OPEN CALL: National Mall Anastylosis
Building-Again as Socialist Futurism
Deadline: 31 October 2025
Submit to: contact@postamerican.ist
Launching Summer 2026
THE PROJECT
Postamerican.ist invites students, architects, artists, and theorists to engage Washington D.C.’s imperial monuments through works of anastylosis, the archaeological practice of reconstructing ruins using original fragments. We reclaim and invert this method as speculation:
How would the National Mall transform if its monuments were seized and reconstituted, not towards the neoclassical ideals they incarnate, but towards the production of proletarian culture? What forms emerge when marble, granite, and steel is repurposed for collective life?
We seek speculative proposals that dismantle the National Mall’s symbols of empire and reassemble them as scaffolds for building communist futurism. Submissions can include architectural drawings, sculptures and models, archival investigations, mixed and hybrid media pieces, audio, video, photo, and VR/AR/XR, that weaponize reconstructions and monumentality for proletarian futurity.
LET THE PICKAXE SPEAK
Anastylosis (literally -ana, again, & -stylosis, building) is building-again as political project: a spectacle that maps fantasy onto ruins. It is unsurprising those engaged in large-scale projects of cultural, racial or ethno-supremacism include Anastylosis in their toolkit of urban alterations: the fascist conception of history is structured much in the same way. ‘Let the Pickaxe speak,’ declares Mussolini, razing Rome’s Alessandrino quarter to stage his Third Rome. The pickaxe spoke: the present is profaned. In Jerusalem, Israeli bulldozers speak with the same clarity, clearing homes to sanctify the Western Wall. The logic is identical: the ruin-of-the-present conceals an immanent ideal; through violence it is reconstructed.
Likewise, the slogan Make America Great Again is an appeal to a large-scale collective work of Anastylosis, to thread an idealized past through an idealized future, suturing both into the present.
The monuments that are our subjects are self-contradictory—from the staggered construction of the Washington Monument to the controversy that stalked Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial. The Mall also contains monuments beyond those explicitly designed as such: the collections of the National Gallery and the Hirshhorn; the pantheon of the military-industrial complex that is the Air and Space Museum; the monuments to the oppressed nations of this land confined behind the glass of a museum case; the open space itself and its uses and abuses over time, from occupations and marches, demonstrations of both resistance and reaction.
The questions haunting all of these projects are: who decides what future to build through its reconstructed monuments, and who has the power to implement them?
For this project, we expropriate the tools, practicing speculative anastylosis, and challenge the notion that appeals to authenticity, implemented by those who make and maintain imperial monuments, are sovereign and immutable.
Let the pickaxe speak for the people.
CORE FRAMEWORK
Proposals should engage:
Material Transformation: How is the work of anastylosis conditioned by socialist reuse?
Programmatic Shifts: How is use reimagined through new social and cultural practices?
Symbolic Ruptures: How is the monument effaced in service of new narrative and mythmaking?
Futurity: What is building-again, building-toward?
Temporal Dislocations: When does the work of anastylosis occur?
PROPOSAL SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Format: PDF (3 pages max). Combine visuals, sketches, diagrams + written statement of intent.
Focus: Select one monument/site on Washington, D.C.'s National Mall (e.g., Founder [Your Name] will address the Washington Monument).
Deadline: 31 October 2025
31 October 2025, 11:59 PM EST
Submit: contact@postamerican.ist
FINAL OUTPUT: COUNTER-CARTOGRAPHIES
Selected works will culminate in:
A physical and virtual exhibition opening summer 2026 – the U.S. Semiquincentennial. (TBD)
A printed book constructing a new map of the National Mall. This publication stands as a radical counter-plan to L’Enfant’s axes and McMillan’s imperial vistas – replacing state fantasy with visions of collective ones.
WHY 2026?
The various construction projects and cultural events planned for the Semiquincentennial of the United States reifies imperial mythologies. We deploy anastylosis not to restore national monuments to an idealized past, but to reconstruct a latent and liberatory future.
Submit by September 14, 2025.
Questions? contact@postamerican.ist
NOTES ON ANASTYLOSIS
I. BUILDING-AGAIN
Anastylosis is a meticulously regulated preservation practice by which monuments are (re)built with parts assigned to their original construction, integrating novel materials only when necessary for structural integrity or aesthetic continuity. The etymology of the word —derived from ana- (again) and -stylosis (building), suggesting literally the re-erection of columns—hints at its application. Anastylosis is a process for building-again.
II. IN SITU
The work of building-again begins with a ruin; or, the assumption that what currently exists In Situ is incomplete or partial. This leads to a second assumption: the ACTUAL STATE and its assorted detritus can be measured against a RECONSTRUCTED STATE, and, with enough scientific analysis, can be physically altered to resemble it and bring it closer to its ORIGINAL STATE. The term In Situ itself implies this dialectic — what remains is left over in place from a formerly completed architecture, privileged as the ‘original’ (and therefore idealized) construction. This begs the question: if the ACTUAL STATE is what exists at the time of the work of Anastylosis, what media, assumptions, or ideas provide the basis for determining what existed before, and justifying what will exist again?
The again in building-again is an imperfect present threaded though an idealized past, suturing an idealized future into the present. For the one undertaking this work, the husk of the moment at hand is a temporarily effaced monument.
In the world-building activity of Anastylosis, the temple haunts the piles and fragments that localize it, and the architectural objects constituting any monument are sublimated by the eidos of the monument. For the would-be re-erector, the toppled column drum is possessed by memory of its former height.
III. THIRD ROME
It is unsurprising those engaged in large scale projects of cultural, racial or ethno-supremacism include Anastylosis in their toolkit of urban alterations: the fascist conception of history is structured much in the same way. ‘Let the Pickaxe speak,’ declares Mussolini. The tool of the excavator in the hands of the archaeologist, guided by the spirit of nationalist mythology, is a semantic device for the production of truth. In this context, the Via dei Fori Imperiali is not one strata among many in the stratigraphic makeup of contemporary Roman ground, it is the ground, temporarily concealed beneath layers of parasitic post-antique accretions. The centuries of life held in the tangled warren of tenements and churches in the quartiere Alessandrino is a barricade preventing the Men of Rome from marching between the Coliseum and the Monument to Victor Emmanuel II, between the 1st and 19th centuries into the 20th. The dictum inscribed on Trajan’s Column: "Legionarii pontem fluminis faciunt." (Legionaries build a bridge over the river) is a summary epitaph.
IV: SANCTIFICATION
The work of Anastylosis is the work of material sanctification. After the razing of Mughrabi Quarter to create a new plaza in front of the Western Wall, Herut Party leader Menachem Begin writes: ‘we do not want to harm the sanctity of anyone, but we have our own sanctity and we must protect it, even if that means evacuating a few Arab homes, which are awful slums anyway … Those houses were built up against the Western Wall a few hundred years ago with the express intention of hiding it.’
Here we have a Negative Anastylosis, a building-again by process of elimination. The wall is not physically altered through accretion — no displaced blocks are piled back on top — instead, the Monument is reconstructed by a process of negation, by removing what is considered profane from the sacred precinct. The Kotel, as pilgrimage site and Monument, is a RECONSTRUCTED STATE mapped onto the ACTUAL STATE through sanctifying violence - guided by the principle that the ruin-of-the-present is concealing its essential and historically immanent nature. Like the pickaxe, the bulldozer speaks.
V. POWER
It is clear in the examples listed so far that Monuments are inseparable from the political projects they are imbedded in and appeals to refashion them, guided by a ‘respect for original material and authentic documents’ (Article 9 of the Venice charter) are always structured by both the contradictions and priorities of these projects.
To expand the question asked above, we can pose the following in any work of Anastylosis: who has the power to impose onto the present what is believed to have existed before? The media, ideas, and assumptions that facilitate the work of building-again are secondary to the ability to carry it out. The verse from Nehemiah 4:17 which reads: “Those who built on the wall, and those who carried burdens, loaded themselves so that with one hand they worked at construction, and with the other held a weapon” is a second summary epitaph.
VI. SIMULTANEITY & DISLOCATIONS
At first glance, the appeal to authenticity driving any work of Anastylosis relies on spatial simultaneity. It is impossible, it seems, to conceive of a monument’s ORIGINAL STATE (reincarnated as temporary fantasy through the RECONSTRUCTED STATE) anywhere else but In Situ — the reconstructed Monument must rise again as if it always existed in place. But what happens when this work begins with a dislocation, when the RECONSTRUCTED STATE manifests the ORIGINAL STATE elsewhere? Similarly, could we refer to a work of Anastylosis that has no past, present, or future, existing in a closed self-referential system? What about projects where there is no ORIGINAL STATE, where the ruin is a persistent affect without beginning or end?
The endless cascade of displaced and looted artifacts or partially reconstructed Monuments littering European museums demonstrate appeals to authenticity are negotiable, or at least mediated by the institutions legitimizing them. The museum-goer in Berlin or London does not look at the Ishtar Gate or the singular Caryatid Elgin liberated from her sisters and think they are looking at simulacra — Provenance is presented as an extraneous detail. The explanatory wall text is enough of context for the Monument to rise before them, completed by the artificial lighting and climate controlled environment of the museum interior. Ironically, it is the governments demanding repatriation who seek to safeguard the prerequisite context appeals to authenticity in works of Anastylosis demand. The refusal to honor these requests is predicated on the hubris that Babylon or Athens, Pergamon or Samothrace, as ORIGINAL STATES, can exist anywhere as long as the Museum has the self-imposed authority to build them.
VII. MAKE AGAIN AGAIN
The large-scale project of cultural Anastylosis encapsulated by the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ is one such example of this. Unlike the Classical Archaeologist who can gesture first to an orthographic drawing of a Doric Temple and second to a pile of rubble, the MAGA practitioners and ritualists are unable to say when (or where!) their project exists in its Original State. The curiosity of this phenomenon is that the vagueness of its appeal ultimately doesn’t matter - the feeling that the world, as it exists now, is incomplete, waiting for someone to guide its reconstruction, resuscitate the ambiguous past into a glorious future - is enough. The resonance this message has among Evangelicals should be unsurprising - the foundational myth of this belief system figures Christ as Monument, completed (ascended) after three days and left as a ruin for several Catholic Millenia, patiently awaiting return and reconstruction.
We would like to argue the result of building-again is always a spectacle, an architectural fantasy, a mockup of an idealized world subject to its own logics and political programs.