1. The Monument is the Struggle

Deptford People’s Heritage Museum and Goldsmiths Department of Visual Cultures investigate how histories of colonial dispossession and resistance register in the public realm.

The Monument is the Struggle plots routes to and from the Deptford Docks. Originally an important site in the history of violence waged against our communities, the Docks are currently under re-development, threatening significant changes to the area. In response, we are collaborating with local groups, schools, and community organisers to publicly explore experiences with and against the modes of domination shaped by colonisation, enslavement and the plantation. Unlike monuments focused on memorialisation of the past, with historian Walter Rodney, we understand ‘the present as history’. As such we highlight the inter-play between the struggles of the past, present and future in contemporary urban spaces.

The project comprises seven different routes, each one based on a study group who maps contemporary issues onto a deeper, conjunctural analysis of the forces that have shaped our current moment. Each route is indicated by a different colour on the map. Each point on the route indicates a place in the local area where we see and feel the way that historically transmitted relations of power have a concrete effect on our everyday lives. We mark these both online, and offline, through QR codes placed in the local area.

The routes are:

• Black Autonomous Spaces
• River Logistics, Plantation Imaginaries
• We are here… We are on the move
• Monumental Slang
• Andaiye Women’s Reading Group
• The Children’s Museum
• Carceral Logics of the East India Company

The Monument is the Struggle is developed in collaboration with Goldsmiths Departments of Visual Cultures and Goldsmiths Computing Department. It is funded by Untold Stories, part of the Mayor of London’s Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm and the Goldsmiths Anti-racism Student Fund.