Digital Ghost Debris (VGC) Digital 3D Object (AR view), The Tides of Monumental Gesture, LUAN Gallery, 2024
In Ireland, after independence, the relics of empire became anomalies in the urban landscape, asserting obsolete hierarchies and power relations. In this context, acts of destruction—defacing, toppling, or dismantling the monuments of British rule—became symbolic signifying strategies. Through these acts, public spaces dominated by the old order could be reimagined and repurposed.
István László is interested in how these acts can reconfigure physical and imaginative territories. Using surviving archival photo and film documentation, László has produced a number of digital models of the removed imperial monuments, recreating at the point of their disassembly, including the monument to Queen Victoria, abandoned in the courtyard of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. László is interested not in celebrating these historical figures but in the transitory states of monuments, pausing to consider what happens at the moment of their removal. How do we address toxic histories? What do we do with the physical remains and the invisible traces?
During a site-specific participatory process at IMMA in the summer of 2023, László worked with visiting groups and individuals to explore these digital models (virtual monuments) in situ through augmented reality, examining them in the surroundings of their disposal, the courtyard and formal gardens of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. Inspired by recent protest actions and mass defacements that have accompanied the removal of monuments internationally, participants were invited to make their own interventions into these historically charged forms.
In Digital Ghosts Debris (QV), the participant's interventions have been incorporated as a skin on the digital model, which is available to view and take away on your phone as a moveable monument. Use the QR code below to obtain your own virtual model. No longer able to assert their dominance, the fragmented monumental composition can now be playfully recontextualised in any space.