MONUMENTOMANIA

An immersive experience on how monuments make us forget the past

Ambedo — A melancholic trance involving total absorption in vivid sensory details; coined by John Koenig.

Sehnsucht (German) — Life longings, intense desire for alternative paths and states; an ‘addiction’ to longing/pining.

Han (한) — Sorrow, resentment, regret, possibly with a sense of patiently waiting or hoping for amelioration.

what you will feel:

what you need to know:

Vitya Vilisov is an independent researcher and curator; he’s the author of two non-fiction bestsellers and dozens of performances and immersive projects, winner of The Sergey Kuryokhin Contemporary Art Award. For the last two years he is researching critical theory of contemporary warfare, ‘MONUMENTOMANIA’ is his fourth major project on war

You find yourself in a 3D space directly from your browser. You are immersed in a performative lecture that unfolds in 20 scenes in 5 different locations. It's like a lecture, performance, and video game mixed together. You can move through space, jump, fly, and communicate with others as you watch. The experience itself is about how war monuments — meant to commemorate the victims — actually glorify war and make us numb to organized violence. How big stones in the centers of our cities form the places and objects of memory, forcing us to remember only what is good for the state. It is about what’s wrong with monumental culture in general and what’s coming to replace it.

what happens:

We’re using words from
“The Positive Lexicography Project” by Tim Lomas