The Melancholy Monument of the Left

Petra Rethmann

doi:10.18357/anthropologica64120221024

Authors

Petra Rethmann McMaster University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18357/anthropologica64120221024

Keywords:

Melancholia, memory, art, history, monument, left, Russia

Abstract

From November 2017 to April 2018, in Mexico City’s Museo
Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, the Russian artistic-activist collective
chto delat (what should be done?) exhibited a number of monuments in
memory of the Russian revolution. In centring on three monuments, in this
article I consider the ability of the collective’s monuments to inspire political
mediations on historical potential embedded in revolutionary pasts. I argue
that melancholia does not inevitably mark historical fixity or unaccomplished
mourning, but rather a temporal openness to mnemonic productivity and
solidarity. It is in this sense that melancholia does not index a pathological
response to loss, but a political alternative to normative mourning. In
recuperating melancholia as a potentially productive and critical relation to the
past, chto delat reframes accusations of left-wing melancholia as being “stuck
in the past” as an opening to consider alternatives to what is now.

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