By Sasha Glim
Public monuments are designed by those in power, and we must come up with new ways to memorialize history, says Valerio Ciriaci, filmmaker and creator of the documentary Stonebreakers.
“There is no worse way of telling history than a monument,” Ciriaci told a UC Santa Barbara audience earlier this month. “A monument, by definition, is a statement of power and presence in a public square and somebody put it there to convey certain meanings.”
Valerio Ciriaci (left) and Izaak Liptzin (right) directed and filmed the documentary Stonebreakers.
Ciriaci, along with the film’s producer and cinematographer Izaak Liptzin, were hosted by UCSB’s Carsey-Wolf Center in collaboration with the university’s Transnational Italian Studies program for a screening and discussion of the film.
“The documentary chronicles the heated conflict around public monuments and the politics of memorialization,” said moderator Stephanie Malia Hom, an associate professor in Transnational Italian Studies, as she introduced the film.
The two filmmakers were curious as to why the Italian navigator Christopher Columbus was so revered in America but had not experienced a similar recognition in Italy. They discovered that Columbus statues were often constructed to improve the political standing of Italian Americans in the United States at a time when they were facing intense persecution.
The filmmakers originally set out to chronicle the fate of monuments to Columbus, but put that project on standby in May, 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When they resumed, they felt compelled to expand their scope.
“May 25 was the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis that sparked the Black Lives Matter protest and when we started to see the Columbus monuments going down, immediately we resumed the project and understood we had to go beyond Columbus,” Ciriaci said.
The film Stonebreakers, screened by UCSB’s Carsey-Wolf Center.
The filmmakers went on a road trip around the United States to follow protests advocating for the removal of numerous public monuments.
“We need to open up a broader reflection on the way we memorialize history and also the way political activists can use the struggle to connect the past struggles to the present day,” Ciriaci said. “At the end it was really the people in the streets, again, again, and again. They were for practical change in the present as much as they were about retelling a more correct version of the past.”
Liptzin, the cinematographer for Stonebreakers, said that to pacify the protesters many city governments would make monuments disappear overnight. “If you just wake up one morning and a Columbus statue is just gone, I’m not sure that does much to advance what the material demands of the protesters were,” he said.
Instead, it’s the public discussion that mattered most. “It was really in the protest itself, in the dialogue, in the clashes that were happening, that maybe something could emerge,” Liptzin asserted.
The filmmakers said the use of public areas to protest amounted to a “reappropriation” of public space by those with less control. “People were not just attacking and vandalizing the confederate monuments, they were really reappropriating a neighborhood from where they were excluded, and that symbol of exclusion became one of inclusion,” Ciriaci said.
UCSB Transnational Italian Studies professor Stephanie Malia Hom, left, with filmmakers Valerio Ciriaci and Izaak Liptzin, right, discussed the film Stonebreakers after a screening at UCSB’s Pollack Theater.
The documentary also shows monuments that serve as positive models. Ciriaci mentioned a new memorial in New York City that honors the victims of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in which 148 garment workers in Greenwich Village perished. The memorial was dedicated in October. The monument’s designers had invited the public to contribute pieces of fabric, which were joined into a 300-foot banner representing the immigrant workers of that era.
The film Stonebreakers documents the campaign to tear down monuments to Christopher Columbus in the United States.
“This is a memorial that took many years, and was really a collective effort by unions, by historians and professors, and by students,” Ciriaci said. “They put up this beautiful memorial to a collective of people that were, in this case, the victims of this tragic fire that happened at the beginning of the 1900’s ,” said Ciriaci. He cited it as a “good example” of how to approach memorials.
The filmmakers documented several other contemporary monuments that show local residents can have more input. “We started seeing the seeds of new monuments, the idea of a new kind of memorialization that goes beyond the classic statues on a pedestal or horse,” Ciriaci said.
“We really saw an attempt by those communities on the ground to rethink the way we memorialize history, something that perhaps could be more inclusive…Because people need to have a say in what we put in their square.”
Sasha Glim is a fourth year English major and Professional Writing Minor at UC Santa Barbara. She is a Web and Social Media intern with the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.