin so that all can be seen more widely and be acted on.

Multiple oppressions, multiple vulnerabilities and multiple resistances take form as Monument grows. Ghosts render flesh. Whispered confidences animate the growing collection of casts. Hands, shoulders, feet, faces and breasts cast from strips of plaster, fragile shells laid in a circle on the solid marble floor. This is the re-membering as part of a decolonial process of seeking wholeness by those who have been dis-membered by colonialism, white supremacy, cis-het patriarchy, racial capitalism and state violence. Deliberately exposing flesh in the museum's vast atrium an embodied enactment of political resistance, ghostly re-memberances laid carefully on polished marble. Delicately, consensually, casting parts of our bodies we render ourselves both vulnerable and powerful.

Part way through the evening, we set up the compost toilet by the stairs that wind around the column in the centre of the atrium, leading to the upper floors of the museum. The small plastic camping toilet is smuggled in under pushchairs and prams. We discuss carefully how to erect the cubicle from bamboo and black cloth. The structure is borrowed from a previous action. Five years earlier in Tate Modern, the toilet we concealed was more sturdy. Some of us occupied the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern from high tide to high tide, a growing chorus of words rising with us.

We build and improvise, measuring out the number of sticks we have, taping in as many cross pieces as we can, and gaffer-taping the base of the structure to the floor for stability. It’s not ideal, but we think it might hold. The curtain is far too long so we drape it over the frame and gaffer-tape it down, enveloping our crude structure in thick black cloth.

We discuss at length how we might manage changing the black plastic bags that will hold our excrement. As soon as they are half full they should be changed, we agree. But do we need people in charge? Or can we leave it to the group to take individual responsibility? We decide that we will write clear instructions, to be taped to the door of the toilet, so that we can be sure that people will see them. Alert and excited, I agree to give covert briefings in small groups to the 50 or so people occupying the museum overnight. I know that at this stage whether we will be able to stay is far from certain, everything that we do matters.

A slight, anxious woman is desperate for the toilet, but wary about using our creation. She doesn’t want to be the first. To show that it is safe, I use the makeshift toilet crouching low over the flimsy plastic frame, hot wet piss hitting the plastic bag slung below. Parting the heavy black curtain to allow the next person to enter, I move on to give the briefings. I beckon people together in small groups, quietly, keen to be discreet, aware just how surveilled we are. We don’t want to draw the guards attention to our system lest they evict us. In a hushed tone, I dramatically sketch out the consequences of an overflowing bag, keen that people hear and take in what I have to say.

There is a commotion, and someone emerges in a state of agitation from the cubicle. It is the slight, anxious woman, who had been so reluctant to use the toilet when we first set it up. A slurry of urine and sodden paper seeps out from under the edge of the black curtain. No one seems to know what to do, or at least no one seems willing to engage. I look around for Sarah – someone who I know is calm and practical. We subtly gather paper and cloths and begin the process of cleaning up.

We mop the floor with towels and antibacterial handwash. Keen to leave no trace, but aware that it is only urine. Viscous, bodily, human. I think about the people who clean toilets, tend to the intimate needs of the elderly and bedbound: those whose bodies absorb chemical cleaning products so that those they care for are ‘safe’ from infection. The many acts of intimacy late-stage capitalism demands that we outsource. Mainly to Black, Brown and Indigenous peoples. A friend panics about the potential newspaper headlines: ‘activists defecate in museum’ and is convinced that we should leave. I think about the blood on which the museum is built. The blood of Jamaican slaves that financed its first collection and the blood of empire that enriched, and still enriches, the UK.⁴

A year or so earlier, between an aborted and successful trial for stopping a charter deportation flight due to force 57 people to Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone I saw the novelist, and concentrated observer of politics, Arundhati Roy speak about liberty. She says that underlying fascism is a desire for neatness. She says that it's hugely important that we celebrate untidy identities and untidy lives in a society seeking tidiness.⁵ The British Museum, BP, the court and the government want things to be neat. Binary. Fixed. Guilty or not guilty, right or wrong, an atmosphere that can be cleaned, emissions that can be offset, illegal or legal, alien or neatly ordered papers, racialised, someone I know or someone I don’t know.

On the witness stand in Court Four of Chelmsford Crown Court, I was asked repeatedly whether I knew the people due to be forced onto the charter deportation flight the night we stopped it. I’m haunted by the question. It moves me to tears, even now. Why would the desire to prevent harm stop with people we know? Surely we are capable of larger, more generous, intimacies. I wonder how much damage is done by the desire for neatness. I think about how real lives are never neat. Real lives are always rich, queer, more than human, shining, fluid, interwoven, sympoietic, entangled. Real lives are always organisationally ajar.⁶ They are never neat.

Neatness orders the world around binaries, it separates, contains, puts into boxes. It doesn’t want to touch or be touched. Neatness is the desire for borders that divide. Borders that create ‘us’ and ‘them’. Neatness is where violence takes place. Neatness powers the drive to outsource almost everything from caring for children to answering phones in call centres; from clearing up the faeces of elderly relatives to cleaning schools and hospitals. Neatness is separation. Those who seek control over others like things to be neat.

I suspect that part of the way that we move beyond neatness might be through everyday and unexpected public intimacies. Through the navigation of delicately negotiated boundaries that bind us together. These might be among the ‘promising tools and techniques for non dualistic thought and pedagogy’ that the queer theorist Eve Sedgewick describes.⁷ It is intimacy that creates a space between us that enables us to be a plurality, a factor that the political theorist Hannah Arendt believed to be critical for a healthy public realm.

By seeing one another as we are, we can accept, claim and celebrate our differences. This kind of radical intimacy in which we are seen whole, as we are, is the foundation for living well together. We invite one another into our homes, and by sharing their particularity we disclose our differences in a way that enables them to become familiar. In our differences we see one another as we really are, in all of our peculiar distinctiveness. The casts that made Monument were a celebration of that collective difference; each limb cast recognisably drawn from flesh, each clearly unique.

Without this ability to see one another as we are we see ciphers, or reductions: assumptions are made according to adherence to a particular form of politics, or about a social class or gender, racialisation or sexuality. This is where fascism and its desire for neatness takes root. It reduces the world to ciphers. Without spaces where we can see one another, we are unable to bring new worlds into being.

Hannah Arendt describes actions that disrupt by breaking into the world ‘unexpected and unforeseen’, a process she describes as akin to a miracle. ‘If it is true that action and beginning are essentially the same, it follows that a capacity for performing miracles must likewise be within the range of human faculties.’8 I have come to think of these acts of radical intimacy from a smile to a stranger to the making of Monument as creating small openings in which the possibility of other worlds appear. We will need these everyday miracles if we are to navigate the climate crisis, meaningfully decolonise, steer away from endless destruction and towards human and ecological flourishing, and re-enchant the world.

Everyday miracles begin with acts of radical intimacy. In disrupting the flow of events, intimacy breaks open everything we have been conditioned to believe is normal by late stage capitalism. Intimacy connects us to one another and to the other than human, and public intimacy weaves us into community. Intimacy bears witness and requires consent. Through intimacy we come to an embodied understanding of our interconnection. As Healing Justice London’s founder Farzana Khan points out: ‘We need each other. And every time we turn away from each other, we turn away from ourselves.’

New monuments will be built not in stone, but in flesh, breath and warmth and touch.

This is where messy, entangled, living forms of utopia begin.

This could be ours.

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Making New Monuments was first published in Dark Mountain: Issue 27, a hardback collection revolving around bodies, human and creaturely, plant and mineral, in an era of planetary breakdown. Hard copies can be ordered from the Dark Mountain website.

An earlier version of the text was included in the Utopia*Arts*Politics collection, published by Utrecht University. The piece draws on research as part of the Research in Action community, and was commissioned for a gathering that took place in Utrecht in July 2024 exploring how artistic practices can help reimagine and remake our world.

References:

1.Monument was part of ‘BP Must Fall’, a creative intervention in the British Museum by the group BP or Not BP? from 7th - 9th February 2020 calling for an end to BP’s sponsorship of the museum, to confront the reality of BP’s ongoing investment in new fossil fuels.

2.Established in 1753: the history and collection of the British Museum are built on the violence empire and the colonial exploitation of people and resources. The foundational collection came from Sir Hans Sloane, physician and President of the Royal Society, who had acquired 80,000 'natural and artificial rarities'. Sloane had used developing global networks created by European imperial expansion to collect these materials and used income partly derived from enslaved labour on Jamaican sugar plantations to pay for them. The museum has largely resisted calls for restitution. On 15 July 2022, the author Ahdaf Soueif resigned as trustee of the British Museum, citing the institution’s sponsorship from BP and the fact it “hardly speaks” in the debate over repatriation.

3.While museums are not yet centres for climate and racial justice, restitution is happening. In 2020 The Museum of the Bible in Washington, returned nearly 11,500 looted objects to Iraq and Egypt. In spite of growing pressure, Britain’s major national museums have resisted requests for repatriations, remaining monuments to colonialism. The British Museum returned objects stolen from Iraq in 2003, but has resisted requests for restitution of objects stolen in the colonial era.

4.The economist Utsa Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938. The average life expectancy of Indian people dropped by a fifth from 1870 to 1920, and tens of millions died needlessly of policy-induced famine. As Sathnam Sanghera shows in Empireland, Empire still shapes British society – from its delusions of exceptionalism to immense private and public wealth, the fabric of cities and the dominance of the City of London.

5.Arundhati Roy, (2016) Noor Inayat Khan Memorial Lecture: The ‘Liberte’ Series. Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre.

6.Eve Sedgewick (2003) Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity.

7.Hannah Arendt (2018) Thinking without bannisters: Essays in understanding.

8.Farzana Khan (2015) Moving From ‘No borders’ to Broaderland for the Borderless