Design and Culture | 2021
Public Reminiscence and Official Commemoration: The Paris Commune of 1871 and the Gezi Protests of 2013
Abstract
Abstract On Paris’ Montmartre hill, the visitor is confronted by a puzzling number of padlocks, objects of reminiscence left by individuals on the surrounding railings. As individual acts of reminiscence, these padlocks are indifferent to the historicized design materiality and the discursive space of the basilica, which oscillates between manifestations of Catholic piety in late nineteenth-century France and a grim reminder of the disproportionate suppression of the Commune of 1871. Sacré-Coeur offers a framework for understanding the rhetorical function of the commemorative practices connected with Turkey’s authoritarian AKP regime and its new mosques. They similarly set up a paradox between the manifestations of an oppressive political rhetoric – expressed through a historicized architectural style – and the individually driven cultural responses they provoke. This essay examines the amalgamation of these design materialities and politics, which, it suggests, are open to reinterpretation through group and individual actions that alter the way people experience monuments.