Decolonising Time: Katie Paterson's Nonlinear Monuments

The traditional monument enacts a narrative of history through the (re)telling of a past, deploying fact and/or fiction, to make visible a specific ideology and story of nationhood. Specifically, the narratives can be objectionable, with contentious monuments increasingly the subject of violent protest and calls for their removal or destruction. Under the contemporary climate of decolonisation, the urge to tear down statues and other public monuments of colonial oppression, would appear to be justified albeit inherently problematic.

Opposing iconoclasm and the destruction or erasing of histories, this paper proposes a decolonisation of time and the temporal mechanisms on which the monument functions. Resisting the conventional temporal status of the monument - the linearity of past-present-future - nonlinearity offers a condition were past and future exist in simultaneity with the present; past and future are cohabited with the present. Under such conditions, the impulse of memorialisation and the making of monument is under contest.

This paper examines the practice of Scottish artist Katie Paterson, including Future Library (2014-2114), a forest planted in Norway which will supply paper to a special anthology of books to be printed in the year 2114. Paterson's artworks propose a recalibration of our temporal ontological condition, offering nonlinear strategies of decolonisation. The approaches outlined in this paper seek to not only reconfigure the category of the monument, offering strategies of decolonisation that gain particular significance under the conditions of the Anthropocene.