The Rights of Monuments

The Rights of Monuments was a ten-day workshop led by David Gissen in Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. The workshop explored acts and charters from the late eighteenth century to the present that attempt to either grant or negotiate protections to historical monuments. This includes charters and laws that protect monuments from wartime destruction; international agreements that govern the movement of monuments and artifacts across national borders, and other agreements that govern things such as copyright and the reproduction of monuments. Within the workshop students were introduced to "posthumanist" critiques of rights as a way to rethink the rights of monuments from both a critical and contemporary perspective. The ultimate goal of the workshop involved a group articulation of the rights of monuments based on this theoretical reconceptualization of the historical literature. The essay is an edited version of a lecture in which the author presented many of the concepts behind the workshop.