Ethik statt Moral?

Nachdenken über Handlungsräume der Kunst am Beispiel von Sklav*innenmonumenten

Abstract

In 2015, the Ark of Return monument, designed by Rodney Leon, was inaugurated in front of the UN headquarters in New York City. Almost 400 years earlier, the monument to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando I de’ Medici, was erected in Livorno. It coincided with the climax of the slave trade in the Mediterranean. The two monuments will be considered as a “constellation” which touches the opposite ends of a specific thread of (violent) history. Both monuments exemplify a larger corpus of (archi)sculptural works whose visibility nowadays is sensitized to the presence of black slave imagery in European urban spaces and its intertwining with the transatlantic slave trade. The concluding section seeks a possible theory of empathy that allows for the inclusion of historical positions on the ethical and sympathetic dimension of sculpture in urban public spaces.