Welcome to Monuments
More than an app, Monuments AR is an insurgent architecture, a digital counter-infrastructure in the contestation over memory culture in public space. This independent, non-profit platform seeks to reprogram the ideological landscape of urban memory culture through augmented reality technology (AR). Launched in 2022 at the 12th Berlin Biennale, Monuments AR functions as an interface for collective artistic interventions—reconfiguring sites of contested histories into spaces of artistic research, decolonial intervention, and speculative futurology.
This is not monumentality in its traditional, authoritarian sense—no stone, no bronze, no singular author. Instead, Monuments AR operates as a porous, fluid system: an overlay, a digital palimpsest where layers of erased, silenced, or forgotten histories can take space. It hosts site-specific interventions that subvert dominant narratives, exposing the fractures within public memory culture and carving out speculative futures. What happens when the monumental shifts from mass to transmission, from physical endurance to real-time counter-history? Who controls remembrance when memory is no longer bound to material permanence but exists in a state of continuous recalibration?
By occupying digital space, Monuments AR reclaims visibility in a realm increasingly colonized by corporate surveillance and state control. It resists the extractive logic of Big Tech—there are no data mines here, no user profiling, no surveillance disguised as convenience. The app is built with a strict commitment to privacy, ensuring a secure and data-respecting experience. In an era where both urban and digital public spaces are increasingly privatized, Monuments AR remains an open framework for collective authorship, democratic activism, and the radical reimagination of memory itself.
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Selected Projects
Alternative Monument for Germany / Alternatives Denkmal für Deutschland
ADfD proposes a counter-narrative to Germany’s toxic migration discourse by reclaiming public memory culture as a site for inclusion, resistance, and collective imagination. In direct opposition to right-wing populist rhetoric, such as that of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), ADfD offers an alternative: a vision of migration as a force that weaves spaces and histories into an evolving, collective fabric. Through a queer-feminist lens—foregrounding voices long silenced in the public sphere—the project explores the transformative potential of migration to reframe urban spaces and communal memory.
Monuments for the 12th Berlin Biennale
On the former site of the Reichskanzlei or Reich Chancellery, where colonial powers divided the African continent into zones of exploitation during the so-called “Congo Conference” or “Berlin Conference,” augmented reality artworks reflect on the troubled history of the now nondescript space. Today, the space of project Dekoloniale Memory Culture in the City is located here, one of the venues of the 12th Berlin Biennale. Kabedi Moukanda Kasonga Kalala’s sculpture focuses on the systematic amputation of the limbs of Congolese workers who did not meet the quota of rubber production; Irina Zavalishina and Avishi Mitruka’s three-dimensional map juxtaposes historical extractivism of raw materials like ivory and gold with today’s mining of noble metals used by big tech; Leen Alshemaly and Saidakhon Nodiri restage the “round table” setting of the conference with historical documents of its devastating consequences; Javier Paredes Moran and Max Bode have translated the concept of “private property” into architectural obstacles; Farhan Khalid draws lines from the historical division of the continent to today’s refugees hoping to cross the Mediterranean Sea in rubber boats; Isabell Drauz imagines the “voice of history” as a disembodied, deformed choir bearing the marks of defacing violence; Sara Pelyani and Shira Malka’s moving installation seeks to destabilize eurocentric concepts of North/South, Up/Down, questioning regimes of power and disenfranchisement.
Utopian Tours
In Utopian Tours, augmented reality sculptures function as “Monuments of the Future”, and are interwoven in an alternative narration of Berlin, performed live by Mikala Hyldig Dal. The tour presents a radically optimistic futuristic perspective on the development of sustainable social structures in an urban context. Here urban space takes place as an expanded social sculpture; with humour and belief in the political potential of imagination, Utopian Tours aims to make the Freiräume, the utopian free spaces we dream of, experienceable in the present. In a city endangered by gentrification, artistic tourists are connected with urban activists in a sci-fi journey through Berlin, Kreuzberg. Invited artists and activists have created interventions in public space along the path of the guided tour. Multi-media installation, talks and performances at Galerie Alpha Nova.
Impressions from Utopian Tours, Berlin 2019
Monuments AR is initiated by Farhan Khalid and Mikala Hyldig Dal and develops in collaboration with an international network of artists and cultural institutions.
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