The Anti/Monumental Laboratory is an experimental, roaming design-education unit interrogating the place of memorial politic, architectural antagonism & justice today.
What do we do with difficult monuments? With monuments that have failed us, or betrayed us? How do we mediate sites of haunting, and how do build in the place of justice? Do we tear monuments down, and how do we build new monuments? Do we build new monuments at all? And what of anti-monuments, counter-monuments, or nonuments?
The following course interrogates the philosophical positions of monuments, and the ways in which such structures enfold into mobilisations and articulations of not only recognition, but also wider landscape and cultural amnesias.
The Laboratory’s various-length lectures & workshops put students into the role of both subject, antagonist & counter-antagonist, producing final outcomes of architectural intervention proposals, actions, performances, writings & artworks.
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2023
17 July – 5 August
Internationale Sommerakademie für Bildende Kunst Salzburg
Untersberg Quarry
Anti/Monumental Laboratory was first commissioned to mark the 70th anniversary of Oskar Kokoschka’s experimental School of Vision: a summer school formed in the after-math of World War II, with a conviction toward teaching any member of the public the radical act of learning how to see.
The course interrogated the semi-decommissioned, open-cut landscape of the Undersberg stone quarry, and the violent and extractive processes which underpin monument-making.
[ Site Documentation ]
Limestone extraction at Untersberg Quarry
[ Process Photograph ]
Simona Gottierovà, ‘Reading the Stone’
[ Process Photograph ]
Elisabeth Schuhmann, ‘Borborygmus (Series)’
An MA Programme which asks how acts of subversive imagination could be a trigger for transforming current environmental, political, cultural poly-crises into a desirable future, through instrumentalisation of critical design toward impactful change in specific spatial contexts, rooted in anarchist Catalan tradition.
The Anti/Monumental Laboratory, held over a month as the first unit of the degree, interrogates the place of ‘staying with the trouble’ within the urban metropolitan context of Barcelona.
[ Response Publication ]
Nicholas Burridge, Appendix
[ Workshop ]
Columbus, Columna
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2025
26 – 29 March
Vila 31
Tirana, Albania
Commissioned as the first workshop of the Vila 31, the home of former dictator Enver Hoxha recently converted into an artistic residency – the Anti/Monumental Laboratory interrogated the private visual languages of the mansion against the public visual languages of the regime’s monuments in the surrounding Tirana metropolitan area, with a host of local undergraduate art & architecture students.
Student responses to the Vila architecture, Laboratory lectures and walking tours were collated into an extensive series of self-published zines, with generative graphic design pirated from Hoxha’s private library of books, most of which were otherwise banned by him for Albania’s citizens.
A 1969 book detailing the anti-communist student protests of Budapest & Prague in 1956/1968 found in the private library of Enver Hoxha, ordered for the Vila by his wife Nexhmije Hoxha for her Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies.
The book, a starting point for the iteration of the Anti/Monumental Laboratory in Tirana, details (amongst other information) intervention on monuments with graffiti, slogans and caricatures.
Cover of the response zine publication by Stanislava Pinchuk, Olson Lamaj (Pararoja) and participating students to the workshops, walking tours and lectures of the Vila Laboratory.
Impromptu lecture on underground publishing from Sezgin Boynik (Rab-Rab Press), Vila 31.
Anti/Monumental Walking & Talking tour of Tirana, at the Sou Fujimoto Serpentine Pavillion (2013).
Generative design workshop with books from the private library of Enver Hoxha, Vila 31.