Statues have become a vehicle for protest

For the past few weeks, statues of Donald Trump — as bizarre as they are monumental — have been appearing and disappearing in Washington. The first portrayed him in gold, holding a giant bitcoin aloft like a trophy. The second, installed “in honor of Friendship Month,” as the plaque on its base declared, showed him cheerfully clasping hands with Jeffrey Epstein, both with one leg coyly lifted.

In both cases, the statues were erected overnight in front of the Capitol and removed only a few hours later. A few hours, however, were enough for their irreverent absurdity to circle the globe. Ugly as they may be, they cannot be dismissed as mere pranks. Their very impermanence is what makes them unusual for a monument: they were never meant to last.

Alessandro Portelli, The Knee on the Neck, 2020

It is hardly news that monuments have long been instruments of power. They dominate the central spaces of squares, forcing passersby to look up at equestrian figures, generals, kings, and benefactors. Bronze imposes official memory; marble turns historical figures into everyday presences. And precisely for this reason, monuments have also been prime targets of contestation throughout history. In ancient Rome, the effigies of disgraced emperors were mutilated or replaced: damnatio memoriae was a political ritual meant to erase opponents from the city’s visible history. A few centuries later, the iconoclastic wars of the Byzantine Empire (8th–9th centuries) turned the destruction of sacred images into a massive religious and political conflict. In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation unleashed another wave of iconoclasm, striking at images deemed idolatrous. In 1789, the French Revolution tore down statues of kings as a founding act of a new political order — a gesture echoed a century later in the destruction of the Vendôme Column during the Paris Commune.

The twentieth century brought its own ruptures. Statues of Stalin and Lenin fell across Eastern Europe, first in Budapest in 1956, then throughout the Soviet bloc after 1989, marking the visible end of an ideology. In 1991, in Ethiopia, the removal of Lenin’s statue in Addis Ababa accompanied the fall of the Derg regime, while in the Balkans the 1990s saw Yugoslav symbols systematically dismantled and replaced.

In 2003, the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad — broadcast live around the world — became an instant global icon of regime change. And more recently, the #RhodesMustFall campaign in South Africa (2015) led to the removal of the Cecil Rhodes statue in Cape Town, sparking a wider reckoning with colonial legacies.

Alessandro Portelli, The Knee on the Neck, 2020

Surprisingly, it was 2020 — and the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in particular — that marked an unprecedented break in this story. As Alessandro Portelli noted in his incisive The Knee on the Neck (2020), there is something mythological in the image of Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck: St. George trampling the dragon, the deity crushing the serpent, the hunter mastering the beast. Images that, over the centuries, have embodied the triumph of spirit over nature, civilization over the wild — and, in this case, white over Black. An image that condenses centuries of iconography of supremacy and, through its global circulation, has become a kind of inverted and traumatic monument in contemporary visual culture. It was no coincidence that the Black Lives Matter movement placed the monument back at the center of political debate. In 2020, dozens of Confederate statues across the United States were toppled or removed from public squares: generals such as J.E.B. Stuart, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson fell from their pedestals, while in Washington the statue of Albert Pike was set on fire.

Europe was no different. In Bristol, the statue of slave trader Edward Colston was dragged into the river, briefly replaced by Marc Quinn’s A Surge of Power (Jen Reid), showing a Black woman with her fist raised. In Belgium, effigies of King Leopold II — responsible for the genocidal exploitation of the Congo — were vandalized and removed. In Milan, the statue of Indro Montanelli was repeatedly doused in pink paint to recall his relationship with a 12-year-old Eritrean girl during the colonial war. Meanwhile, in England, a “hit list” emerged of monuments seen as legacies of racial hatred: figures like Christopher Columbus, Robert Milligan, and Queen Victoria became the focus of heated protests. Monumentality had suddenly become everyone’s concern. Statues considered untouchable for centuries revealed themselves as fragile symbols of ethical and historical conflict. Their removal was no longer seen as vandalism, but as part of a democratic rethinking of public memory. The city itself became an arena where memory could be torn down, rewritten, contested. And one certainty emerged: imposing monuments on a community that no longer recognizes them is itself an act of violence, a form of coercion.

And as always, once power begins to be dismantled, satire steps in — the ability to seize monumental rhetoric and turn it upside down. In 2016 the Indecline collective scattered American cities with statues of a naked, anatomically ridiculed Trump under the title The Emperor Has No Balls. A few years later, in 2020, the Trump Statue Initiative staged performances with gold-painted actors frozen on pedestals, mimicking celebratory poses in order to strip them of meaning. At the same time, the monumental form continues to be used in the opposite direction. Just recently, New College of Florida announced plans for a statue of Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist assassinated on September 10, 2025. Privately funded and presented as a gift to the community, it was framed as a tribute to freedom of expression.

So-called “difficult monuments” also do not simply vanish. Many remain in place, cleaned up or fenced off, becoming recurring sites of debate. Some are moved into museums, others reframed with plaques and panels that contextualize their history. The dual movement is evident. On the one hand, ephemeral and satirical statues reject permanence and turn sculpture into a critical gesture. On the other, official monuments still attempt to fix memory and shore up an ideological order, even as they increasingly divide communities.

The recent Trump sculptures in Washington make clear how one element has radically changed the rules of a game as old as stone: these are not works made to celebrate, but to disturb; not to consolidate, but to undermine. They exist to be photographed. Their power no longer lies in permanence but in virality — not in marble, but in the screenshot shared online. And in this new symbolic war, stone seems to be losing its battle to the pixel.

Opening image: Statue of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump holding hands appears in front of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on September 23, 2025. Photo by Joe Flood from Washington, D.C., USA - Trump-Epstein Friendship Month Statues, CC BY 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons