The Monument and the Quarry: A Talk and a Walk in Four Epigraphs

If monuments hail passersby into relation, on what kinds of frequencies can we respond? Is the often remarked “invisibility” of monuments, which become overlooked parts of everyday landscapes, accompanied by an inaudibility in what Michel de Certeau called the “oceanic rumble of everyday life”? This talk looks to these questions as well as aspects of theatricality that haunt Western orientations to (ongoing) stone-based rituals of (ongoing) imperial triumph. Are de-colonial orientations to triumph and what Tiffany Lethabo King has called “conquistador subjectivity” also resident in stone? Are there other-wise ways of listening for what stone might say? Or, what is the quarry to the monument, and what does the quarry re-call?