Vaissnavi Shukl
In our effort to question the premise of this season’s three central themes, preservation, restoration and conservation, we often came across the idea of public memory and monuments. This led us to think about what historic monuments most frequently seen as stone statues on pedestals signify in the contemporary context, and what new monumentality could look like. So we reached out to Monument Lab, a public art and history studio based out of Philadelphia, and spoke to Paul Farber with the director and co-founder of Monument Lab. Farber and his team were the inaugural grantees of the Andrew W Mellon Foundation’s monuments project, a $250 million initiative to transform the way the country’s histories are told in public spaces.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off-Centre, a podcast where we highlight unconventional design perspectives, practices, and research projects that reflect emerging discourses within the design discipline and beyond. Architecture Off-Centre features conversations with radical designers, thinkers, and changemakers who are redefining the way we live and interact with the built environment.
I’m going to start really basic out here. This is something that well, of course, I’m going to talk about your work and monument labs work especially we’ll get to the National Monument audit in a bit. But before we do that I want to pause and dwell on something that has come up a few times during this season. And we’ve been focusing very broadly on questions of restoration preservation, conservation, but one word kept on popping up a bunch of time and that the idea and the realisation of a ‘Monument’ you know, with a capital ‘M’. We’ve spoken about it in almost artistic way on the creation On the Creation of a Counter Monument in the first episode of this season. But I want you to just stay with me on this for a little bit and talk about what qualifies as a monument in your opinion and in your practice?

Paul Farber
Thank you for the question and thank you for having me on the podcast really treat to be here with you. You know, monuments are central to our cultural consciousness. They are of course, central authenticity is in towns and places of meaning. There is no single agreed upon definition of a monument, especially in American culture. And I’m curious to know how this moves transnational. And, you know, of course, there are things that we conventionally call monuments. Those bronze and marble figures on high. But monuments is also a term that’s used to talk about traces of the past, whether archaeological or those maintained through historic preservation. Even the unintentional monument is a turn of phrase that talks about shuttered schools and factories and other bits of civic infrastructure that were purposed for one meaning but they their real significance their monumental statuses because they point to gaps in our cultural fabric. The word monument is also often brought in for ecological landscapes or moments of artistic expression in protest and projection. And what we have found at Monument Lab through tens of thousands of conversations and public spaces over the better part of the last decade, is that when people talk about monuments they’re thinking about those bronze and marble figures, but they’re also thinking about other ways that we understand how memory and meaning situate in public context. And so for Monument Lab’s purposes over the last few years, we’ve defined Monument as a statement of power and presence in public to accommodate the conventional symbols but also other expressions. So that if you have the time, the money and the official power, you build a monument that’s important to you and also reinforces your place. If you don’t have the time, the money or the official power, you power nonetheless, you build your own monument, or you gather around a public symbol that exists and that’s how you make your presence felt.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So in that sense, I think the monuments that in the conventional sense that we’re referring to, at least in the American landscape are for the lack of a better word, statues that often memorialise or commemorate individuals rather than events. Most often, or is that not the case?

Paul Farber
I actually think that we focus on of course, there’s a segment of, you know, the art history, civic design sectors who would define it that way? I actually think from our conversations and our learnings, monument is a far more unstable term. You know, it’s monuments are hyper local, and they’re national and they’re transnational. You know, monuments are part of a ever changing civic landscape despite the ways that we can think of them or treat them as quote unquote, permanent though of course, no monument is permanent. They require maintenance money and mindsets to keep them up. So I actually think that, you know, part of the part of the turmoil that we find ourselves in around living history is about the instability of the term of monument and at the same time, it’s part of why some of the most impactful and meaningful campaigns grassroots campaigns, artists led campaigns, educator led campaigns are about reclaiming a sense of authorship around monumentality. Because, of course, for every monument, conventional monument, whether it’s statue or some other commemorative structure that’s in the spotlight, right? There are hundreds, if not thousands of others that languish in the background. They are new, they were put in with much fanfare, but they fade. They’re like the, you know, objects that kind of get left behind and…

Vaissnavi Shukl
Become relics almost?

Paul Farber
Yeah, you know, I think of like, maybe one of… maybe there’s more… more poetic but as you as you may know, when seasons change, and people are in a rush in public spaces, they put a lot of effort into warming and clothing themselves. They have the resources to do so. But you know, that that single gloves that you walk past by the bus stop or the train station that gets left behind? Do you ever have that experience when you see that and you say, “Oh, what do I do with that?” Right? I think actually, in large part, some of our conventional monuments are like that, where they’re not meant to be left behind. They’re meant to be held in perpetuity, and yet, when we encounter them, we feel both a potentially an intimacy but often a kind. of sense that’s not for us. And so I think that, you know, part of part of where we find ourselves around monuments right now is fundamentally about the ways that at least in the US context, and I know that other…other sites in North America and of course, other transnational sites around the world beyond where there are the so called official histories that are not just about telling of the past, but how the past lives into the present, how resources are allotted and how criminal justice systems are perpetuated. How people powered democracies or forms of governance are validated or stamped down. That’s all how the past lives in the present. Monuments are visible, or tangible representations. It’s far easier, as we often say to protest the statue than a statute, which is to say that power that lives through policy institutions embedded into practices made across generations are hard to dive into. Nonetheless, there are really brilliant tacticians and thinkers and organisers who do so right. Public symbols are waiting there, have been put there for the purpose of harnessing power. And I think what we are seeing is now for more than a generation, but especially kind of in a crescendo right now or at least it seems the ways in which people, artists, organisers, educators, students, activists are able to kind of rally around the monument not just treating it as an untouchable spectacle, but as a platform to look out and organise and gather.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So before we step into what that looks like, we’re just having different stakeholders on the board in in order to conceptualise this this monument that we are talking about, I want to take it a step back and talk about the work that you did with the Mellon Foundation through the National Monument audit and I’ve something is spoke about right now is very profound, because you said monuments as we know them right now, our the way we think about them are visible and tangible structures almost and I was going through the audit and you study what some 50,000 monuments as they exist and, and the key findings were, I want to say very acute and accurate and surprising, but not shocking. I mean that’s…that’s a conversation that we’re having right now. And even in grad school, you know, we… we used to have all these student-led panels to just talk about everything that was happening last summer especially I think that’s right before the audit might have started but it was a very weird time that everybody was collectively going through. And, of course you one of the findings was that most of these monuments were dedicated to white men. And one of the other key findings was, was highlighting how current monuments present the almost distorted version of American history and how there is still scope for introducing new narratives and multiple histories rather than one that is almost prescribed on to the public space as you know, “Okay, well this is it and there’s no other way you can look at this monument or no other way you can question this monument.” But I think you put it very sensitively in saying that there’s ways in which we can more thoughtfully relate to public memory and with communities within which these monuments are situated. I would love to know what your process of the audit was like.

Paul Farber
Yeah, thank you, thank you for… for diving in. And you know, maybe I can… I can set a big picture. So just first, the National Monument audit was produced by Monument Lab in partnership with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. And this was the first initiative under the Monuments Project, which is a much bigger Mellon led $250 million investment in telling a fuller history of the United States. And we were very honoured to be inaugural grantees. of the Monuments Project and now I have a growing set of colleagues that we get to work and think with. And when we first started speaking with Mellon as they were embarking on the finance project, we were taken by, of course, the vision forward from their leader, Dr. Elizabeth Alexander, and they’re really thoughtful and brilliant team, and they wanted to as, as critical thinkers, but also as… as humanists, as poets as… as researchers, wanting to know what we have inherited in our monument landscape, as a baseline as an understanding. And to come to Monument Lab, you know, we’re a nonprofit public art and history studio. And so while we are researchers, we’re also artists, we’re thinking creatively about what is present and what is absent. So when we set out to do the audit, there’s something that we encountered and I want to put it out there for you and for the listeners, which is a common misconception about monuments that I think makes a lot of sense, but I do want to put it out there which is that this idea this misconception that there is someone or some central government agency out there tracking all of our money, you know, and that there’s some kind of magic list out there that names every single monument, though, that is out there when it was built. To whom or to what it’s dedicated, who paid for it, right and that that information, you could simply look up. The truth is nothing like that. There is no list of monuments waiting to be discovered, put into a search engine. There’s no trove of monument data out there. That’s just waiting for someone to analyse it. So to be clear, the audit was not meant to be a list of everything that could be called a monument in the United States. What it was is an attempt to create a large study so that we could see the patterns and themes like a panoramic snapshot. A way to see monuments not just as one-off symbols in our cities and towns, but as a collection of public assets, shaped across generations and really understand where we were and how we may engage with them. Right? Again, to go back to something that we talked about earlier, which is that monuments are central to our cultural consciousness and our geographic and memorial landscapes and yet they are elusive. And so, in order to approach the audit, our team and this audit was co led by myself, Sue Mobley, Monument Labs Research Director and Laurie Allen, our Senior Research Advisor and a team of about 30 people working across… across the United States, and what we set out to do in order to be rigorous and timely, because you could spend your life trying to count every monument and not meet the demands of the moment was to draw on existing data sources that were that had been collected by federal, state, local, tribal, publicly assembled sources. That were… that were about not necessarily monuments because actually there was not a national study set that we could draw and they were definitely those that we follow in the footsteps of like the Southern Poverty Law Center’s heritage or Hate Data Set about Confederate Lost Cause symbols and included monuments within it. Or you know, other work like the Smithsonian Safer Outdoor Sculpture. Initiative, right? That is about outdoor sculptures. But what we found is that there were no kind of like, again, no magic list was waiting for us. What we ended up doing with our team is pulling in as many of these data sources that were publicly available. We worked with the Harvard Cyber Law Clinic as partners to work on which data sources we were able to use, and had just these really fascinating conversations within our team about how data lives online and what is there and what is not there. What we ended up pulling in is 42 separate and representative data sources that consisted of nearly 500,000 records that included many different kinds of public assets. Like historic markers, outdoor sculptures, cemeteries, buildings. From there, we created a series of algorithms and then our research team went in and… and tested them and what we ended up from that list I mean, this is really the work of carving through data sources that exists to find a large enough study sample is that we found 48,178 nearly 50,000 sites, symbols, conventional monuments, which we defined as monoliths or statues, made with enduring materials, sponsored or maintained by state or institutional actors, as a way to ask questions and then seek answers of the study set. Right? To zoom out. So what we ended up pulling in those 50,000 included the conventional monuments from every US state and every US territory. And while our findings which you refer to right, monuments have always changed, the monument landscape is overwhelmingly white and male. The most common features of American monuments reflect war and conquest. And the story in the United States is told by our current monuments, misrepresents our history. As we as we learn that from the data, you’re right, a lot of these ideas have been the ones that activists and scholars and others have been saying for years. And so when we launched it, we… we said to those who gathered in our in our kind of keynote event with the Mellon Foundation was, as we read this, and we tell you what we’ve learned from our study set, being able to search records, including titles including metadata from local sources, we want you to ask yourself, how did this…How does this compare to what you already know? How does this compare to what’s happened in your city there are regional differences. There are important case studies at the monument single monument level, but this is an attempt to do something else. This is an attempt to see the patterns and themes. One last note before we go back and forth. You know, it is one of the imperatives of this project was to be able to figure out who are the most who are the figures with the most recorded US public monuments. To really give a snapshot around especially demographics and what we did was we gathered the top 50 individuals honoured in public and US public monuments. And you know what, what stood out, of course, was that, you know, 11 of the 50 were former US presidents 12 or US generals not counting Confederate generals, those who fought against the United States. 50% were enslavers. There were three historic women on this list. Joan of Arc is the first one also Harriet Tubman and Sacra Julia, and there were no US born Latinx, Asian Pacific Islander and self-identified LGBTQ plus people. We are not talking here about one-off symbols we’re talking about the way that memory has replicated itself across the landscape. And I think just what… what stands out for this for this project is that we’re able to ask questions on the study set. People can build on this data. You know, there are opportunities of course to use this as a tool to search on our website to go to our GitHub and look at our code. But we also wanted to meet people where they are and we did an Educators’ Guide and we, you know, published additional essays to go along with us and programmes and I think that’s the key, how to think of this data as a tool to deepen knowledge that’s already circulating and open up new opportunities for learning about how monuments are embedded in this broader civic landscape of power and presence.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I mean, I think the first thing that comes to my mind while you’re talking about this was of course, we’re looking at these monuments as finished products that have occupied the physical space within our city since decades, maybe centuries. But I’m automatically thinking about the fact that all of these monuments at some point would have been commissioned by some entity and then be executed by an artist or sculpture or stone Smith or somebody of that sort. But this automatically the question, and because you mentioned the findings and the data set and you’re using that data set as a way to raise these questions. I mean, by default I’m thinking, shouldn’t our first question be who commissioned the monument? Because regardless of who builds them, it’s because something was commissioned and something some entity at some point wanted to portray a certain part of history or a certain individual from history and goes back to I don’t know if it goes back to basic policymaking in terms of permissions, these monuments you know, I mean, who writes the RFPs. What does that look like and why did everybody at some point feel like these 50 individually as needed to have a more prominent place than other people? And it just goes back to the basic question, you know, where does the power lie and who commissioned sees these monuments?

Paul Farber
You’re asking great questions. And… and also those are questions that are really steeped in contemporary practice, the notion of an RFP. And speaking about the history of monuments, a lot of them are the products of a) people in power saying, “I want this here”, or just to note the processes is opaque right monuments are and have traditionally been statements of power and presence in public. And there’s not always a lot of justification of how and why. And I would just say this one, when it comes to monument data, you know, I’ve talked a bit about how there is no exhaustive list, even when sponsors are found in our 42 data sources. They’re scams, it’s…it’s really like you can see some standout like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which are largely, you know, part of the loss caused narrative that happened on and off the pedestal is still perpetuated, but a lot of times the sponsors are missing. A lot of times the information about fundraising is unclear. Most of the ways that we now think of public art, stewardship are post-haste four symbols and statues that already existed, and that had been absorbed into collections. So I think you’re asking the right question of who did the work. I think that monuments are actually very tricky to be able to track in that way, you know I’ll give you some other examples. One is that there are all kinds of ways in which there might be an official sponsor, but money is coming from fundraisers near and far. There are moments where those like the Freedmen’s Memorial in Washington, DC was initially imagined as something to really honour self-emancipated black Americans after the Civil War, and was fundraised as such, and you can read more about this and Savage’s book, “Standing soldiers, kneeling slaves”, among other texts but it really got morphed and switched into a kind of monument that really mythologize Lincoln as above and beyond the emancipator and did not really do the justice of honouring those who had been enslaved and then thought to… to maintain the union. And so tracing the power behind the monument is absolutely important to this narrative, and I cannot overstate how difficult it has been for those seeking redress don’t even ask those questions in one local community or city, let alone a state or the country.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah, the reason I was thinking about the RFP is because when I was going through the audit and then I read the section on next steps in the audit, I automatically started thinking of monuments in the way your practice as public art studio deals with monuments that go beyond the conventional statues and take form in other media. Just to kind of go wild here if we were to publish an RFP for a new monument, what…what would that look like post the audit and I’m wondering if this is a good time to talk about the Regeneration Project maybe?

Paul Farber
Yeah, you know, I think it’s a fascinating question. One thing I just put out there is before we even get to the language of RFP/ RFQ, like the Request for Proposals, the Request for Qualifications, I want to take a step back and really understand intent. There are times when, whether it’s a local municipality, a state government, or an institution has an intent to build a monument and I want to go a step further and understand why, for whom and how. So if the goal is to do the work, of repair of something happening in a local community, deep in its history or living surface. It might be that a monument is important that we I do really believe that monuments can take knowledge and do work from the past to the present, but we’re also ambivalent about monuments because monuments alone cannot save us and they it’s not about symbols or systems of redress. It’s about how they fit together. So I want to know intent I want to know is this the pet project of a mayor who wants to get this done before their term limit? Is this something that is in correspondence to a long standing community debate? Because when you go to intent, something we have seen throughout the country in the United States is that sometimes the efforts to act in the moment when the cultural zeitgeist catches up to those prophetic voices who have been calling for change or redress for a long time is it can feel like a strange moment almost of communion gaslighting at times like why didn’t you listen before? Why now? How does this process matter? Right? And I’ve even seen a number of municipalities Institute not just calls for percent for art for new art, but the engagement process is fundamentally a part of it. Then so I just want to put that out there, intent, process and for whom. These are all really important questions and I… I want to hear what the local artists and activists have been saying that people who’ve been calling for redress those relationships are tender and…and need to be nourished. Beyond that, I think that what we’ve seen a monument lab and it’s really an outgrowth from our audit is that we are interested in really have drawn on a value of our work, which is to respect local knowledge and expertise, while building strategy and tactics and coalition’s across regions, so that you are balancing things that you know you really know and you’re from or you’re rooted in a specific place, and what can happen when you create coalition’s to compare notes, and so out of reach out of the audit, our Regeneration Project, which is also supported by the Mellon Foundation as a part of the Monuments Project is supporting ten locally rooted grassroots teams who are in their own cities, towns, regions, neighbourhoods taking on the ideas, that few monuments, some of them are interested in building statues and… and assert markers but others are taking on walking trails and memorials and utilising all of the kinds of most innovative and also most grounded tools. And so we have folks across the country from Los Angeles to Rapid City, South Dakota, to rural Puerto Rico, right here in our hometown of Philadelphia, where we’re based, and really the idea here, you know, the inspiration of that project goes back to a very early critic of American monuments, Frederick Douglass, who, of course, as the Freedmen’s Memorial, which I mentioned was being dedicated, spoke and said, you know, perhaps that minute paraphrasing no one monument and hold all of its all of its intended meaning. But Frederick Douglass after the Civil War also called for national regeneration, his idea that we know it’s cancelled, we just move forward and not look backwards, but the past is with us profoundly, and how we respond to it and what is our intention matters. So we’re really excited. This is one method. It was curated through an open call where over 240 teams across nearly every US territory, numerous tribal communities, and the ten teams are just one small part of a much larger movement around the country. And so this question of go back to your notion of RFP, I want to both acknowledge the municipal art workers out there who are really trying to figure out processes that are not just inclusive, so to speak, but… but address legacies of exclusion and public art extending. That is not just say, Let’s include in let’s if you want a different result, you have to have a different systems. And I also want to pause and say a lot of the energy and change comes from those who are not always in that officially stated position of power. And so well, you know, maybe it’s RFP, but maybe it is the group of elders in the community who we need to go to first to figure out our intention or maybe it’s the high school students who have piloted a new programme for historic markers. And I think that is not just a place that’s important with for integrity sake, but I would argue for hope and imagination, which we need a lot of, in this current moment. We need it always.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah, well, we were talking about the intent. I mean, I was nodding here which is not the best for a podcast because nobody can see you nodding. But we’ve, while I was working in the US, you know, submitted our own chair of RFPs and RFQs. And your…your observation on intent was so spot on because depending on where Commission’s would be coming from or where you know, who the call would be from it. You could see a wise vast variety of processes that people have chosen for themselves. I mean, I think it’s now on the rise where a lot of public art commissioners will ask for Community Engagement before public art project is, you know, passed. They will ask for certain research to have happen with different stakeholders, they will ask for artists from out of States to work with local artist and just just in a way the whole commissioning process is also probably evolving is maybe headed in a in a much nicer direction than what I mean. I can’t comment on what existed before but looking at the monuments, maybe it’s, it’s changing, for for the better in terms of how people have become aware of what we bring into our public spaces. So yeah, I agree with your observation on intent. But I want to I want to jump to another question and maybe we can wrap it up after this. I usually my last question is what’s next but you’ve spoken about the Regeneration Project. So this is this is a more professional practice questions bringing from my own inquisitiveness. I am in absolute awe of all the different platforms that you use to create a public discourse around questions of history, public space and memory. Your website of course, is a wonderful resource for anyone who wants to learn more about your work but you also have a bulletin section which invites essays and highlights other voices in the field. You also host a podcast yourself and have done exhibitions in the past to keep the conversation going. So very simple question, how do you do it? And what is the role of public discourse in your in your practice? I mean, I would I would love to learn for myself.

Paul Farber
I appreciate your kindness and I would just say it’s…it’s a journey that you know, you you embark on, and sometimes you know, where you’re going and sometimes it’s the detours and the people who sustain you along the way. And I can answer this but for myself, you know, as a co-founder of Monument Lab and its current Director, but also as a thinker and a historian and artist, myself and I just want to say first and foremost, the teachers along the way who I’ve had and mentors, people like, follow me Shut till it. Michael Eric Dyson. Heather love, the late Eric Schneider. But I also think if like my… my elementary school teachers, even who really were the first people, some of them who helped me think about how history lives in public and I’ve spoken about my… my first and second grade teacher, Miss Carroll Corson, who was a white Quaker woman who attended the 1963 march on Washington. You know, I’m a… I’m a Jewish and queer white person. And I heard at a very early age before I even had full awareness of those identities. I understood a sensibility to figure out how to be and coalition. Those are not words I had at the time, but that was evidenced. My… my third and fourth grade teacher Miss Teresa Midori, you know, taught us about ancient Japanese history and also told us about her stories of being born in a US concentration camp, as… as a Japanese American person, and these are things that stick with you. And I’ve just appreciated and been really fortunate to have not, you know, it is not… not the case universally, but you really appreciate those kinds of figures who show you how to be focused on your learning, how you read how you think how you write. There are people who are also able to push you to do your best but give you a sense of acknowledgement and love and a sense of process that you’re coming. And again, it’s not the norm but what it what it demonstrated for me is that as a value system, when I wanted to teach and write and research up before Monument Lab, I was really connected to a process of transference. What can you do to appreciate what you’ve learned, and how do you keep that process going? And then I think, you know, it’s always a process of discovery and relationship building, and takes a lot of work, but I think, grounding and intention, you know, we talked about this before, I think it’s really important. When I…when I went to graduate school, you know, I knew I wanted to teach, write and do the work of racial and gender justice. And I knew that I could do that in my scholarship, but I also knew that wasn’t the only place and I remember reading, you know, a passage by the scholar Joseph brooch in my first year of grad school, he said historians shouldn’t abandon the archive altogether, but they should spend more time in the streets and that first summer in graduate school, I went to the city of Berlin to do a residency, you know, I also know like in graduate school, I could barely pay my bills. I was, I was privileged to have health insurance but lived under the poverty line. But I could find a fellowship to go to Berlin I just couldn’t pay for my books. And so I went to Berlin and I… I kind of crossed paths of the stories of people I greatly admired in American culture. People like Angela Davis, Audrey Lorde Keith Haring, the photographer Leonard Frege. He teaches URI Paul robes and Langston Hughes. And realised I hadn’t quite I had left the kind of US in kind of continental sense. I hadn’t left the geopolitical space of the United States. And as a Jewish and queer person in Berlin, I was aware of such a heavy history but I have to say seeing memorials as big as city blocks and others a smallest cobblestones, there’s something about that that for me, like said, wow, history does not have to push everything under the rug and we don’t need to suppress. If we can create spaces to acknowledge history, then, maybe we have through. And I kept thinking Berlin is one of the most traumatised sites is in the cultures that I grew up in, but it’s also a space of transformation. And where else can you go in the world that doesn’t have for someone a connection to stories of violence and loss in addition to the tenacity towards survival. So I think being rooted in that around purpose is one of the ways that I try to carry forth and then just finally, just again, echoing the value of coalition you know, whether monument…Monument Lab was a passion project and started in the classroom, long before it was ever an organisation. And like it… sometimes monument in labs and sound very official, but really, it’s been only the last year that I’ve worked full time at Monument Lab, and that we’ve had a team. So it’s a team that’s really got us through there’s a group of people that you know, we’re paid project to project based on the grant. Or before really were committed to building a board of directors before they were before they were ever official received before we had a monument before we had a lab. And I think of that team, Co-Founder Ken Lum, Laurie Allen, our Founding Research Director and the whole team now. That’s how we’re able to move forward. We’re, you know, at our most challenging days, were coming from different sectors and fields, understanding how to put into play our training and our ideas and our intentions. And our best days were like a confluence of many rivers, and that’s where the energy is, and that’s where they’re sacredness as well and, you know, this is work that is challenging. This is work that tests you This is work that’s associated with many people’s traumas and challenges. And one of the things that we try to do for each other, and this is the way I teach, and this is the way I write and this is the way that I’ve learned from wonderful mentors and mentees is to try to hold space for one another, for learning, for process and to find joy in that pursuit of justice and do it in big ways and small ways. And, and I think just the last thing I would say is, you know, I think when you are coming up and you want to make a change and you, you know, want to make an impact, you’re waiting for this moment to come that you can really show and that’s not really how integrity works. Integrity, you either have it or you don’t and you have to keep building it and developing it and nourishing it. And I find more and more. It’s the small moments, like the decision on job description, or how you build your budget to do something we call moral budgeting, like where did the values how do your values live in your budget, the way that you create signage or the way that you involve students I think those is that you no matter where you are in your journey, have an impact and be a part of the big and small ways that we can do this work and to follow this vision statement Monument lab has now in our work, which is monuments must change, and we must be the people that change them in big and small ways every day.

Vaissnavi Shukl
This is actually beautiful. Apart from that, I think what you said about Berlin is also very profound because it comes from an art background, I think it’s very similar in art as it is in architecture and that’s the concept of the sublime. And one of the reasons why I chose to what I went to Berlin while I was studying architecture, but one of the reasons why I chose to pursue architecture was because I visited that memorial which occupies the entire city block and right across the road from there is another one which is just a monolith, which is a Memorial to the Murdered LGBTQ people. And I mean there you just have to cross one street where on one side it’s an entire city block on the other. It’s just one like one stone. But the effect that that place has on you and the… how do you even put it, it’s just the magnitude of introspection that the place demands of you when you’re there like then you physically present is… is kind of unparalleled. So when you are talking about monuments I’m of course I’m obviously thinking about the place because I’ve been there, but I absolutely relate to you know, your own personal journey and how you draw from that place in your own work. So thank you so much for sharing that. I really really appreciate it.

Paul Farber
Last thing I’ll say I had to put these notes up in my office in the part of this long work. Remember I’m…Monument Lab is now a much bigger organisation, but for a long time it was a group of people seeking a new way. And I think you know, you’re exactly where you should be. If you’re here and we’re in conversation, you know, that’s an affirmation to me that I’m where I should be. But I think that’s an affirmation of where you should be. And keep thinking and, and refining that purpose and keep…keep learning because that’s going to be the way through.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Well, thank you. Thank you so much for that and thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Paul Farber
Sending gratitude and appreciation and looking forward to crossing paths again.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.