Helin Özdemir

Weight of Absence is a multimedia installation that challenges the ontological illusion of permanence governing commemorative landscapes. The traditional public monument does not merely occupy space — it produces it, inscribing state-sanctioned narratives onto the urban fabric through the borrowed authority of stone. This thesis argues that such permanence is a form of spatial violence: a claim on the future made by the past, enforced against the living city. The more a monument aspires to be seen, the more thoroughly it disappears — absorbed into daily life until its ideology feels like the absence of ideology. Against this, Weight of Absence proposes the antimonument: a form constitutively incapable of permanence. Memory is most potent when it is seen to be vanishing. The installation realises this through corroding aluminium plates and field recordings gathered at monument sites across European cities — materials that remember by forgetting and speak most clearly as they dissolve.