Immaterial Monuments, Narrative Inequality and Glocal Social Work. Towards Critical Participatory Community Art-Based Practices


 The aim of this study is to ask critical questions about the immaterial narrative force of monuments and social justice related to place and space, and to develop an interdisciplinary, participatory, art-based methodology for the study of narrative inequality in glocal social work. The study begins with the glocal turn in social work, a condition characterised by a critical understanding of the interlinked and intersectional localities within a world perspective, theoretically and methodologically reshaped towards space, the arts, architecture and interdisciplinary practice-based collaborations. It develops participatory art as a tool for dialogue and critical spatial practice in urban environment by drawing upon critical scholarship on participatory art projects and the author’s experiences as a guest participant within the project ‘Immaterial Monuments’ in the Western Balkans. Experiences from this project are used as a catalyst to illustrate and discuss how participatory community art and social sculpture, with illustrations from photography and poetry, are useful for visualising the language of narrative inequality. The study argues that the question of how immaterial monuments reflect the worldviews and dominant narratives of privileged elites restrict spaces for marginalised people, and that glocal social work research, education and practice needs to promote anti-discriminatory and social justice perspectives through the critical study of immaterial monuments.


Introduction: Immaterial monuments and narrative inequality
'There is nothing in the world so invisible as a monument' read the much-quoted words of Musil (1936Musil ( /1987. I first encountered this citation when I was invited as a guest participant to the interdisciplinary project 'Visualize the Invisible', in which artists, architects, art-historians, sociologists and social work scholars worked together on the theme 'Immaterial Monuments' in Skopje, Macedonia, in 2014. The project made use of dialogue, installations, city walks and performance to 'stimulate a wider discussion about the impact of the arts on societal change' (Alfreds and Å berg, 2014, p. 12). This form of collaborative practice illustrates what Appadurai (2013, p. 279) refers to as collaborative frameworks for 'creative action, artistic action and political action', to promote discussions about what research is and how new questions can be asked.
The etymology of the word monument derives from Latin moneo, monere, which means to remind, to advise or to warn. Thus, when monuments 'speak', their embodied presence symbolises events from the past for the purpose of collective remembrance. In her study of the commemoration of the South African war (1899)(1900)(1901)(1902), Stanley (2006, p. 219) shows that there is an 'activity of memory in monuments' that promotes a post/memory process over time. Dragi cevi c Se si c (2016) describes how monument policy shapes such collective national remembrance by creating specific spaces for mourning and celebrating heroes, a process that privileges specific events and memories over others.
In this study, I suggest that Plummer's (2019) terminology 'narrative inequality' is useful to help us understand how complex relationships of elite power are produced through stories generated by the way in which monuments speak. Stories in public space produce cultural power, by means of which they create social exclusion or social inclusion and belonging. Plummer (2019, p. 71) defines a number of inequality criteria for modes of analysing inclusion and exclusion through stories. These can be identified by questions in relation to diverse situated locations. Economic location relates to poor/rich and the production of work narratives, ethnicity/racialisation relates to black/white, which produces ethnic narratives, etc. Societies are structured by forms of narrative inequality and narrative domination is made possible by hierarchical structuring at various levels of societies. In Plummer's (2019, p. 66) words, narrative inequalities have an 'infrastructure', which can be visualised through 'the power of institutions (e.g. governance, economy, religion), culture (e.g. media and digital), location (class, race, gender, etc.), and everyday situations (workplace, families).' I argue that such infrastructures of power inequalities can be empirically studied through the immaterial force of monuments. Monuments have a history of speaking from positions of privilege in the voices of elite, often white, men, which tends to exclude the histories of women and minority groups (Dwyer and Alderman, 2008;Dragi cevi c Se si c, 2016; Moraistis and Rassia, 2019). As installations in the architecture of public space, monuments often play a role in the narrative power of governance. They impact upon the well-being of people and in the creating of what Lamb (2014, p. 109) calls 'spatial expectations of use'. Dwyer and Alderman (2008, p.168) write: Because memorials typically reflect the values and worldviews of government leaders and members of the dominant class -who else has the social capital to install such costly tokens? -they tend to exclude the histories of minority and subaltern groups or appropriate these histories for elite purposes.
Research shows that spatial manifestations of statues, which are often placed in central locations in cities, have consequences for a human rights-based approach to the city as seen through intersecting locations of class, race, gender and able-bodiedness. The critique of social movements directed against regimes for their lack of democracy and social justice is expressed through protest and collective manifestations for democratisation and social change, for example, riots in city suburbs (Schierup et al., 2014) and counter-monuments to address racial injustice (Osborne, 2017). As research in geography and architecture portrays, the demand for social justice by social movements is expressed through protests against racism and colonialism and the demand for the removal of certain statues as a representation of political ruling, violence, war and oppression (Dwyer and Alderman, 2008;Moraistis and Rassia, 2019).
Throughout history, protests against oppressive regimes and calls for democratisation and social justice have included the destruction of monuments and the creating of counter-monuments; people find new ways to make use of monuments, and sometimes use their human bodies as a contemporary monument for protest (Dwyer and Alderman, 2008;Livholts, 2014;Dragi cevi c Se si c, 2016;Osborne, 2017). A current example is the #BlackLivesMatter movement and people against racism who protest across the USA and Europe, demanding the removal of statues of slave owners and representatives of racist ideologies. #BlackLivesMatter was founded in 2013 as a response to the murder of Trayvon Martin and has become a global movement to end racism and promote intersectional equality. The death of George Floyd, an African American man who was killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota on 25 May 2020, became the trigger for increased protests, which included demands for the removal of statues that represent a history of violence and oppression against black people. In Richmond, Virginia, the Robert E. Lee monument was removed in June 2020, and replaced with a statue of civil rights leader Barbara Johns who, as a sixteen-year-old, defied school segregation in Virginia in 1951, and in London a statue of Robert Milligan was removed from outside the Museum of London Docklands (The Guardian, 2020;BBC, 2020). In Sweden, a petition was initiated that demanded the removal of statues of Carl von Linné (See Figure 1) due to his categorisation and stereotyping of humans into different races. The argument of the petition was that, in the future, the entire story of his legacy should be told, in society, in education and in literature, including his dehumanisation of indigenous people and promoting the values of white supremacy, which became a norm in Europe and other parts of the world (SVT, 2020).
These protests can be understood as resistance and counter narratives in response to narrative inequalities and dehumanisation. As Plummer (2019, pp. 72-73) writes: 'The narrative self writes itself through an awareness of others. [. . .] It is this connection to others that is central to locating ourselves as being human.' Against the background of the complex power of stories and their relevance for social work as a human rights profession that encounters increasing injustices within and between countries (Healy, 2017), I argue that there is a need for social work to critically engage with the question of how monuments can exercise institutional, cultural and locational power that contributes to sustaining inequality. The aim of this study is to ask critical questions about the immaterial narrative force of monuments and social justice related to place and space, and to develop an interdisciplinary participatory community arts methodology for the study of narrative inequality in glocal social work. How can interpretations of the ways in which monuments contribute to narrative inequality be acknowledged as a question for social work in the context of contemporary structural transformations of societies? What is the potential for participatory community art to be used for the study of immaterial monuments and narrative inequality to promote social justice? In the next section, I develop a contextual framework for this study by positioning it within the glocal turn in social work and the emergent interest in critical spatial practices.

The glocal turn in social work and critical spatial practices
This study begins with the notion that changes in conceptualising social work across the international, transnational, global and, during the last decade, the glocal, mirror a paradigmatic shift that is re-shaping the discipline. In discussing the term 'glocality ', Steger (2010, p. 2) writes that it signals 'a possible future condition that, like all social conditions, will ultimately give way to new constellations.' Arguably, the glocal future of social work is intimately intertwined with an awareness of multiple structural transformations at a global scale and sustainability challenges such as ecologies, economies, social divisions and inequalities at more local scales. The interdisciplinarity of glocal social work brings with it transgressions and interdisciplinary collaborations with disciplines such as architecture, the arts and human geography. Disputes about the genealogy of glocalisation show that the inspiration comes from both the media and Japanese business in the late 1980s, but also from the arts through the exhibition of Benking's Rubik's Cube of Ecology in Germany in the early 1990s (Livholts and Bryant, 2017). Publications on glocalisation that address issues of welfare and social work appeared first at the beginning of the 2010s in a Chinese and Russian context (Hong and Song, 2010;Romanov and Kononeko, 2014). We see an increasing interest in glocal social work illustrated in two theme issues of the European Journal of Social Work in 2017 (Lyons and May-Chahal, 2017), and Community Development Journal (Sudmann and Breivik, 2018), followed by two books that provide a broader framework to understand the emergence of glocalisation as transformative questions, methods and responses (Livholts and Bryant, 2017), and social work history and compressed modernity (Harrikari and Rauhala, 2019). The first comprehensive interdisciplinary collection in this field, Social Work in a Glocalised World (Livholts and Bryant, 2017), brings together scholarship from diverse localities within and across countries, including Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Africa and Sweden. These show how glocalisation offers a theoretical tool for identifying emerging social welfare issues related to environmental destruction, violence, migration and visual images, but also a methodological reshaping towards emotion and space, alongside creative writing and community art as responses aiming to produce 'third spaces' and 'third figures' (e.g. Gordon, 2017;Tascon, 2017;Turunen, 2017).
Glocalisation critiques the abstract notion of globalisation and visualises the range of interconnectivities at work in local practices of social work with people, in place and space, as well as creative and transgressive interprofessional practices with community artists, cultural workers and city planners (Livholts and Bryant, 2017). Such interprofessional collaborations have also been identified by Kester (2011, p. 7) as part of the paradigmatic shift in the arts through 'an increasing permeability between "art" and other zones of symbolic production (urbanism, environmental activism, social work, etc.)'. Spacek (2012, p. 1) has formulated how the re-shaping of social work is linked with: 'Spatial sensitivity and reflection [which] allows a multi-level understanding of social spaces beyond individualistic, clinical and single-case oriented concepts of social work.' Glocal social work actualises such a multi-level understanding of spaces that allows researchers, educators, students and communities to engage in critical spatial awareness through diverse forms of collaborative arts-based practices. The glocal context of this study is monuments in urban space. Bryant and Williams (2020, p. 327) write that social work has always been attentive to space but nowhere: [. . .] is this more evident than in an era of unprecedented urbanisation. Social workers are active in reconceptualising care and support in the evolving dynamic of city spaces, countering negative dispositions of disadvantaged areas, advocating against hostile architecture and inserting care values into emergent collaborative endeavour.
An increasing actuality of the globalisation of social problems and rapidly changing conditions of life circumstances that force people to move from their home regions within or across countries is one of the questions of central concern to social work. As the editors of the theme issue, 'A World on the Move', in the British Journal of Social Work (Williams and Graham, 2014: il) describe this contemporary situation: Across the world, people are on the move -international students, highly skilled workers, economic migrants, retirees, refugees, nomads, those within global care chains and those whose unauthorised status leave them vulnerable to all sorts of human rights violations, including slavery.
To work for equality, human rights and the worth and dignity of all people are core mandates for social work research and professional practice. There is evidence of socioeconomic marginalisation, hostility and dehumanisation through various forms of exploitation of asylum seekers and refugees, and social work has a responsibility to act against such degradation (Healy, 2017;Williams and Graham, 2014). This perspective is of increasing relevance for social work in relation to the contributions from studies of social space focusing on marginalisation and poverty, privilege and the displacement of marginalised people (cf. Bryant and Williams, 2020). Indeed, as Lamb (2014, p. 112) shows, architecture 'induces a normative conception of movement in the urban environment. Through habitual use of space architecture becomes a medium through which power is communicated and uncritically accepted.' In social work, scholarship has drawn attention to inequalities related to socio-spatial conditions. Spacek's (2012) socio-spatial approach for solidarity is relevant to how monuments shape living conditions for people in glocal settings by their narrative power of inclusion or exclusion. As a dialogical, practice-based activity, Spacek (2012, p. 1) suggests that collaborative social space work can promote collaboration across three areas of the public realm: '-Individual perspectives of citizens and residents, -Administrative perspectives of social services, public administration, schools and health care organisations, and -Town planners and architectural perspectives around planning and development of buildings and public infrastructure.' The socio-spatial perspective in social work has also been taken up by Turunen (2017) as a community work response to glocal segregation and vulnerability. Turunen draws attention to the relationship between urbanisation and socio-spatial marginalisation and visualises how social work plays a significant role in relation to other disciplines such as architecture, design and human geography for promoting understandings of the social dimensions of space. Turunen (2017, p. 173) argues that the concept of 'thirdspace', which 'combines a three-sided interplay of spatiality-historicity-sociality', is useful for this purpose. In the next section, I present some of the main departures and some key examples of how critically socially engaged participatory community art can be used as a tool for dialogue and social change in glocal social work.

Participatory community art as a tool for dialogue and social change
In this section, I draw upon critical scholarship of socially engaged participatory community art (e.g. Kester, 2011;Bishop, 2012), alongside my own experiences drawn from the interdisciplinary collaboration in the participatory art project 'Immaterial Monuments' in Skopje, Macedonia 2014 (Livholts, 2014). The main source for making use of my own example is a selection of artistic publications in the book 'Visualize the Invisible' (Alfreds and Å berg, 2014), which together with exhibitions and performances constituted the outcome of the project conducted in Sweden, Croatia, Macedonia and Albania during 2013-2014. The project 'Immaterial Monuments' can be positioned as relational art, new public genre art and community art (Asp, 2014). These artistic genres are diverse and overlapping, but an important common characteristic is that they emphasise the processes, encounters and interactions between participants, artist and audience, and not the artwork as such. Kester (2011) states that the collective and collaborative social art practices that emerged during the last few decades constitute a diverse field of artists and art groups, within which activities by activists, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and urban planners often overlap.
Socially engaged art practices challenge established forms of art criticism. Bishop (2012) describes how the re-orientation towards art as a social participatory process is characterised by the construction of situations and long-term projects with indefinite beginnings or endings. Bishop (2012) uses the example of Liisa Roberts' long-term art project, 'What's the Time in Vyborg?', located in the small Russian city of Vyborg on the Finnish-Russian border to illustrate this challenge. Roberts' project was created as a collaboration between the artist and six teenage girls who conducted workshops, exhibitions, films and theatrical events. The social characteristic of this project is linked to the question of time, focusing on how the residents of Vyborg have perceived their personal re-identification in the context of the conflictual war-history territories of Finland and Russia. Bishop (2012, pp. 18-19) notes how this project challenged established art criticism due to its aim to 'facilitate the creation of a temporary community engaged in the process of solving a series of practical problems'.
Another illustration of a participatory art project with a human rights and social justice agenda is Dragi cevi c Se si c's (2016) example from the artist Jochen Gertz, who conducted several participatory art projects focusing on Germany's negative past and cultural shame related to the country's war history. One example is the three-year collaborative counter-monument artwork that Gertz conducted with students from Saar College of Visual arts. Based on interviews with Jewish communities, a list of all the cemeteries that existed in Germany before the Second World War was created. The names of these cemeteries were engraved on the underside of pavement stones in the boulevard in front of Saarbrucken palace. This collaborative artwork illustrates the creating of an invisible counter-monument, which today is known as 'Monument against racism'.
The participatory art project 'Immaterial Monuments' in Skopje, Macedonia, was inspired by the work of Joseph Beys' 'social sculpture' (see Beuys and Harlan, 2004;Alfreds and Å berg, 2017), and set out to use art to deconstruct hierarchical structures and promote democratisation processes by means of communicative practices through dialogue and conversations. As Alfreds and Å berg (2017, p. 165) write: '"the immaterial material", as thoughts and conversation, are sculptural material used to bridge gaps within society as well as transfer knowledge through cultural barriers.' This requires openness, a willingness to communicate and to build trusting relationships within the group. With this transformation of art-based practice towards social processes there follows a question (Asp, 2014, p. 8): '"Where is the actual work?" What kind of questions and further conversations does it lead to?' The project 'Immaterial Monuments' has attracted critical discussion due to Macedonia's monument policy to construct museums, government buildings and monuments, a majority depicting war heroes and political leaders (Milevska, 2014;Stefoska and Stojanov, 2017). During the city walk that we conducted as part of the participatory art project in Skopje, I was struck by the stark contrast between the stone, bronze and golden monuments, erected in central locations such as squares and parks, against the visible poverty and run-down housing blocks. Most of the monuments embodied men, sitting in chairs, or on horseback, sometimes guarded by lions (see, for example, Figures 3 and 4 in this article). I reflected on Musil's (1936Musil's ( /1987. 1) words: 'There is nothing in the world so invisible as a monument.' How could these giants in public space remain invisible, and to whom? During the project, art historian Suzana Milevska (Livholts, 2014, p. 34) addressed this question. As the presence of monuments becomes part of the architecture of people's everyday lives, so as we walk past them, they mostly remain unnoticed. Another aspect is that monuments now have competition from visual digital culture and images in urban spaces. However, as Osborne (2017, p. 170) shows in her study of monuments such as the Lee-Jackson confederate monument in Baltimore, erected in 1948 and depicting two of the most well-known confederate 'war heroes' during the battle of Chancellorsville 1863, specific events of violence and death can be the starting point of counter-monumental acts. Following the death of Eddie Grey in Baltimore in 2015, the Black Lives Matter groups protested and, in the same year, the local artist Pablo Machioli created a '10-feet tall statue of a topless, pregnant African American woman with a baby in a sling on her back' [. . .] Her left hand is raised in a clenched fist that is painted gold, and around her legs is a white skirt on which passers-by were invited to inscribe messages of their choosing; photographs of the statue depict hand-written statements like 'down with white power,' 'love is triumphant,' and 'this new purpose is so great!' In the aftermath of this event, the counter-monument was removed and racialised threats were made. The installation and public engagement via this countermonument demonstrates the intimate relationship between dominance in material culture and narrative inequality.
During a workshop as part of the project 'Immaterial monuments', we discussed the role of counter-monuments and social change through protest and visualisation via demonstrations, performances and re-namings (of streets), to address silenced stories, exclusion, lack of influence, poverty and other inequalities. One example brought up how protesting after a murder could mean arranging a march, protesting in front of government buildings, prints of letters of protest or drawing a silhouette of a person's body on the ground. Another example we discussed was how unemployed people demanded the right to work and visualised their situation by setting up camp in a park in the city, visualising how the life dynamics of protesting groups creates spaces for 'monuments in transition' (Livholts, 2014, p. 35). Participatory community art actualises a number of concerns about relations of power and ethics of change within and beyond the collaborative collective of participants. As Kester (2011, p. 4) argues, the term collaboration has an ambivalence built into it, through associations such as 'working together' and 'united labor' set against 'collaboration as betrayal' and coercive consensus. This tension reflects dynamic relations of power between the collective and the individual in participatory art. Kester (2011) suggests that the concept of the third artist opens up a space for creative labour that responds to these ambivalences. There are limitations to how artists, academics and activists can engage in critical practices and promote social change, particularly in marginalised communities and spaces. The project 'Immaterial Monuments' consisted of participants with diverse positions, knowledge and aims in our work situations outside the project. We had different disciplinary belongings, theoretical and professional education and specific regional knowledge among the group of architects and art historians from the region, socialwork NGOs, social work(ers) from Sweden and Albania and artists who worked with different forms of arts-based practices. Leavy (2017) emphasises that relational ethics in community-based research are promoted by researchers' active interest, correct information, integrity, being caring and using non-judgmental language. A central ethical concern in the project 'Immaterial monuments' was to build trusting relationships among participants in order to promote the interdisciplinary basis for collaboration and to encourage respectful practices in relation to the public spaces of monuments that we visited, discussed and documented. This also included ensuring that photographs and written material in the publication did not include stereotyping or judgemental language or images. As a social work scholar who had worked with creative and narrative life writing before this collaboration, I experienced it as open and dialogical. The creative learning process included interdisciplinary group activities in diverse settings, both indoors and outdoors. We made use of various forms of interaction for our conversations in order to share experiences and knowledge, for example, communicating via creating collages out of different coloured paper, sharing photographs from city walks and writing. I learned to understand the community-based practices of social sculpture in the creative learning process and found that my knowledge and skills learned in the research and education of social work, the commitment to critical self-reflexivity and creative writing could be shared and developed in this alternative third space (cf. Gordon, 2017). The process of working with participatory community art as a tool for dialogue and change can be illustrated with the following model from Å berg (2014, p. 17, 2017, p. 157).
In the concluding part of this section, I will build further on my own experiences of 'Immaterial Monuments' (Livholts, 2014) to illustrate how poetry and photography can be used in participatory community art. Using diverse genres of writing, such as poetry, alongside photography, is a methodology that Ulmer (2018) calls slow writing. Slow writing promotes attention to the details, scenes and experiences of everyday life. The photographic practice can be turned towards experiences that have evoked the attention of the photographer/writer. Ulmer (2018) describes how going slower means practising reading, listening and responding to events and the environment in the local community. Photographing during the project was sometimes conducted in the group, partly with cameras that could print the photo immediately after the photographing. I also photographed using my mobile and wrote the poetry in direct relation to the photographing while I was in Skopje in 2014. Some of my photos are published in the book Visualize the Invisible (Livholts, 2014), but I no longer have access to all of these. So, for this study, I collected images from Wikimedia Commons and Flickr, which were freely accessible, to provide visual images of monuments. I chose photographs of monuments that made the strongest impression on me during Skopje 2014 with regard to inequality and power. In the next paragraph, I present the poetic-photographic methodology and illustrations from the working process, including a set of questions that I suggest can be used as inspiration for readers who wish to work with this methodology.
Poetry constitutes a growing field in qualitative narrative social science and social work research (Gunaratnam, 2007;Livholts, 2019Livholts, , 2021. McCulliss (2013) writes that there are many uses of poetry, such as viewing and writing up data, and employing sensory and empathetic perspectives. Poetry has a transformative potential to create what Leavy (2015) calls a 'third voice' for the voicing of experiences that are otherwise difficult to express. Indeed, as Lorde (1984, p. 37) states: 'Poetry is the way we help to give name to the nameless, so it can be thought.' In my own work, I have made use of poetry for the purpose of performative illustrations of power, among other things by writing about the complex relationship to the power relations of class, gender and whiteness demonstrated by immaterial symbols such as a professor's chair, snow angels and water (Livholts, 2019). Chamberlain (2015, p. 3) argues that poetry is useful for promoting sensory awareness and creating radical meeting places: [. . .] sensory awareness unto the world, including the world of poetry, in order to grasp and intermingle with it. Experience and perception offer an ontological point of departure from which to approach the radical meeting places where poetry, in writing and song, proves problematic for authority both legitimate and illegitimate and where poetry awakens readers and listeners to action in a public domain.
As much as poetry is a practice of writing, it is also a practice of reading and reflexive thinking that opens up space for multiple interpretations and emotions (Livholts, 2019(Livholts, , 2021. I suggest that McCulliss' (2013, p. 89) set of analytical questions for working with poetry, together with a concluding question that I created inspired by narrative inequality (Plummer, 2019), are useful as inspiration to work with poetry in participatory community art collaborations: Photography is widely used within the social sciences, and its uses for participatory art are excellent. Photography is in itself a form of material and immaterial practice to put into use when considering how monuments speak (Livholts, 2014, p. 33). Making use of photography means being engaged in the subjective acts of seeing and narrating. The practice of photographing can be understood as acting as an 'interruptive agent' (Livholts, 2019, p. 40) who reminds the viewer of another time and situation. Berger (1972, p. 10) states that: 'Every image embodies a way of seeing', and therefore it situates and locates the viewer and the item/object/person/landscape/scene in a complex relationship of seeing, feeling and remembrance. In a similar way as poetry engages through reading, so do photographs, by actualising multiple ways of seeing and the relationship between the photographer and monuments. Inspired by Berger's (1972) and McCulliss' questions related to poetry, I constructed the following set of analytical questions to work with photography as participatory community art:  (Livholts, 2014, p. 31)

Concluding reflections
In this study, I have invited readers to engage with the question of why and how the immaterial narrative force of monuments is a question for social work. I argue that, for social work, a glocal discipline that promotes social justice, the human rights, dignity and worth of individuals and equal access to public space, the immateriality of monuments is an important question across research, education and society. I have taken my point of departure in the transformative process of glocalisation that is reshaping social work with renewed questions, interdisciplinary theories and practices for the study of power and subordination, privilege and resistance (Livholts and Bryant, 2017). By developing forms of working with critical spatial practices, it is possible to gain a better understanding of the contemporary challenges of inequality for social work, including physical, material and emotional spaces (cf. Bryant and Williams, 2020;Livholts 2021).
I suggest that participatory community art, guided by the principal ideas of social sculpture (Beuys and Harlan, 2004), can be used for critical anti-discriminatory and social justice practices in order to build interdisciplinary working constellations and to communicate with politicians and city planners. Kester's (2011, p. 6) analysis of dominant political narratives shows that, even if they 'explain and justify social and economic inequality', they can be challenged through demands for equal opportunities and fair distribution, and as a result alternative visions of the future can be created. Tamboukou (2015) describes how the dominant ideas of narrative coherence are challenged by fragmentation and the viewpoints of marginalised subjects. What we remember, how we remember, the suppression of memory and forgetting, and how moments, events and situations from the past influence our present and future is a complex and on-going process saturated by the diversity of worldviews by which narrative inequalities are structured through intersections of locations (see also Plummer, 2019). The immaterial power of monuments to remain invisible is forceful in the imaginary of a 'heroic' past, but resistance and counternarratives demand that multiple voices and perspectives are heard, as the anti-racist movements for human rights currently demonstrate (Osborne, 2017).
I have drawn upon my experiences as a guest participant in the project 'Immaterial Monuments' of 2014. The history of Skopje and Macedonia is saturated by struggles over territory, domination by empires, the First and Second World Wars and an earthquake in 1963, which have all shaped the lives of the people and the architecture of this city. The project Skopje 2014, created by the Macedonian government, consisted principally of the construction of museums and government buildings, as well as monuments, most of them depicting historical figures, war heroes and influential men. The project has, among other things, been subjected to critique for constructing a nationalist history and for the huge cost of building monuments in an area with high levels of unemployment and poverty. Stefoska and Stojanov (2017) show in their analysis how the official aim of unifying ethnic Macedonians through Skopje 2014 has in reality created political, intra-ethnic and intra-cultural divisions in an already fragile Macedonian society. Milevska (2014) critiques the monuments as an artistic expression in Skopje 2014, and the way in which it has been used as a political tool for national identity at a time when new and critical discourses on counter-monuments, monuments in waiting and participatory monuments are being debated across Europe. It is important to say that, although Skopje 2014 constitutes a specific example, it is not my intention to merely emphasise it as a special case, but rather to draw attention to how my own participation in this project raised awareness of the actuality of the question for social work. Monuments have an immaterial life in glocal sites across the world. My focus in this article is limited to examples of monuments that speak from sites of privileged power. The current critique by the global #BlackLivesMatter movement raises awareness of the problem of how narrative inequality related to postcolonial perspectives on white privilege matters, including in Sweden. The colonial past and postcolonial present of the Nordic countries is not often discussed in social work research, although a historical perspective reveals both the occupation of land and distant colonialism through missionary work (Ranta-Tyrkkö , 2011). The establishment of the Race biological institute in Sweden in the 1910s and the structural discrimination against people such as the Sá mi minority, the Romany and people with an immigrant background is part of Swedish history. Schierup et al. (2014, p. 332) express this dynamic of social and spatial inequality in the following way: When the intersection of social and spatial inequality becomes conceptualized as a subjective experience, expressed in visions of the need to recapture denied subjectivity through self-awareness and collective struggle, then politics of belonging are in the making.
As shown in this study, participatory community art can be practised through a range of different forms to promote collaborative creative learning and communication through group work, interaction and dialogue. In addition to the three lead words: exploration, commitment and self-awareness presented in Figure 2, I would like to emphasise critical spatial practices and analytical reflexivity related to privilege, power and marginalisation. Anti-discriminatory and social justice perspectives for future interdisciplinary collaborations among social work(ers), artists, architects, art historians, human geographers and city planners will play an important role by asking critical questions and conducting empirical studies about the life of immaterial monuments, in order to better understand narrative inequality and social change.
article and the anonymous reviewer for constructive comments to an earlier version of the article.
Conflict of Interest: The author has no conflict of interest to declare.