My name is Charles Athanasopoulos, and I am a third-year PhD student in the Department of Communication. My research interests include Black rhetorical studies, afropessimist thought, iconography, and media studies. My current dissertation topic explores the ritualistic nature of anti-Black violence with an emphasis on the role of iconography in maintaining those rituals. Moreover, I am interested in analyzing what I call “chaotic Black rhetorics,” which refer to the formation of rituals dedicated toward disrupting and countering the normative investment in anti-Black discourse and structures. Due to my interest in iconography and ritual, I found myself wanting to learn more about performance and embodiment, and I wanted to gain hands-on experience in applying my theoretical knowledge to an actual icon or monument. For this reason, I applied for the Humanities Engage Summer Immersive to pursue an immersive fellowship with Monument Lab, an independent public art and history studio based in Philadelphia that is dedicated to challenging racist/hetero-patriarchal monuments and producing alternate visions of cities and their public art.

To give you a better idea of what I write about, my first academic article “Smashing the Icon of Black Lives Matter: Afropessimism & Religious Iconolatry” examined the conversion of Black Lives Matter (as a philosophical statement and social movement) from an iconoclastic movement dedicated to the abolition of the United States into itself an icon of U.S. policy reform and racial progress. In this way, my work is committed to thinking about icons as multi-modal and thus manifesting in the form of individuals (politicians, celebrities, activists), monuments (statues, street art), iconic films and/or television shows, social movements, secular and religious paintings, and more. I immediately found resonance with Monument Lab as they emphasized a broad definition of monuments as “a statement of power and presence in public.” Within this broad framework, I worked on three major projects during my time with Monument Lab. First, I assisted artist Marisa Williamson with the creation of a performance art piece entitled Sweet Chariot: Unsettling Grounds, in which audiences are taken on an augmented-reality scavenger hunt in Charlottesville, VA, led by Sally Hemings (performed by Marisa Williamson), who is searching for her final resting place. Along the way, audiences interact with the city’s landscape and monuments and uncover alternative histories that demonstrate how the past of slavery is still very much present. Second, I researched and archived public art works funded by Confederate legacy groups as a means of uncovering how the architecture of a city can be read as a product and extension of racial hierarchy. Third, I researched and archived emerging BLM street art in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd/Breonna Taylor protests.

Across all three projects, I was able to both draw on previously gained skills from my experience as a PhD student in the Humanities and gain new skills from my host organization. For example, part of my hope in working with Monument Lab was that being able to work closely with artists doing work in a public arena would allow me to gain a more nuanced understanding of public art that could inform my writing and develop writing skills geared toward cultivating a public audience. Luckily, Monument Lab placed me with an artist, Marisa Williamson, whose work primarily deals with the haunting of modern spaces by the ghosts of slavery in order to gesture toward how this disavowed past continues to inform our present day. In this portion of the internship. I was able to draw on my theoretical knowledge of Black studies and Black feminism, specifically the work of theorists Saidiya Hartman, Dionne Brand, and Christina Sharpe in order to assist Williamson in the creation of a theoretical model for the performance art. At the same time, I was able to learn new skills such as how to take highly theoretical concepts and turn them into a narrative script geared toward a public audience that molded the theory, the historical facts, and a fabulation of what 1800s Charlottesville would have been like. I found this new style of research to be challenging due to my lack of knowledge, and the learning-curve for this new style of collaborating with an artist was made steeper by the inability to work face-to-face due to COVID-19. Despite these challenges however, we produced a script, and by the time my internship came to a close, Williamson’s team was on the cusp of filming a trailer for the project for the purpose of launching a fundraising campaign.

I had been theoretically familiar with conversations surround Confederate monuments before my internship with Monument Lab, but this part of my internship really forced me to expand my methodological toolbox by learning how to produce a digital archive via Excel spreadsheets. Lastly, I took my original research interest in Black Lives Matter and iconography in order to produce my own original research proposal for Monument Lab concerning the emergence of public art in support of Black Lives Matter in the wake of the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor protests.  This resulted in me creating a separate datasheet logging these new monuments, whether they were commissioned or not, and what reforms were produced as a result. Lastly, I was able to take my knowledge of publishing in academic circles and expand my writing by having to learn how to speak to a broader and more public audience.  Given the opportunity to make my scholarship more accessible to public audiences, I wrote an essay titled “Iconography in the Age of Black Lives Matter” that is currently featured on Monument Lab’s bulletin. Ultimately, the summer immersive fellowship I was awarded from Humanities Engage offered me truly enriching opportunities to expand the scope, method/techniques, and accessibility of my scholarship, and I will no doubt continue to use the lessons learned going forward. Having been equipped with new theoretical and methodological approaches to icons, I plan on dedicating at least one chapter of my dissertation to a discussion of performance and embodiment and perhaps another one relating to monuments/murals.

Learn about all the Summer 2020 Immersive Fellows and their experiences with their host organizations.