'Contested Heritage: Memorialising a Diverse Society.'

The UK's monuments, sculptures and statues help us to understand and debate our history. As the
Black Lives Matter-inspired removal of a statue of Edward Colston in the summer of 2020 and the ongoing
Rhodes Must Fall campaign reveal, statues erected in tribute or celebration in the past become
contentious, locally and nationally, as lives and legacies are subjected to critical scrutiny.
Contemporary practices of memorialisation are bound up with political debates about identity and
values in the present, as the choices of who to celebrate and how are debated in various courts of
public opinion. As attention to questions of diversity becomes, rhetorically, at least, a more central part
of local and national forms of civic life, statues and monuments can appear as apparently permanent
and immovable representatives of an imagined homogeneous, stable past. They reveal histories of
empire, of political and industrial conflict, but also of exclusionary hierarchies or norms pertaining to
gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality and disability and their role in marking public open spaces.
The politics of commemoration generate important questions for contemporary cultural policy. To
what extent does the presence of statues and monuments prompt us to explore, debate and better
understand our sense of place? Should contested heritage claims lead to removal or significant
alteration of monuments? What are the roles of ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, religion or disability
in shaping who and how is commemorated? Can our statues and monuments ever reflect a diverse,
dynamic and changing society? How can sculptors respond to such requirements in their work? Taking
these debates as its context, this collaborative project seeks to provide greater understanding of the
relationship between residents of the Midlands and the monuments and statues of the region that they
inhabit.