The Feast with the Statue - Creative, playful and innovative approaches to controversial cultural heritage

The destruction of confederate statues during the Black Lives Matter protests as well as the assault to the US Capitol by MAGA supporters have highlighted the centrality of cultural heritage in the current social and political struggles. This paper engages with the strategies that can be used to defuse or solve the controversies emerging around cultural heritage sites and monuments around the World. First, we define monuments as urban artifact embodying discourses about cultural heritage, therefore at the centre of a conflict for the construction and conservation of memory. We then problematise the concept of cultural heritage and its ideological components and offer as an alternative the idea of cultural commons. Subsequently, we use some tools from urban semiotics and human geography to contextualise and propose a short typology of intervention and relation with monuments. Finally, we use the typology to explore both the top down strategies employed by institutions and the creative, playful and innovative solutions that have been and could be used by citizens in a bottom up way.