The Common Monument (Fabienne Sommer, Christoph Zingg)

In urban fabric, objects on the borders of indetermination and ambivalence are the mean carriers of our urban aspiration. Their openness leads to the transmission of a tension that produces a perception where spaces and things are again bearers of sense, mystery or soul. These objects are productive because they manage to creating ever new realities.

In our view, these monuments have a valour that cannot be estimated by a classical conservator’s eye aiming to preserve the substance of historic monuments nor abandoned to a self-referential machinery of speculation, which ascribes a certain valour to a place, a valour yet, which corresponds to an abstract price tag and which leads to a cool down in all emotional bindings. We try to prevent this machinery of determination. We would like to call our proceeding “subversive upgrading”. Our memories, thoughts and feelings are bound to places locatable on an inner map. Its social overlaps, connections and differences form and organize our cultural construct of society. Subversive revaluation is about the question whether there is a point of contact that intervenes in a manipulative way in the dynamics of these mechanisms. The strange status of a Common Monument is less the substance of the building as such than rather its elusiveness and mythical and social importance. The Common Monument is an anchor of our emotions. Since the poetic and irreducible element eludes de?nition, it protects the monument from being possessed or becoming property. Our task for the ?ve buildings presented above shall be to shape the qualities which unfold through the process of excessive rise of the subjective and, at the same time, to develop their characters out of visible and invisible structures. It shall not be our intention to seek an “original” meaning. It is about holding these places in a tension between memory and expectation, between grief and desire. We propose to rethink these non-protected buildings as an example of a Denkmalp?ege for and from „the common“. The everyday life is, according to our thesis, the ?rst thing which is repressed or locked out if economic interests have the priority in thinking and arguing. This is what makes the emotional relation to a site so dif?cult to ?nd. It was always our goal to suggest a new, maybe utopian use for these monuments that would ?ll the places with new memories or that would even only enable, from a very subjective perception, a broadly accessible discussion.