Humans always find an excuse to create a monument commemorating a person, object, event, or theory. Monuments have been here for centuries. Since the days we praise to the gods to commemorating loved ones we lost in war. As we develop as a society, many now see that memorials are changing their meanings such as the statue of Christopher Columbus as a murder than the leader of the exploration era. For our second to last project in Integrative Studio, we had to make a monumental intervention with a collective in the class , which basically is changing or adding any form of media to a monument to bring more meaning to what it truly is with a group in our class, which I had Dima and Andy. At first, initially as a group, we thought about choosing monuments that were going to be destroyed by politics such as the Grand Staircase – Escalante national monument, which is still currently at risk by Donald Trump. But then I threw the idea out about a monument I personal know, which was Stone Mountain. Stone Mountain, Georgia is home to world’s largest Confederate monument. It is engraved into this very large dome like mountain granite which is called Stone Mountain. It is home to the KKK and many groups of white extremist. The Confederate Memorial Carving, depicts three Confederate figures of the Civil War, President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. Many see the memorial as a symbol of white supremacy, racism, and slavery. We decided that we wanted to add a modern touch by creating 3 gifs representing different ideas of what the memorial represented. Stone mountain has these laser shows that are projected onto the memorial, so we interpreted that into making gifs. Gifs were created by our generation of people so that the fact that we created these gifs, it was a way to connect to people our age but add a sense of humor by making it into an animation. Overall this project, was very tedious but fun at the same time. At times there were problems of communication within working together in a group but we were able to spread out the work evenly and be able to create what we did. It’s interesting to see as time goes by that we change the meanings and morals of so many items such as monuments. In my opinion, even though some memorials or monuments are changing its meanings, it’s still a reminder of our history and even though it might seem praised.
