Something that comes up a lot in our workshops is imagining new landscapes- what would it look like if all our contributions were celebrated? Street names would change, that’s a big one, even in cities like Glasgow things would change, in the Netherlands guerrilla artists have taken things into their own hands to change street names to reflect women’s history (btw- I would love to walk down Beyonce Boulevard rather than King James street).
But what would it look like? Would it be a city made up entirely of blue plaques? Would there be no monuments, memorials and memory of the past? Just a fresh slate for us all to start from equally?
Last week we created some geographies of what it would look like. The makers felt that what was needed was more perspectives, so we had monuments you would climb to see other monuments, bridges you would cross to see things from another place, but the focus became on people looking at and recognising monuments. They’re often invisible, we forget they’re there.
It’s not a solution, but a challenge, look at the history that is commemorated around you and ask yourself if it’s your history.