Milena Bonilla

Stone Deaf (Video)

Stone Deaf by Milea Bonilla is both a video and drawing series that traces the history of Karl Marx’s gravesite in Highgate Cemetery in London. As the result of a petition by the British Communist Party, Marx’s remains were moved in 1954 from their initial location to the main avenue of the same cemetery, and in 1956 a 12-foot-high bust of Marx was erected. The original gravesite can still be identified among the weeds, where a broken stone marker announces to visitors that Marx and his family are no longer buried there. Bonilla’s video features ants, wasps, and a snail crawling along this plaque, obscuring the history of Marx’s burial. Implying the process of stone rubbing as a method of recording history, their slow movements highlight the carved inscriptions, the porosity of the material, the cracks in the stone. Presented in the exhibition If These Stones Could Sing at KADIST San Francisco (2018) Bonilla’s ephemeral sculpture, produced for the first time in this exhibition, consists of a stack of gravestone rubbings. As visitors take a print home with them, the pile slowly disappears over the course of the show and rejects the notion of monument as a permanent emblem of power, thus becoming an anti-monument.