What can be done with Confederate statues and monuments whose time has come? There’s the option of just tearing them down and throwing them out, which is satisfying and simple. I’ve seen some excellent replacement ideas floated (for every Confederate, put up a black abolitionist or another worthy crusader for civil rights; for every Confederate, put up a piece of cool public art).
But there’s one more option beyond “remove” and “replace.” In other countries, people have creatively repurposed statues and monuments representing vanquished ideologies. Repurposing—making the original statue into a whole new piece of art—preserves the fact that the statue existed while making it clear that people living in the present day have moved on from the ideology it represents.
In Algeria in 1928, French colonial authorities commissioned a Monument to the Dead (Le Pavois) to commemorate the fellowship of French and Arab soldiers who died in World War I, and to mark the centennial of French colonialism in Algeria. The sculpture, by Paul Landowski, stood in Algiers until the late 1970s. Slate’s Henry Grabar writes that after Algeria gained independence in 1962, other French statues suffered indignities, but the monument remained relatively undisturbed. In 1978, the government finally commissioned artist M’hamed Issiakhem to edit the memorial. “Issiakhem encased the original monument in cement, and crowned it with a pair of fists breaking through chains,” Grabar wrote. Art historian Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi adds that just as the 50th anniversary of Algerian independence approached in 2012, “cracks began to appear on the monument’s outer shell,” revealing parts of the original sculpture.