Toppled Monuments Archive

Our mission is to facilitate direct action through education and utilize geographic data visualization to illustrate that the struggle for liberation is global.

Toppled Monuments Archive is a radical collective reimagining methods of historical preservation by creating the most comprehensive, accessible international online platform of recorded toppled monuments. The online database we are building is currently working towards utilizing digital cartography to host video, images, text, oral history and various collaborations between activists and academic and art institutions. Points on the map will show individual monuments and expand into individual pages with research, resources and information on current actions or movements taking place.

In putting activism first, the Toppled Monuments Archive reorients how to preserve history. For example, all of the images in the archive are protected with anti-facial recognition software, to preserve the anonymity of the protestors. We are currently developing an open-source tool for anti-facial recognition batch editing which will be available for free use. The collective and the archive mirror one another; as the ways in which work must support and uplift our political beliefs and values.

Toppled Monuments Archive operates equitably and welcomes all skill and education levels to participate in all aspects of Archive development. Regional groups are established and work with a core group of editors. The groups are enabled to upload directly to the digital archive, and uploads are edited and fact checked by the editors before publication to the website. Archivists and researchers may join regional groups that they do not live in based on individual research. We want to connect different types of people and organizations to create a space where various archival practices, activism and theory come together. As the website is still in the development stage, research and images are being gathered onto a shared G-Drive with all of the current collective members. The cartographic system will correspond with the excel documents in the drive.

Toppled Monuments Archive launched from a desire to see the direct actions of the widespread social justice movement come together in an online space that facilitates new and pre-existing research. We aim to create this database for other researchers to use as well as create data visualization that shows that monuments being toppled are not isolated incidents of violence, but rather an illustration of the power of the collective movement towards a better world.

Our volunteer-based group meets online via Zoom every Thursday evening from 6 - 9 PM EST. We refer to this time as ‘workbloc’ and at the moment the group consists of 40 members who put in approximately 3-5 hours of research weekly, for an average of 120-200 collective labor hours per week.

You can make a tax deductible donation to Toppled Monuments Archive through our fiscal sponsor, A Gathering of the Tribes.