Who Builds the Monuments? People’s Memory or State Command?
If a sculpture is never approached, never touched, never surrounded by conversations, pauses, or moments of stillness — can it still be called a “memorial”? Or is it simply installed — like a command, a label, or a predetermined script of national memory?
We’ve grown used to seeing sculptures scattered across our cities, but rarely do we stop to question their modes of existence: Why are they there? What do they commemorate? Do they truly emerge from the needs of collective memory, or from the imperatives of a particular narrative? Have we ever genuinely chosen to approach, engage with, or respond to the emotions they carry? Or are they merely symbolic footnotes left by power in public space — telling us what we should remember?
In the traditional logic of commemoration, sculptures often symbolize height and authority. They are placed up high, at the center, on axes — positioned with a solemn and indisputable posture in front of squares, campuses, and government buildings. They do not ask to be approached; they demand to be looked up to. And to look up is to accept distance, authority, and passive reception. But does this prescribed mode of memorialization truly move us — or have we simply been taught that we ought to feel something?
Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North offers a counterpoint to this model. This massive steel sculpture on the edge of a motorway in Northern England was initially ridiculed for its abstract form and lack of commemorative content — “It doesn’t look like a sculpture; it commemorates nothing. Too industrial, too modern, too empty of historical weight.” But time revealed another possibility.
It did not collapse. It was not ignored. Instead, it became one of England’s most emotionally resonant public sculptures. People pose for wedding photos in front of it, scatter ashes beneath its wings, celebrate birthdays, mourn loved ones. It was never assigned a fixed narrative, but through constant interaction, it was used, felt, and redefined. Angel of the North doesn’t instruct people what to remember — it simply stands there, as an open interface, inviting individual memories and emotions to converge within it.
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By contrast, many commemorative sculptures in contemporary cities face the opposite dilemma: they are too explicit, too prescriptive, too tidy — they become visual achievements for political agendas, or illustrations for textbooks. And when you cry in front of one of them — are those really your tears? Or are they the ones the monument is asking you to perform?
In Angel of the North, we witness another pathway: this sculpture has no defined subject of remembrance, yet it becomes a site of commemoration — not because of what it says, but because of what it holds. People sit by it, linger, photograph it, leave a flower, tie on a scarf — these small and repeated gestures collectively generate meaning.
If commemoration is a history handed down by the state, can we not demand a right of use — a space where people reclaim memory on their own terms? Not another heroic monument, but a vessel left open — not declaring what to remember, but allowing emotion and memory to reside.
Because no matter how grand the narrative, commemoration only becomes real when individuals have the right to choose what to remember — and how.
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