In 1936, an Austrian modernist writer, Robert Musil, proclaimed monuments to be the most invisible things in the world. In fact, for most of the twentieth century, European and American critics and art historians derided traditional monumentality as didactic and authoritarian or pronounced it outright dead. However, monuments to victories and national heroes continue to appear across the globe. 
 
In Lithuania, for instance, the search for a unifying national symbol to grace the central square of Vilnius has been ongoing since the removal of the Lenin statue over thirty years ago. Meanwhile, the enthusiasm for erecting war memorials in the UK shows no signs of abating. Some, like the 2021 British Normandy Memorial, are even being constructed across the Channel. What explains the longevity of the monument? And why, given the ongoing debates on the legacies of empires and colonialism, does the need to provide a visual embodiment of national foundation myths remain so strong?
 
Join Dr Dzmitry Suslau to consider the constant transformation of national memory in the twenty-first century. Here, we will examine the fallacy of understanding monuments as concrete structures with fixed meanings immune to change. 

Dr Dzmitry Suslau is a Lecturer at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. A specialist in public art, he is also the co-founder and creative director of Climate Art, a public art commissioning platform focused on environmental change. In addition, Dzmitry sits on the advisory board of On the Record, an award-winning organisation specialising in oral history, co-production and creative media, and he previously held a position at the V&A. Dzmitry is currently working on a book that explores the distinct processes of national identity and memory reconfiguration in Vilnius, Minsk, and Kaliningrad. 

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