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Urban fallism: Monuments, iconoclasm and activism

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Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action

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Urban fallism
Monuments, iconoclasm and activism

Sybille Frank & Mirjana Ristic

To cite this article: Sybille Frank & Mirjana Ristic (2020) Urban fallism, City, 24:3-4, 552-564, DOI:
10.1080/13604813.2020.1784578

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 Introduction

Urban fallism
Monuments, iconoclasm and activism
Sybille Frank and Mirjana Ristic

In March 2015, an activist movement ‘Rhodes must fall’ from the

University of Cape Town initiated a new form of global socio-political
protest, which spread in cities worldwide and was characterized by
spatial practices of occupying, modifying and pulling down monuments
in public space. Presenting key theoretic points of this special feature in
City, this introduction explores the phenomenon of ‘urban fallism’–the
ways in which the action of contesting, transforming and/or removing
a monument from urban space operates as a means of political struggle
and as a form of political engagement in urban contexts. It outlines
and integrates the contributions to this special feature, which covers a
range of historic and contemporary cases in different urban, geographic
and socio-political contexts, including: post-colonialism in Africa and
the Americas; post-communism and post-imperialism in Europe and
Asia; and wars in the Middle East. Drawing on original research and
analyses from the fields of archaeology, history, art history, heritage
studies, architecture, urban design, and sociology, the papers in this
special feature highlight how the fall of monuments operates as a tool
for political resistance against marginalization, discrimination and
exclusion, a catalyst for democracy and social justice, and a means
of dealing with contested heritage. As such, contributions of this
special feature speak about the urban politics of race and identity and

 Keywords fallism, iconoclasm, monuments, public space, urban politics, activism,

post-colonialism
552 URL https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2020.1784578
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 Frank and Ristic: Urban fallism

raise questions about the role of collective memory in the struggle of

opposing and/or marginalized social groups for their right to the city
and their place and recognition in society.

O
n 9 March 2015, a student of the University of Cape Town (UCT),
Chumani Maxwele, threw a bucket of human excrements at the bronze
statue of Cecil Rhodes that marked the entrance into the campus. His
action was supported by a group of fellow students and professors, which rap-
idly grew into the protest movement ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ (RMF) calling for the
monument’s removal. The protestors, who referred to themselves as ‘Fallists’,
saw the presence of the monument as an act of discrimination and violence
against black students and staff because, as they argued, it glorified the colo-
nial ruler who carried out a politics of white supremacy based on exploitation,
discrimination and violence against black indigenous people (Marshall 2017;
Timm Knudsen and Andersen 2019). Their protest resulted in a broader call for
the creation of a more inclusive memorial landscape on campus, which would
recognize the history of black people who built the university and acknowl-
edge the sites of violence and graves of black slaves that lay under the uni-
versity buildings. The protest involved occupation, appropriation, modification
and transformation of the Rhodes statue by temporary creative spatial practices
such as performances and dialogues on site but also more lasting disruptive
actions of spraying graffiti and banners over the statue, pouring buckets of paint
on it and wrapping it with black rubbish bags. It gained attention of broad pub-
lic audiences through the dissemination of images via social media, including
a Facebook page and Twitter hashtags ‘#RhodesMustFall’ and #Fallism. On 9
March 2015, the statue was pulled by a crane and removed following the vote by
the UCT senate in favour of its dismantling.
The fall of the Rhodes statue marked only the beginning of a surging cam-
paign calling for racial equality and decolonizing the UCT by increasing the
number of black professors and providing an equal access for black students
to campus accommodation (Isdahl 2016; Taghavi 2017). It spread across South
African universities, where Fallists contested statues of colonial leaders in a
larger movement aimed at decolonizing the country’s education (Marshall 2017).
This triggered Fallist-movements in cities across the world that have ‘targeted’
monuments in public space as a means of coming to terms with global socio-po-
litical injustices. The toppling of confederate monuments in the United States,
tearing down the imperialist statues in British cities, disputing the colonial
monuments in South America, pulling down of the Lenin monuments from
public space across East Europe, displacing the monuments of former dictator
Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan and the destruction of statues of the authoritarian
ruler Hafaz Al-Assad in Syria are but some examples.
These events brought a new term—‘fallism’—to global public attention and
opened up questions about the socio-political role of the contemporary phe-
nomenon of occupying, modifying and pulling down monuments in urban
public spaces worldwide. Why must monuments ‘fall’? Which figures or ideas
attract such iconoclastic actions? Who are the actors involved in these practices?
How do they engage with and transform monuments and their embedded pasts, 553
City 24–3–4

physically and symbolically, before, during and after their removal? What are
spatial, social and political implications of these transformations? This special
feature in City explores the phenomenon of ‘urban fallism’–the ways in which
the action of contesting, transforming and/or removing a monument from
urban space operates as a means of political struggle and as a form of political
engagement in urban contexts. It is a collection of papers covering a range of
historic and contemporary cases in different urban, geographic and socio-polit-
ical contexts, including: post-colonialism in Africa and the Americas; post-com-
munism and post-imperialism in Europe and Asia; and wars in the Middle East.
Drawing on original research and analyses from the fields of archaeology, his-
tory, art history, heritage studies, architecture, urban design and sociology, the
papers in this special feature highlight how the fall of monuments operates
as a tool for political resistance against marginalization, discrimination and
exclusion, a catalyst for democracy and social justice, and as a means of dealing
with contested heritage. As such, the contributions in this special feature speak
about the urban politics of race and identity and raise questions about the role
of collective memory in the struggle of opposing and/or marginalized social
groups for their right to the city and their place and recognition in society.

Monuments and iconoclasm

The importance of analysing the socio-political causes and consequences of

contesting, modifying and pulling down monuments has been stressed by a
growing body of scholarship from a wide range of disciplines. A number of
concepts have emerged to theorize the attacks at, and creative transformation
of commemorative public art and architecture.
First, the targeting and destruction of monuments in public space was theo-
rized as a form of political iconoclasm (Gambioni 1997), which was regarded as
a deliberate destruction of an urban image or landmark that stands for a political
authority, ideology or doctrine. To that end, statues, victory columns, triumphal
gates and other forms of commemorative public art represent a form of polit-
ical iconography—they express desires of state governments, political leaders
and dominant groups in the society to assert political power and establish a
particular social order and hierarchy. They are part of what Hobsbawm (1983, 1)
refers to as ‘invented traditions—a ‘set of practices’ embodying a legacy of the
past reshaped in the present to convey ‘myths’ (Barthes 2001). These practices
justify political ideologies and legitimize power relations in society. In the con-
text of societal changes, monuments as political symbols also become appro-
priated, transformed and toppled by opposing social groups in order to testify
to a new era (Bredekamp 2018). Gambioni (1997) argues that such destruction
of monuments is not an irrational act of vandalism but a deliberate and pur-
poseful attack to abolish both the ‘icon’ and a set of values associated with it
(Gambioni 1997; Speitkamp 1997). Such political iconoclasm has marked politi-
cal shifts since ancient history. Damnatio memoriae, the condemnation of mem-
ory, was the Roman practice of dishonouring the emperor or elites by removing
or altering their statues after their deaths. The Egyptian Pharaohs also erased
554 the names of their predecessors from statues and temples as a statement that
 Frank and Ristic: Urban fallism

history begins with their rule. Similar practices were an integral part of political
changes in more recent history. The toppling of the British imperial statues in
1776 to mark the independence of the United States, Napoleon’s monuments
during the French Revolution (1789–99) or Tsarist monuments in the October
Revolution (1917) are but some examples. These cases show that political icon-
oclasm by means of pulling down and removing public monuments operated
as a means of coming to terms with the fallen political regimes and a symbolic
marker of their political disempowerment.
Second, in the context of war and conflict, the destruction of monuments and
heritage in cities has been theorized as ‘memoricide’ (Bevan 2006; Riedlmayer
1995), which is understood as the ‘killing of memory’ embodied in monuments,
historic buildings, open spaces and urban quarters. In this context, the targeting
and destruction of monuments has been part of the politics of Nazism, fascism
and ethnic nationalism, which are all based on the principle of ethnic homoge-
neity, separation from and exclusion of ‘others’ (Coward 2009). Such violence
has been understood as a ‘cultural dimension of genocide’ or ethnic cleansing
by other means (Bevan 2006; Riedlmayer 1995). As monuments and heritage
in urban space provide visible evidence of the presence of ‘others’ and/or the
cohabitation of plural communities in a city, their destruction is seen to repre-
sent a means of erasing traces of coexistence in the city and vestiges of particular
ethnic, sectarian or social groups that had inhabited it, thus setting the stage for
the creation of homogenized enclaves and the inscription of simplified national
or ethnic histories. In 1938, symbols of Judaism were destroyed by the Nazis
during the so-called Crystal Night (November Pogroms), in a raid against Jewish
religion and culture in the then German Reich. In the context of contemporary
military conflicts, as in former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Syria, targeting monuments
has been a strategy of forceful reconfiguration of territories and ‘place purifica-
tion’ by removing traces of the pasts related to the ‘unwanted’ groups of people.
In the post-war context, third, the destruction of monuments also links to
the notion of dealing with ‘difficult heritage’ (Macdonald 2009) or ‘places of
pain and shame’ (Logan and Reeves 2009), which refers to the urban transfor-
mation of sites, relics and traces of the war, occupation, dictatorship, and slavery
after their end (Ristic and Frank 2020). It is argued that such urban heritage
‘hurts’ because it embodies infamous pasts that have the capacity to express
the collective trauma or stigma of a social group and create the grounds for
continuous political tension and disputes (Macdonald 2009). Since the reunifi-
cation of Germany in 1990, monuments erected by the National-Socialist and
Communist regime have largely been removed from post-wall German cities
because such symbols had no place in a democracy (Saunders 2010). However,
although ‘difficult heritage’ usually involves contradictory and often mutually
exclusive perceptions of the past by different political, social, ethnic or sectarian
groups, it has been argued in recent years that dealing with such heritage can
also be a tool of fostering socio-political inclusion and cohesion (Silver 2006;
Macdonald 2015). Participation in shaping the painful and shameful past in pub-
lic spaces through public lobbying, negotiations, and contestations over what
happens with monuments offers a venue for previously conflicted communities
to participate in shaping the city’s public discourse and society’s democratic pro-
cesses (Silver 2006). 555
City 24–3–4

Expanding on different roles that public monuments play in constructing

national, ethnic or sectarian identity and mediating political power, these stud-
ies provide valuable theoretical and methodological tools for understanding the
ways in which the targeting and destruction of monuments has for a long time
operated as a means of fostering religious or socio-political shifts (Bredekamp
2018). However, we suggest that these concepts and historic cases are limited
to the analysis of the role that the removal or modification of monuments plays
in the politics of the nation-state. The nation state, however, has suffered a loss
of power since the advent and globalization of flexible capitalism in the 1970s
(Harvey 1989; Sassen 1991). As a consequence, cities have gained increasing
political relevance and agency (Brenner and Schmid 2011, 2015; Harvey 2012)
which has recently given rise to a ‘New Municipalism’ that contests capitalist
over-accumulation and neoliberal austerity urbanism (Thompson 2020). New
municipalist movements understand ‘the municipality as a strategic site for
developing a transformative and prefigurative politics’ (Russell 2019, 991) that
involves ‘a collective and perpetual struggle to democratize our society and to
manage our affairs for ourselves’ (Purcell 2013, 2). In this context, this special
issue proposes to explore the role played by the contemporary removal of mon-
uments in cities worldwide in civic politics as a tool for claiming the right to the
city (Lefebvre 1991) and a place in its collective memory.
We conceive ‘urban fallism’ as the contestation, transformation and pull-
ing-down of public monuments by minority, marginalized and/or oppressed
civic groups in today’s socially, politically and ethnically diverse cities as a
means of political struggle for social recognition and inclusion. We argue that
contemporary urban fallism is a form of political iconoclasm that attacks sym-
bols which reinforce racism, oppression, discrimination and intolerance with a
view of transforming the city into a place of heterogeneity, equality and social
justice. In this context, we conceive monuments as tools for ‘territorialisation’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987)—colonial statues, imperial columns or totalitarian
public art—embodying meanings that convey reassuring versions of the past
(Vale 2008), which stabilize spatial boundaries and inscribe fixed place iden-
tities often exclusive of ‘others’. We propose that the targeting of such monu-
ments operates as a practice of ‘deterritorialization’ by which fixed and exclusive
place identities are destabilized and shifted to a more ‘progressive sense of place’
(Massey 1994) based on connections, and interaction with difference. Symbols
of racial and socio-political supremacy and dominance in public space are ‘tar-
geted’ and contested in order to set the stage for the creation of a heterogeneous
memorial landscape, which acknowledges the legacies of diverse communities.
In this context, we argue that fallism is not much about the ‘killing of mem-
ory’ (Bevan 2006; Riedlmayer 1995), erasing and forgetting the past, but about
unpacking, deconstructing and subverting troublesome heritage (Macdonald
2009; Logan and Reeves 2009) and opening it up to new meanings. The pulling
down or modification of monuments is thus not merely about contesting the
past; it also operates as a tool for inquiring, critiquing, and subverting the pres-
ent. Indeed, what urban fallism attacks is mostly the ‘present-past’ (Huyssen
2003), that is, the legacy of specific events or figures that may in some cases
be long gone but whose consequences or legacy are still persistent—slavery,
556 colonialism, fascism, occupation, and totalitarianism. As such, papers in this
 Frank and Ristic: Urban fallism

special issue open a view into different conceptions and case studies of urban
fallism that raise challenging questions and critical debates about the capacities
of memory in public spaces to act outside the realm of the past and bring about
contemporary urban and socio-political changes.
In the following, we discuss in detail three key insights of investigating
urban fallism and the role that it plays in contemporary practices of urban life
in our political presents.

Urban fallism

First, exploring urban fallism highlights the potency of public space to empower
previously disempowered social groups to demand socio-political change. The
targeting and destruction of monuments has been an integral part of the poli-
tics of the modern nation-state since the nineteenth century (Speitkamp 1997).
Symbols of political authority and ideologies have been attacked in order to
show that the power relations and the state’s social order have shifted. The
legacy of the past related to particular groups in society was targeted in order
to foster change in the politics of national identity. In contrast, contempo-
rary urban fallism crosses the national borders and increasingly focuses on
renowned symbols of urban, trans-national and global significance. Since 2014
residents in cities throughout the world, often connected via social media, have
occupied, appropriated, transformed and pulled down monuments associated
with previous colonial, imperialist or communist regimes (Souza and Barbara
2011). As papers in this volume show, in the contemporary global context char-
acterized by the mixing of cultures, the contestation, pulling down and removal
of monuments is about a different politics. It is no longer about the disempower-
ment of the ousted political regime but about the struggle for the empowerment
of the minorities, marginalized and/or oppressed communities to have their
previously silenced voices heard. Rather than attempting to exclude ‘others’ by
means of erasing their heritage, the taking down or modification of monuments
is about the struggle for inclusion and coexistence of multiple narratives of the past,
embodying diversity and plurality of views. It is an urban struggle for the city as
a place of civility and democracy. As such, urban fallism offers various insights
into the socio-political dynamics and transformative power of contemporary
cities and acts of urban citizenship (Isin 2008, 2009; Tonkiss 2020).
Second, and connected with the first observation, investigation of urban fal-
lism opens up a window onto how the modification of commemorative public
art in public space can operate as a form of social (re-)production. Rather than
through the making of ‘difficult’ heritage, communities are built through the
opposite process—the unmaking of the legacy of the past embedded in public
monuments. In the contemporary global context, the actors involved in the tak-
ing down of monuments have changed. As awareness has risen that ‘[n]ation-
alism, imperialism, colonialism, cultural elitism, Western triumphalism, social
exclusion based on class and ethnicity, and the fetishising of expert knowl-
edge have all exerted strong influences on how heritage is used, defined and
managed’ (Campbell and Smith 2011), the non-state actors are becoming more
dominant political actors. By discussing, occupying and toppling monuments in 557
City 24–3–4

public space, it is ordinary residents, civilian initiatives and grassroots movements

who are gaining a stronger influence into decisions about dealing with often painful,
shameful and difficult heritage. In this context, cities provide both the arena and
tools for political debate and contestation of the past embedded in the cityscape.
As the case studies in this special feature show, the taking down of monuments,
which involves contestation and/or vandalism against built form, is very much
about the struggle for democratization and social justice. This raises challenging
questions and critical debates about the capacities of public spaces of the city, as
places of civility and heterogeneity, to provide space for inclusive and cohesive
societies (Stevens and Franck 2016; Knierbein and Viderman 2018). Urban fal-
lism also speaks about the potency of the past embedded in architecture and of
activism in urban space to transform our cities for better (Elinoff, Sur, and Yeoh
2017; Tilley, Kumar, and Cowan 2017; Richter 2017).
Third, an insight into urban fallism also offers new perspectives on the
politics of architecture and urban space in the context of societal changes.
Monuments are often pulled down in the struggle of the marginalized against
the dominant groups in society, which can be regarded as ‘asymmetric struggles’
(Kaldor 2007), as the resources of the contested parties involved differ signifi-
cantly. Public space is a suitable arena for such a struggle because, as Lefebvre
(1991) has argued, it is space that is available to everybody, where large numbers
of individuals and communities cohabit and coexist, encounter and interact but
also confront their ideologies, values, desires, and needs. In this context, mon-
uments in public space are appropriated as symbolic targets as they are often
highly exposed and accessible urban landmarks (Lynch 1960). They also capture
the public gaze as symbols that appear in the media or on objects in everyday
circulation, e.g. notes and stamps. Attacking them attracts instant public inter-
est and attention of the mass media (television, newspaper and social media),
which empowers groups with small resources and ‘a fierce sense of vitality
and justice’ to have their political statements seen and heard (Isdahl 2016, 3).
Indeed, the contemporary taking down of monuments is characterized by global
connectedness and spread through the power of the (digital social) media, which have
triggered self-consciousness in minority groups globally to take on public space
and claim their rights.

This special feature

This collection of papers on urban fallism has a global scope. It includes eight
case studies from different cities in the world, located in Africa, the Americas,
Europe, Asia and the Arab region. They delineate and analyse the fall of Rhodes
in Cape Town (see: Shepherd, this issue), confederate monuments in New
Orleans (see: Mitchell, this issue), Nelson’s pillar in Dublin, now the site of a
post-fall public sculpture (see: Boetcher, this issue); contesting the Monument to
the Bandeiras in São Paulo (see: Cymbalista, this issue), the selective destruction
and conscious preservation of the Tsarist monuments in Russia (see: Cohen, this
issue), Zhongzheng statues in Taiwan (see Stevens and de Seta, this issue), the
destruction and ‘unfallist’ reinstallation of Assad’s statues in Syria (see: González
558 Zarandona and Munawar, this issue) and the re-exhibition of the head of the
 Frank and Ristic: Urban fallism

fallen Lenin Monument in Berlin (see: Ristic, this issue). By this, the papers
presented in this special feature shed light on different aspects of fallism in past
and present times and places.
In the first paper of this special feature, entitled ‘After the #Fall: The shadow
of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town’, Nick Shepherd explores he
contestation, defilement and final removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes from
the University of Cape Town campus following protests of the student-led
movement #RhodesMustFall in 2015. Shepherd argues that the spatial layout
and architectural design of the University of Cape Town campus, as well as the
Groote Schuur estate in which it is located, convey an imperial gaze on the uni-
versity, the city and the entire African continent that has inscribed itself in uni-
versity members’ bodies and minds—and, more generally, in higher education.
According to Shepherd, the removal of the Rhodes statue from the campus and
the defacement of Rhodes’ bust in the Rhodes Memorial nearby disrupted this
stable network of signification, laying bare both the ambiguous inheritance of
the built environment and the persistence of coloniality. Shepherd argues that
recurrent activist protests and performances staged at the former Rhodes stat-
ue’s plinth, combined with the spread of the Fallist movement to other South
African cities and to cities all over the world, testify to the rise of a new intel-
lectual, political and emancipatory space. By this, he conceptualizes the statue’s
fall as a powerful symbolic act that holds the potential to change (not only) the
deeply segregated South African society to the better.
‘We always knew it was possible’: The long fight against symbols of white
supremacy in New Orleans’ by Mary Niall Mitchell examines social justice
groups’ fights for a removal of the confederate monuments to General Robert
E. Lee, General P.T. Beauregard, and Jefferson Davis from central places in New
Orleans. The activists’ campaigns against the racial injustice, structural inequal-
ity and psychological oppression embodied in these monuments resulted in the
city-ordered taking-down of the statues in 2017, and in spill-overs to other U.S.
cities. In the official press releases and media reports of the events, the black
community activists’ long-standing advocacy for the monuments’ fall and for
social justice however remained unnoticed, while white supremacists’ loud
fights against the decreed removal were reported widely. Mitchell argues that
urban fallists work in New Orleans has nonetheless opened up new perspec-
tives on racial oppression. It confronted the national story that shifts off racism
to the era of the civil war and its aftermath, and it revealed how city officials
exploited the toppling of the monuments to portray New Orleans as a city that
has overcome its racial inequalities, thereby ignoring (and restoring) the vivid
legacies of slavery, racism and segregation. By contesting these official narra-
tives, urban fallism sustains and connects minority groups’ claims for social
recognition and for the ‘right to the city’ as an inclusive and democratic space.
In ‘Iconoclasm and response on Dublin’s Sackville/O’Connell Street, 1759-
2003’ Derek Boetcher explores a prominent site at the centre of Dublin’s
O’Connell Street, which has experienced several iconoclastic actions over the
past 250 years. A monument on the site commemorating Anglo-Irish army offi-
cer Lieutenant-General William Blakeney (1759) was attacked and mutilated,
and by 1783 it had been removed. In 1808, Nelson’s Pillar was erected on the
same site, but in 1966 Irish republican activists fighting the British bombed the 559
City 24–3–4

monument. The destruction of Nelson’s Pillar can be seen as an act of political

iconoclasm, since the monument was deliberately targeted and destroyed as a
landmark symbolizing British imperial political authority and ideology. It took
until 2003 for the Spire of Dublin, which engages with the Pillar’s imperial leg-
acy through a deliberate lack of a narrative element, to be erected on the empty
site in O’Connell Street. The author focuses on a series of conscious alterations
to a monument and its site’s physical state and context over time, the site’s con-
tinued symbolic meanings, and the place becoming a home to new monumen-
tal or other symbolic expressions in conjunction with shifting Irish attitudes
toward the British and themselves. By tracing local events, contested ideas and
changing discourses after an imperial monument’s fall over more than three
decades, Boetcher’s paper gives insights into the challenges posed by dealing
with the void space, and by conferring new meaning to a (post-fall) landmark
urban commemorative site.
‘What to do with the Bandeirantes? A challenged monument in São Paulo,
Brazil’ by Renato Cymbalista analyses grassroots protests at the Monument to
the Bandeiras in São Paulo, Brazil. The massive stone sculpture that was inau-
gurated in 1953, soaring to one of the city’s most prominent sites because of
its aesthetic qualities, was the result of a local artistic initiative to honour the
exploratory hinterland missions (bandeiras) of the Portuguese conquerors of São
Paulo. In 2013 activist Indigenous groups started to contest the heroic narra-
tive of the bandeirantes as brave builders of the city’s wealth, pointing at their
role as enslavers of the native population. Cymbalista traces the interplay of
changing public interpretations of the bandeirantes and interventions enacted by
different activist groups at the bandeirantes’ monument, which they have used
as a platform for protest. Because of the ongoing discrimination of Indigenous
groups, the Monument to the Bandeiras is currently trapped in an endless cycle
of activist defacement and city-ordered cleaning. Cymbalista argues that the
demands of different social groups should be made visible on site in order to
create a space for open dialogue and negotiation that would break this cycle. The
massiveness and presumably indestructibility of the big stone structure thus
turns the Monument to the Bandeiras, currently guarded by sentries, into both
a challenge and an opportunity for urban (non-)fallism.
In ‘The limits of iconoclasm: the fate of Tsarist monuments in revolution-
ary Moscow and Petrograd, 1917-1918’ Aaron Cohen analyses urban fallism in
early revolutionary Russia. Cohen delineates the different options of dealing
with the monuments to the Russian Tsars that were discussed after the col-
lapse of the Tsarist monarchy in 2017. They ranged from preservation and the
creation of new monuments to large-scale demolition. While Lenin brought
forward the idea of a maximalist iconoclast policy that would have resulted
in the fast destruction of the Tsarist monuments, artist groups, critics and art
preservationists in Moscow and Petrograd that belonged to the urban cultural
elite lobbied against the national leader’s decree. They succeeded in convincing
the city soviets and local committees that the Tsarist monuments did not only
have a political but also an aesthetic and art historical value. As a consequence,
recently built statues that embodied realist aesthetics were dismantled, while
those from the neo-classical or aesthetic modernist phase remained. The case of
560 early revolutionary Russia hence shows that urban civic elites such as artists, art
 Frank and Ristic: Urban fallism

preservationists, critics and architects may have considerable influence on polit-

ical decisions on preservation or destruction of monuments erected to honour
national leaders. It also illustrates that aesthetic judgements may not only lead
to the preservation of contested ‘beautiful’ monuments—as it is argued in the
case of the Monument to the Bandeiras in São Paulo—but also the destruction
of contested ‘ugly’ monuments and, therefore, to selective iconoclasm.
‘Must Zhongzheng fall? Varied responses to memorial statues of Taiwan’s
former dictator’ by Quentin Stevens and Gabriele de Seta investigates the fates
of Taiwan’s 43,000 statues of former dictator Chiang Kai-shek since Taiwan’s
democratization in 1987. As the former dictator’s party won several of the dem-
ocratic elections since 1996, Taiwan’s authoritarian past retains a living but
contested memory. Particularly during periods of governance of the opposition,
many statues of Chiang Kai-shek were destroyed, recontextualized or displaced
from their central urban locations to a statue park to tame their political sym-
bolism. While electoral majorities continue to shift in Taiwan’s national and
city governments, activist groups of many kinds, inspired by the rise of urban
fallism in different cities since 2014 and use of social media to document their
actions, have beheaded, defaced, redecorated and playfully parodied the former
dictator’s statues to comment on contemporary political developments. These
acts remained largely unpunished by the authorities. The authors argue that the
1,000 remaining statues of Chiang Kai-shek serve as spaces for disputes over
different views of the past in the present, and for deliberation. Compared to the
policing of the contested bandeirantes monument in Sao Paulo or the toppling
of statues in Cape Town and New Orleans, the general acceptance of variegated
fallist responses, the authors argue, bear witness to an open and vital demo-
cratic society.
‘The Unfallen Statues of Hafez Al-Assad in Syria’ by Antonio Gonzalez
Zarandona and Nour Munawar analyses the destruction and simultaneous (re-)
erection of Hafez Al-Assad statues in Syria during the ongoing Syrian civil war.
The authors look at how the Ba’athist regime that had ruled Syria since 1971
used elements of the past to establish a cult of personality around President
Hafez Al-Assad (1971–2000). Many statues of Hafez Al-Assad were erected in
public spaces. When the Ba’ath regime was first challenged by oppositional
groups in 2011, the activists expressed their discontent with the political regime
by attacking a statue of the authoritarian leader. During the civil war, whenever
armed opposition groups took control over a territory, the local statues of Hafez
Al-Assad were destroyed in deliberate acts of political iconoclasm. In contrast
to the cases of the fallist movements in Cape Town and elsewhere, the fallen
statues however reverted. After the Ba’athist regime’s success in seizing many
of the formerly lost cities, many of the toppled statues were (re-)erected, thus
constituting acts of unfallism. While the placement of statues in public space
is usually connected with the leadership and new political narratives, the Hafez
Al-Assad busts and statues tie in with the old personality cult, thus erasing the
memory of the violent civil war. At the same time, the new statues do convey
a new meaning in that they now attest to the invigoration of Bashar Al-Assad’s
present Ba’athist regime.
In ‘Post-Fallism: The Afterlife of the Lenin Monument in Berlin’, Mirjana
Ristic investigates the afterlife of the fallen Lenin Monument which stood 561
City 24–3–4

on Leninplatz in the former East Berlin since 1970. After the reunification of
Germany in 1990 that had been divided into a socialist Eastern and a demo-
cratic Western part for almost forty years, the Berlin Senate, pre-empting public
debate, decided to dismantle the conspicuous Lenin statue and to bury its many
parts in a forest in the far south-east of the city. In 2015, thirteen years after its
interment, the Senate approved the excavation of the head of the statue in order
to include it in a new permanent exhibition of the city’s fallen monuments.
Ristic traces how the symbolism of the re-emerged head of the prominent
Lenin statue was transformed spatially, physically and semantically through
its post-fallist (re-)presentation in the exhibition. She argues that Lenin’s head,
lying on the side and displaying the scars inflicted by the statue’s dismantling
and burying, forms a counter-monument that contests the political symbolism
of both the authoritarian monument and its decreed fall and disappearance that
was aimed to suppress commemoration. It calls for critical reflections on the
legacy of the past by giving visitors the opportunity to interact with Lenin’s
head on equal terms, and by acknowledging that pluralistic views of the past
coexist, shape and are to be negotiated in every present. While Boetcher’s paper
on Dublin’s O’Connell Street investigates the afterlife of a landmark urban site
after a monument’s fall, Ristic’s paper thus gives insights into the contested fate
of a toppled monument.
In sum, the collection of papers in this special feature give differentiated
insights into the questions of why monuments fall, what kinds of monuments
are targeted, who engages in fallist actions, how these interventions are per-
formed, and how urban fallism shapes the past, present and future of cities.
It explores different scenarios and variants of urban fallism as well as public
responses to it that may include (non-fallist) preservation or policing, (unfal-
list) re-erection or cleaning and (post-fallist) creation of counter-monuments,
new public art aiming to overcome the past, or continuous public delibera-
tion. While fallism is often one-sidedly associated with vandalism, damage,
defacement and destruction—negative terms that describe it from the per-
spective of the prevailing order (Marshall 2017, 204)—we intend to flip the
discussion over by interpreting urban fallism as creative appropriation, mod-
ification and transformation of monuments that engages urban public space
in a non-military trans-border struggle for more just, diverse and inclusive
cities. This struggle continues as we conclude the introduction to this special
feature with the most recent protests against racism, which spread across the
globe in the aftermath of the violent death of African American George Floyd
through a white police man on 25 May 2020 in Minneapolis, USA. In Bristol,
UK, this triggered demonstrations on 7 June 2020, which incorporated a new
form of fallist actions. Protestors pulled the bronze statue of Edward Colston,
a seventeenth century slave trader, from the base with ropes and kneeled
on its neck to commemorate George Floyd’s death (Siddique and Skopeliti
2020). They eventually threw the statue into the water, near Pero’s Bridge,
named after an enslaved man from Bristol. By this, activists have once again
deployed fallist actions to trigger radical debates about the entanglement of
the past and present in urban space, aiming to reshape the future of our cities
for better.
562

Acknowledgement
Mirjana Ristic’s work on this paper was funded
by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
through a Humboldt Research Fellowship
granted from 2016 to 2018.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported
by the authors.
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Sybille Frank is Professor for Urban Sociology
and Sociology of Space at the Institute for
Sociology at the Technical University of
Darmstadt. Email: frank@ifs.tu-darmstadt.de.
Mirjana Ristic is an architect and independent
researcher. Email: mirjana_ristic@live.com.au.