Guest lecture „Monument of Unlearning“ by Prof. Dr. Mona Schieren (Hochschule für Künste Bremen)

2 July 2025

On July 2, 2025, we are pleased to welcome Prof. Dr. Mona Schieren (Hochschule für Künste Bremen) for a lecture entitled "Monument of Unlearning" in Room 120 (ESA-W). This event is organized by Prof. Dr. Margit Kern and Fabian Röderer.

Abstract: 

The talk offers insights how Lygia Clark’s Structuring the Self, developed in 1976, can be reframed as a “monument of unlearning” and how it challenges the conventional view of monuments as fixed, commemorative public structures by enacting a political and spatial practice of embodied remembrance and transformation. Structuring the Self was directed to interested clients who were invited to the artist's apartment at the Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro, for hour-long one-on-one sessions. During these sessions, participants reclined on a mattress filled with polystyrene balls while Clark applied various Relational Objects to their bodies, including stones, shells, plastic bags, and pillows. The purpose was to stimulate the participants' imaginative abilities and help them create their expanded inner worlds as mutually created images, where the Relational Objects could be read as counter-monumental tools and as a connecting thread for diverse histories.

Within the broader project of confronting colonial and fascist legacies, Structuring the Self serves as a critical response. Brazilian public space of the time, heavily inscribed with the visual and symbolic of colonial rule and military dictatorship, raises the pressing question of how commemoration is possible within such charged terrains—making Clark’s turn from public realm to the intimate space of her apartment not only a withdrawal, but a powerful and necessary reconfiguration and a gesture of where and how memory can be held. However, it can also be viewed as her withdrawal from the international art system world and an attempt to create a creative space at the intersection of art and psychological care. By utilising the concept and methodology of ‘worlding’ Clark's decision is analysed to situate her work within the intimate space of her apartment rather than in a public or semi-public art space. This is linked to the political and therapeutic potential of Structuring the Self, which is seen here as partaking in what French psychologist and philosopher Félix Guattari named the “molecular revolution” in Brazilian public culture and psychological care at the end of the military dictatorship. Rather than fixing memory outwardly, Clark’s relational environments provoke histories without cementing them. In dialogue with contemporary counter-monument discourses – Clark’s work invites the participant into a political, transformative process that is reflexive and open-ended: a monument to unlearning rather than forgetting.

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