Empty Columns Are a Place to Dream
 Empty Columns Are a Place to Dreamby Kolaj and Kasini HouseMonuments are ubiquitous on the landscape. Common and omnipresent, they blend into the background and go unnoticed until someone points them out. In recent years, monuments have become flashpoints of cultural controversy. It wasn’t that these monuments weren’t being seen, it’s that some people in the community weren’t hearing what others in the community were saying about them. In Empty Columns Are a Place to Dream, Ric Kasini Kadour unpacks what monuments are and their role in our communities. He takes the reader on a tour from the Megalithic Temples of Malta to Brú na Bóinne in Ireland to the Confederate monuments of Obion County, Tennessee to the empty column in the center of Birr, County Offaly, Ireland. Kadour asks us to consider monuments as sites of collective memory and as places to reflect upon history, even when that history is false or misleading. He then shows us what happens when collage artists reimagine these spaces as sites of truth and reconciliation.  Empty Columns Are a Place to Dream features the collages of eighteen artists from Austria, Belgium, Canada, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Poland, South Africa, the United States, and the United Kingdom made a series of collages that reimagined the empty column in the center of Birr, County Offaly, Ireland, which, from 1747 to 1915, commemorated the Duke of Cumberland’s 1745 victory over the Scots at Culloden, as 21st century beacons of hope and reconciliation. ABOUT THE BOOK Purchase the book from the publisher HERE |