Erica Cheung: Hi, Brendan! To start, will you tell us a bit about the overall concept behind your recent Black Cube fellowship project, New Monuments | Chicago? 

Brendan Fernandes: New Monuments | Chicago is a project about decolonizing and dismantling structures of hegemony through monuments. It seeks to challenge historical narratives and optics that are celebrated and put upon public colonial figures who are placed in positions of power and have had fickle pasts. In my practice, I ask questions about visibility.  

When I see many historic monuments, specifically in the United States or in colonial spaces like India, where I recently traveled to, I do not see a figure that represents me. I believe that monuments should support and be for all people, as well as explore the non-figurative. Through New Monuments | Chicago, I wanted to create a space where people could come together and generate dialogue in solidarity.   

EC: Your project was conceived of with the premise that future variations of the work will travel, engaging with other monuments throughout and beyond the United States. Because Black Cube is an organization known for its site-specific projects, I want to acknowledge the city of Chicago as the debut site for this project. Why did you choose to start with Chicago? 

BF: I wanted to start in Chicago because it’s my home city. I think there’s something really important about making changes in my own community, and in my own personal ‘backyard.’ Having the work be in a public space in a busy neighborhood, I was hoping to attract people from the area to come and read the didactics about my ideas; to stop, think, and contemplate. This project also happened during EXPO CHICAGO, an art fair that brought an influx of people from the art world to the city. 

EC: The Logan Monument, which is a focal point of New Monuments | Chicago, was inaugurated in 1897 to commemorate a figure born in 1826. It has stood in Grant Park ever since. The seeds of New Monuments | Chicago, in turn, started when you joined Black Cube’s Artist Fellowship in 2022. Your project took over a year to produce, and then opened to the public April 10—13, 2024. The sculptural intervention went up, there was an evening performance and the circulation of a community prompt, and everything was deinstalled shortly after. I'm curious what you make of these two very different lifespans: a permanent statue, which has been around for over a century, being engaged by your project, which was temporary but has future potential. 

BF: There was so much process to the project that started years before. Ideating a project at this scale meant there were a lot of things that went into making it happen—collaborating with Black Cube for aspects such as permits from the Chicago Park District, and working together with our other community partners to further engagement. Though I wish the project had been up longer, I wanted the architectural structure of scaffolding and mirrors on the monument to create a moment of fracture where people could both physically appreciate the aesthetics of the work and see themselves in it. Long term, I want visitors to think and reflect on the histories of monuments and how they need to be challenged, considered, and changed. For me, a monument should not be a monolith or a singular figurative object.

EC: Even though it was open to the public for such a short span of time, New Monuments | Chicago was clearly impactful; it drew people in to stop and engage in one way or another. One thing I really love about your practice is that it's often this kind of invitation to gather. All three parts of New Monuments | Chicago, for example, asked people to come together, whether to see the physical installation in a downtown public park, or to attend a performance to witness new monument figurations in the making, or to contribute to your community prompt. Where does this impulse to be in community with others, and to bring others alongside one another, come from? 

BF: I think this impulse comes from wanting to find a way of making a better world, and to form a kind of social solidarity where people can break down binaries and find ways of being inclusive of each other. I think monuments can create division, because they’re often supposed to celebrate a singular figure—when instead we need to support and celebrate the community at large. Whether this means all of us coming together and dancing, or watching a performance, or being there for social programming, it’s all about investing in people. This means that the ‘monument’ is actually us being in a space and challenging it. 

EC: I'd like to take a moment to highlight each of the different components of New Monuments | Chicago—starting with the sculptural intervention that surrounded the Logan Monument. I'm curious to know more about the structure, and what it was like working with an architecture firm—AIM Architecture—to realize it. I know you've worked with scaffolding before. 

BF: Yes, scaffolding has become a material of choice for me in my installation work. I have used it in many pieces such as “Master and Form” (Graham Foundation 2017 and Whitney Biennial 2019), where it acts not only as a sculpture, but also as a tool for dancers to play within. I like scaffolding, as it is a readymade material that we see in our everyday life, and a material that suggests a space in flux and in transition. In New Monuments | Chicago, scaffolding placed the Logan Monument in a liminal position: was the statue of Logan being taken down or was it being supported and taken care of?  Furthermore, the mirrored material obscured the visuality of the figure of General Logan. By doing this, we see things differently—a breakdown of the figure in its visual sensibility, but also in the reflections of people walking around it or the environment in its proximity. This questions and gives space to the future narratives and asks of us: who, what, and how can one be the monument.

Working with AIM Architecture meant having an architecture firm’s expertise, and their knowledge of what is and isn’t possible. New Monuments | Chicago changed significantly over time—first it was supposed to be a hanging garden, but we didn’t have the time. Then I suggested looking at scaffolding, and then the mirrors came in. It was a lot of collaboration and conversation, an exchange in understanding how to design something tangible. 

EC: Turning to the performance—why was it important for you to bring movement to the monument? Can you walk us through some of the choices you made as you choreographed and put the performance together? 

BF: I use dancers in action to build with each other to become a moving monument that breathes and is ever changing. The performance’s time of day was really important, because in U.S. cities, monuments have often been removed during the protection of night. Performing at night was about raising questions of visibility and invisibility—who’s being seen, how are we seen, how are we heard. I collaborated with dancers, a lighting designer, a sound designer, and a costume designer—all to build a big production, which was exciting and important for me. 

EC: I'm curious about the directions or prompts that you gave your group of dancers, in anticipation of the performance. How did you communicate to them what you were envisioning? 

BF: We played a lot during rehearsals. I gave the dancers questions and prompts about how to form a monument with their body, and I offered tasks and motifs to expand on. Moving forward, being seen, and building and dismantling were a big part of our vocabulary. There were games of call and response—moments where the dancers would play with flashlights, create pulsations, call to each other, and move together then apart. There were moments of building and supporting each other’s bodies to create gestures. 

EC: To round out the parts of New Monuments | Chicago: your community prompt, "How can we become the monument?" invited a whole range of responses. Some are passionate, some are funny, some are serious. What do you make of those responses? Are there any that stick out? 

BF: I'm still going through them all, but I think that there are so many that are very poetic and real and vulnerable.  The responses that intrigue me are the ones with people really releasing their fears and joys—thinking about what the future could be, what monuments can be, and how we support and build space for them. 

EC: How are you imagining future iterations of New Monuments? You've mentioned that not every single monument intervention will look the same, and I’d love to know how the series might grow and change. 

BF: I’m currently thinking through a film looking at monuments that have been taken down. I'm thinking about a text piece from the community prompt responses. I'm thinking about a longer-term hanging garden that grows over a monument. I'm hoping to do these not just in the United States, but perhaps in Canada as well. In my work, I want to educate people about history, while at the same time critique and question why we choose to have figurative monuments, and to think about what future “monuments” that support and make visible a diverse community will look like. The balance is definitely delicate, but one that needs to happen.