In the fall of 2020 our tutors in the Information Design Masters program at Design Academy Eindhoven proposed a
loosely collective project focused on the widespread protests earlier in the summer, in particular the removal
of figures memorialized for their roles in racist and colonial activities. Dozens of monuments were removed–some
by force, others by local governments. In Europe, the pulling down of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, UK
by protesters and the removal of King Leopold II by Antwerp city officials made international news.
However, from a distance the nuances within the debate, the stories behind the monuments were often lost. Often
it felt like there was a binary status--monuments in-place or a void where the monument stood. In a word, there
was a lack of information regardless of what happened to the inanimate yet deeply provocative statues.
The public debates of whether removal is the right path of recourse and how to reckon with the colonial pasts
and present in Europe and the countries they colonized is a rich and complex challenge. As information
designers, we wanted to investigate further the practice of monument-making and history-telling in the public
space and how we could contribute.
At the guidance of our tutors, Toon Koehorst and Jannetje in ‘t Veld of the design studio Koehorst in ’t Veld,
we each set off in our own directions finding and researching monuments in our hometowns and elsewhere. That is
the basis of this organic, personal archive of 17 monuments.
While this project began as an assignment, our class felt that these monuments tell a richer narrative in
combination rather than in isolation.
Inspired by the power of collective decision-making, we self-organized to create this website and publish our
archive.
This decision follows in the spirit of the Design Academy while also pushing our tutors to adjust their grading
practices to meet our collective effort. We are proud of this outcome, in particular knowing that each one of us
fostered this output and shaped the infrastructure of this website.
This website was built with only open-source tools and fonts (except for the impactful typeface Martin by Vocal
Type). The underlying code infrastructure was designed and built so that every designer, regardless of prior
technical knowledge, would be able to code their own page. All collective decision-making was democratic and
discussed and all efforts were volunteer. Teams and individuals earned creative license through doing the work.
Our design system and visuals exemplify this collective approach and stand as a deliberate challenge to the
homogeneity inherent in web development and modernist design.
In doing so we hope to share a mosaic of nuanced local stories to audiences who have varying degrees of
familiarity with a specific monument or the global debates. We hope that the archive and the stories take the
space necessary for critique so often deprived by mass media.
This project will be exhibited and launched at Dutch Design Week 2021 in Eindhoven, NL.