Material encounters or Monument for Chelsea Manning and the politics of incommensurability

Monument for Chelsea Manning is an experiment, an attempt to keep something going, to generate an ‘incommensurable controversy’ where “the legitimacy of the logics and institutions employed are at base being undermined” (Critical Rhetorics of Controversy, Kent. A. Ono and John M. Sloop). This brings together a recently cast bronze bust of Chelsea Manning with a proposed permanent public site for this in the small Welsh market town of Haverfordwest. While the bust is the tangible, material part of the experiment it does not define the limits of this. Equally important is how it engages the legal and bureaucratic processes and procedures that police and regulate public space. Processes and procedures that are not just necessary and inevitable procedures that monuments are required to pass through in order to be ‘made public’ but are in fact, as much material parts of the work as the bronze, stone or steel the work is made from and like these materials, shape and form the work.