Inviting proposals for monuments that cannot be built
Submission deadline: February 28, 2026
What would a monument to Pier Paolo Pasolini look like? Or what would it not “look” like, but rather how would it feel and move through the world? What could a monument appropriate to the film director, poet, writer, actor, and playwright be?
Nearly fifty years after Pasolini’s murder, his critique of modernization reads less like the prophecy it was in his time, and more like a description of the way things are today.
"Today's new fascism is less particular: no longer humanistically rhetorical, it is rather pragmatic in a US style. Its goal is the reorganization and brutal, totalitarian homogenization of the world."[1]
The consumer subject influenced by television and accustomed to authority through pleasure has evolved into today's algorithmic citizen. The subproletariat is now networked, the homogenization nearly complete, and what once appeared as cultural catastrophe has stabilized as normal life.
To speak of a monument under such conditions is already paradoxical. Traditional monuments presume a public, a ground, a shared temporality. Yet these are precisely what have been dismantled by privatization, by the logistical reorganization of attention, by the substitution of participation for politics.
A monument to Pasolini, then, would have to address not only his death but also the loss of the world in which such a death could still be scandalous.
This open call invites proposals for monuments that cannot be built: conceptual, textual, digital, performative, or infrastructural gestures that take Pasolini’s contradictions as material. We are interested in proposals that examine the monument as a medium of critique rather than commemoration; that consider how political memory operates once the categories of history, class, and the collective have been turned into data.
Proposals should be sent to submissions [at] e-flux.com by February 28, 2026. Please limit submissions to maximum 3,000 words for written proposals or 5mb for other media.
[1] Pasolini in Corriere della Sera, June 24, 1974. Translation by Andreas Petrossiants.
