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This panel examines the strange spaces where monuments gather—parks, gardens, and open-air museums filled with statues in (un)curated collectives. With President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order for a National Garden of American Heroes, we confront a new iteration of state-sponsored monumental space: not singular, but a landscape of ideological assertion.

In contrast stand post-totalitarian sites filled with statues of deposed regimes, functioning not as shrines but as uneasy archives. Both types of spaces, whether celebratory or critical, signal how national memory is performed spatially, how ideology is materialized in bulk.

What aesthetics emerge in these clustered constellations of power? How do they try to shape historical consciousness? Who curates, who protests, and who visits? Proposals might draw from memory studies, visual culture, museology, political theory, urban studies or artistic practice.