A mobile public art installation by Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC) that is both “siteless and multi-sited” is slated to debut on August 8 at Brooklyn’s Weeksville Heritage Center.
Unmonument consists of a matte black, steel industrial lift that will eventually travel to Los Angeles; Atlanta; Syracuse, New York; and Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. BRC cofounders Olalekan Jeyifous, Sekou Cooke, Felecia Davis, J. Yolande Daniels, and Emanuel Admassu are all participants in the peripatetic endeavor.
The piece is a memorial to liberators of Black America like Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, and Toussaint Louverture; as well as self-liberated communities founded throughout the Americas such as Ambrosio, Fort Mose, and the Great Dismal Swamp. Overall, the artists want to reimagine possibilities for the African Diaspora’s emancipation.
While Unmonument does seek to memorialize, it is also meant to challenge preconceived ideas about what monuments should look like. Or, to quote BRC, Unmonument “is an architectural project around a nomadic sculpture conceived as an ‘exquisite corpse’ exercise, meant to refuse the traditional idea of monuments and inspire collective action.”
The exhibition marks BRC’s first ever collaborative intervention in the built environment. It follows an initial pilot run by Amanda Williams and V. Mitch McEwen at the 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial. That exhibition at South Side Chicago’s Blanc Gallery was called UNMONUMENT CHICAGO: After Work and featured a film by Zion Estrada, 2,340 Miles from 1880.
Building Community
BRC opted to use a matte black, steel industrial lift for its “inherently and intentionally unspectacular structure” and because it’s “flexible, unprecious, and moveable.” The group called it an infrastructure for “recognizing the community that surrounds it, a beacon to celebrate, to gather, and to come together.”
Unmonument’s multi-site approach takes inspiration from the surrealist exquisite corpse game. As such, Unmonument will be modified at each site it touches by engaging visitors in a “call and response” exercise.
“By adapting a refurbished maintenance lift as a mobile site of intervention and then sequentially passing it from one Black artist to another—location to location—the industrial object is transformed into a powerful yet accessible symbol of resilience and ingenuity,” said Olalekan Jeyifous.
Jeyifous continued: “The ‘exquisite corpse’ method of working emphasizes creative practices of refusal and the strength of collective storytelling inherent to liberated communities, while providing a compelling platform for a dynamic and evolving archive of Black cultural expression. At the same time, this approach and object nod towards a history of violence, extraction, and exclusion in this country and in this field, through which Black creativity has persevered and flourished.”
Looking ahead, block parties and film screenings will take place at select locations across the U.S. The contribution designed and organized by Olalekan Jeyifous will stay open in Brooklyn through September.
Afterward, the version by Sekou Cooke will remain in Syracuse, New York through December. Unmonument will then move to Bellefonte, Pennsylvania where Felecia Davis will organize programming until January 2025.
After its Pennsylvania debut, Unmonument will relocate to Los Angeles, where J. Yolande Daniels will organize programming until June 2025. Unmonument’s fifth and final stop will be in Atlanta, organized by Emanuel Admassu.
