MONUMENT

by RICARDO BAPTISTA FERNANDES

What makes a monument? The word carries the weight of permanence — stone, bronze, civic intention, a society’s deliberate gesture toward its own memory. But this definition favours the durable over the transient, commemoration for future generations, an ego of what will remain.

The stacked bales in this photograph possess every formal quality of monumental form: verticality, mass, a stepped pyramidal silhouette echoing ziggurats and stepped plinths from Mesopotamia to Mesoamerica. It rises from a flat plain against a dramatic sky with complete compositional authority. In resin or granite, no one would hesitate to call it sculpture. But it is straw, and it will be gone.

Perhaps that is precisely its power. Alois Riegl distinguished intended monuments — built to commemorate — from unintended ones, which acquire memorial significance through time and human association. This hay stack belongs to a third, largely unrecognised category: the ephemeral monument, built not for memory but for function, yet embodying an entire civilisation of labour, season, and land.

Its ephemerality is not a failure of monumentality — it is its most honest form. A monument, ultimately, is whatever a community recognises as worthy of attention.

This one asks only that we look.

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4th September - 4 October 2026 / Crookett, Maganey R93 C6K3, Ireland