**Summary of Extracts: The Little Mermaid Statue and Iconoclasm**

- The text situates the narrative of merpeople in broader cultural histories, noting their roots in Black and Indigenous cosmologies preceding Hans Christian Andersen.

This context foregrounds how cultural symbols like The Little Mermaid statue acquire multiple meanings across time and communities.

- Iconoclasm (the destruction or damaging of icons and monuments) is framed not merely as anger or vandalism, but as an act pregnant with meaning—an attempt to reimagine social worlds and to challenge the narratives and values enshrined by public monuments.

- Specific reference is made to the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen, described as often targeted ("a long line of attacks").

One recent case highlighted is its being defaced with the Russian flag as an act of protest, reflecting the statue’s status as a cultural flashpoint.

- Broader discourse threads question who decides which figures are commemorated with public monuments, noting the "need for a diverse culture of remembrance"—suggesting acts against such monuments can be calls for greater inclusiveness or transparency in public memory.

- Comparisons are made between how art objects are curated/protected versus how they are sometimes attacked or reinterpreted, raising questions about the arbitrary lines between revered heritage and contested symbols.

- The extract does not describe every individual attack on the Little Mermaid statue but provides a framework for understanding them: vandalism against such monuments can arise from political protest, social critique, or desires to reclaim public space or historical narratives.

- Acts of vandalism are described as didactic and symbolic, as they teach values or contest dominant ideals, just as the original monuments aimed to do.

- The summary also indirectly points towards the diversity of meanings attributed to cultural symbols and the contested nature of public memory.

**Summary of Extracts: The Little Mermaid Statue and Iconoclasm**

- The text situates the narrative of merpeople in broader cultural histories, noting their roots in Black and Indigenous cosmologies preceding Hans Christian Andersen.

Title:

Content: Actually, Black Mermaid Folklore Has Been Around Long Before Disney’s The Little Mermaid

The moment I feel even remotely vulnerable —be that the fragile morning after an inhibition-free night, the familiar shiver of cold and flu symptoms or the helpless pit of despair that engulfs me when my mental health begins to plummet —you’ll find me curled up on the settee, under a protective layer of blankets, shamelessly watching movies filled with childhood nostalgia. Movies like Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989) have sat firmly in this arsenal of self-care classics ever since I can remember, enveloping me in a carefree hug at a moment's notice.
But movies that transported me to a place of innocence and ignited my imagination without having to strain to envision myself within these fantasy worlds, however, are in short supply. As a dual heritage Black kid growing up in the 90s, opportunities to feel represented in my escapism were limited. Slightly too old to be impacted by Disney’s Princess and the Frog, I found meaning, and myself, in classics such as Roger and Hammerstein's Cinderella (starring Brandy, Whitney Houston and Whoopi  Goldberg) and Motown’s The Wiz (an adaption of the Wizard of Oz starring Diana Ross and Micheal Jackson). It’s for these reasons that I am unashamedly excited for Disney’s live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, in which Ariel is played by Halle Bailey.
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There’s no shortage of discourse on representation politics, the ongoing need for fairer representation in the media we consume and the ways the lack of it impacts people of colour of all ages. This importance can be felt most viscerally via a quick TikTok search of The Little Mermaid where endless streams of reaction videos showcase the unadulterated joy of Black children when seeing the latest trailer.
Move over to Twitter, however, and you’ll likely be bombarded by bigotry and bias. The hashtag #NotMyAriel is trending amongst outrage and disgust at a Black actor being cast to play a fictional character. To quote writer and academic Saidiya Hartman, “So much of the work of oppression is policing the imagination”, and whilst simultaneously comical, embarrassing and triggering to witness, this backlash served as a reminder that no matter how frivolous our sources of joy may be, whiteness will attempt to steal every ounce of it.

The fantasy of merpeople lived in the cosmologies of our Black and indigenous ancestors long before Hans Christian Anderson coined his fable in the 19th century

In decolonizing our imagination —  by challenging the Eurocentric erasure of Black and Indigenous wisdoms, creativities and experiences —we’re able to recognise that whilst the remake of The Little Mermaid is important to many (myself included), we can also find ourselves represented in our own cultural storytelling, folktales and mythologies. We don’t need to rely on the white gaze of Western capitalism to feel seen and heard. In letting go of that gaze, we are reminded that the fantasy of merpeople lived in the cosmologies of our Black and indigenous ancestors long before Hans Christian Anderson coined his fable in the 19th century, and certainly before Disney offered our generation a capitalist mascot in their 1989 animated adaptation.
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“All children, irrespective of race, creed, religion, deserve to see themselves reflected in books and films. We owe it to their self-esteem, to their creativity, to their imaginations. The imagination of a child is boundless, and it is the imaginations of this current generation of children that will ultimately provide solutions to some of the most pressing crises faced by the world today,” writer and doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge, Mary Ononokpono tells Unbothered.
A final year doctoral candidate, Mary’s ongoing research into the lives of coastal Biafran women during the Atlantic Age and Age of Abolition has sparked an informal interest in the ways that pre-colonial African communities were informed by a belief in and fear of water spirits. Known colloquially as ‘Orishas’ or ‘Ndem’ these deities were thought to have been sent by a supreme or higher god to populate, protect and service the earth, and continue to be worshipped today.
“Racial injustice is ultimately rooted in historical illiteracy. If people don’t understand how we got to this point as a society, injustice will persist. In that respect, the decolonization of the cosmologies, mythologies and folklore of Black Atlantic societies has a really important part to play” she continues.
Some pre-colonial water spirits include Yemaya — a goddess of the ocean, who, legend has it, created the seven seas. Believed to be a fierce protector of women, this water spirit is still worshipped across the world,such as by those of Santería faith in Cuba who were transported across waters during the transatlantic slave trade. It is said that to connect with Yemaya, holding a shell to our ears will carry her messages in the sound of waves.
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Another pre-colonial deity is Oshun, the goddess of divinity, femininity, fertility, beauty and love. Considered to be one of the most powerful orishas, she’s both heralded as the nurturer of humanity and feared as a benevolent being, whose earthly punishments come in the forms of floods and droughts. In Nigeria, annual celebrations continue to take place along its Oshun river, where pilgrims pay homage, make sacrifices, and ask the deity to grant wealth, health and happiness. Often depicted in yellow robes, Oshun is rumoured to be the ethereal muse behind Beyonce’s numerous works, referenced in both the lyrics and symbolisms of her visual album Lemonade and her ode to the African diaspora, Black is King
Photo by YAMIL LAGE/AFP/Getty Images.
A follower of the Orisha sea goddess Yemaya, of the Yoruba religion, gives offerings at Havana's harbour during the Yemaya Day celebrations in Cuba
Elsewhere in Brazil, the Tupi people celebrate Iara, commonly referred to as “the Lady of the Lake”. A great warrior who was betrayed by her brothers, Iara is a water spirit with a princess-like origin story — minus the damsel in distress trope. Often likened to other South American tales of sea witches and goddesses, over time Iara manifests in recent imaginations as a merging of the two, feared and revered for her power to lure men to the bottom of the ocean.
Perhaps one of the more infamously depicted deities however is Mami Wata.  Also known as  Watramama or ‘Mother of the Water’, this water spirit is part human, part fish, and is often depicted as interchangeable genders. Considered to hold the important role of blessing the souls who died at sea, Mami Wata has held cultural and religious significance to the African diaspora for centuries. Mami Wata is celebrated in festivals such as the Epe-Ekpe festival in Togo for example, and is commemorated across multiple artforms; from exhibitions in the Smithsonian and Knockout Centre to featuring as the protagonist in Natasha Bowen’s young adult fiction, Skin of the Sea.
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Another work of fiction which draws sources from Indigenous histories is Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch, a book I have read and reread numerous times. Here, Aycayia, a mermaid of Taíno legend, who has the lower torso of a fish and a human upper torso adorned in tribal tattoos, is reimagined. Drawing inspiration from the Taíno population who inhabited Hispaniola (now the Republic of Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and were made extinct after being ‘discovered’ by Christopher Columbus in the 15th Century, Aycayia’s tale is one of colonialism, displacement, belonging, love and violence.
Photo by Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images.
Entrance to the Shrine of Oshun, the water dwelling fertility goddess of the Yoruba religion in southwestern Nigeria
It’s through the honest and respectful retellings and reinterpretations of pre-colonial imaginations that diasporas of colour of all ages can truly see ourselves represented. As an avid wild swimmer who has always felt an affinity and attraction to merpeople despite being relatively disinterested in fantasy and sci-fi genres, I feel more at home in these nature-adoring narratives that offer an insight into my heritage than I ever have in any Disney movie.

Chantay is a London-based tattoo artist who specialises in Black depictions of ethereal deities. Her merpeople, fairies, cupids and nymphs sit amongst rockpools, toadstools and flowerbeds, sporting voluminous afros, cascading dreadlocks and woven cornrows.

It's for these reasons that I’d always craved a mermaid tattoo, but after one wildly uncomfortable experience involving a white tattooist and a failed attempt at depicting afro hair, I’ve been cautious of finding an artist who could dream up a mermaid that actually looks like me. So, when I stumbled across Chantay Blue’s Instagram I was overjoyed! Chantay is a London-based tattoo artist who specialises in Black depictions of ethereal deities. Her merpeople, fairies, cupids and nymphs sit amongst rockpools, toadstools and flowerbeds, sporting voluminous afros, cascading dreadlocks and woven cornrows. Earlier this year, I had the honour of getting one of Chantay’s merpeople inked on my forearm. There she sits, glistening as bubbles rise around her, her billowing curls trailing to the part of her waist where scales meet skin.
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Catching up over Zoom, Chantay and I discuss her approach to tattooing — itself a form of expression rooted in Indigenous practices that predates colonialism — and its revolutionary potential to reclaim a sense of identity and belonging.  “When you get artwork tattooed on your skin you want something beautiful, something that reflects what beauty is to you, but most of the time we’re only offered images of white faces and features,” she says.
“All this does is reinforce the same beauty stereotypes that were forced on us in stories about merpeople and fairies when we were growing up. It doesn’t sit right with me, that you go for a beautiful tattoo and a white artist inks another white person on your arm or leg,”  she continues, “I want people to be able to see their own beauty in my tattoos — it helps me feel beautiful when I’m drawing these stunning creatures that look like me too. I think it speaks to my inner child who was always into mermaids, but never saw myself in them.”

Through a decolonizing lens we can reclaim our voices, stories, perspectives and imaginations and enjoy a blockbuster movie for what it is...

Whether through feature-length movies, fictional novels, tattoos, exhibitions, music or oral histories, when we are able to access ourselves in our own cultural storytelling, we’re reminded that we never needed the approval of whiteness to do so. With the racist rantings of grown adults on social media reframed as inconsequential white noise, we can also relinquish ourselves from the politics of representation, and no longer rely on white-dominated industries to dictate when and how our valid need to feel seen is met. Much like the ways that Ursula steals the voice of Ariel in the classic story, the commercialised capitalist legacies of colonialism silence the narratives of our ancestors. Through a decolonizing lens, we can reclaim our voices, stories, perspectives and imaginations and enjoy a blockbuster movie for what it is, without feeling uncomfortably reliant on it to speak to our sense of self. So, whilst you’ll most certainly find me tucked up on the sofa, my cat secured in the little spoon position, embracing the 2023 remake with childlike wonderment, I can’t help but wonder: wouldn’t it have been nice if we could’ve seen the tales of our own water spirits — Aycayia’s, Mama Wata’s or Oshun’s perhaps — depicted on the big screen too?
This article was originally published to Unbothered UK

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This context foregrounds how cultural symbols like The Little Mermaid statue acquire multiple meanings across time and communities.

Title:

Content: Up Next

Ariel (center) with other dolls based on characters from The Little Mermaid. Mattel
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How red locs on The Little Mermaid shows the ways dolls move from mere representation to authenticity

Dolls aren’t just playthings. They tell a story about how children see themselves.

When the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid was released in theaters recently, there was a predictable, if disheartening, reaction from people upset that the title role was portrayed by a young Black woman. (Because, in real life, uh, cartoon mermaids are never Black?) Overshadowed by that predictable paroxysm of racism was an interesting development in the toy aisle.

To accompany the movie’s release, Disney and Mattel produced a series of dolls made in the likeness of the actress who took on the role of Ariel, Halle Bailey, right down to the head full of red locs cascading down her back.

It’s a small detail, but also one more step in decades of innovations to authentically showcase Blackness in children’s toys.

“I see Black dolls as historical objects,” said Sabrina Thomas, a dean at Duke University whose research focuses on material culture and childhood. “They provide a visual narrative of Black history in America by their presentation, not only their hair, but their coloring, their clothing, their presentation, and how that has evolved over time.”

Thomas’ collection of 900 dolls spans from 1900 to the present day. “When you think about the earliest Black dolls, they were [created] by Black people,” said Thomas. There are few remaining examples of those handmade dolls or rag dolls because their materials deteriorate over time.

There was little movement toward manufacturing Black dolls in the U.S. until after the famous doll choice study by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark. The study was first performed in New York City in the 1930s, and an NAACP team suing to end school segregation asked the Clarks to repeat their study in the South in the 1940s. In a series of experiments, Black children were asked to choose between white and Black dolls. Most of the children not only preferred the white doll but attributed positive attributes to its skin color.

“[The study] catapulted the doll as an object into the consciousness of America as an everyday object that speaks to our racial anxieties in the sense that we can extrapolate children’s understanding of themselves as racial beings and their place in the world,” Thomas said.

“I think it gave a new level of consciousness to the object itself, but we’re still not talking about mastering representation.”

Representation started with two dolls: the Patty-Jo and the Saralee. The Patty-Jo, which was sold from 1947 to 1949, was based on a character created by cartoonist Jackie Ormes, whose work appeared in the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier.

“In mid-20th century America, most black dolls represented stereotypes, like mammies, dolls advertised as ‘piccaninnies,’ and raggedy little boys and girls,” reads Ormes’ website. “Jackie Ormes said, ‘No more … Sambos … Just KIDS!’ and she transformed her attractive, spunky Patty-Jo cartoon character into the first upscale American black doll.”

The Saralee, made by the Ideal Toy Corp., was in production from 1951 to 1953. A color jury that included political scientist Ralph Bunche and author Zora Neale Hurston came together to determine the appropriate skin tone for the doll.

Thomas noted that Saralee is significant in doll history because this was the first time the White House got involved in doll production. Ideal agreed to produce the doll after first lady Eleanor Roosevelt advocated for it.

But the company viewed the project mostly as a publicity stunt. The doll’s debut was featured in Life magazine, photographed by Carl Van Vechten. It seems commonplace to think about marketing a doll like this now, but it was unheard of at the time.

Interestingly, Patty-Jo was more popular than Saralee. “I believe it’s because Saralee came out as an actual race doll, if you will,” Thomas said. “They were both Black, but the Saralee doll is making a political statement, and the Ideal Toy Corp. wasn’t that invested in her.”

“Saralee just had so much fanfare around her,” said Thomas. “A Black doll had never been produced with that amount of celebrity or political backing but Ideal didn’t didn’t promote her after that. But Patty-Jo, who’s around the same time, she’s very popular and what Patty-Jo did for Black dolls, I believe that she’s one of the first Black dolls that actually said Black people can be solidly middle-class.”

These dolls appealed to upwardly mobile Black folks looking to impart the idea to their children that, in a phrase that would become more prominent in the Sixties, Black is beautiful. It’s at this point that dolls stopped being simply playthings and became a symbol of progress.

Patty-Jo was advertised as having “playable hair, and the finest and most extensive wardrobe on the market, with all manner of dresses, formals, shoes, hats, nightgowns, robes, skating and cowgirl costumes, and spring and winter coat sets, to name a few.”

“Think of anything that said glamour, she came with it,” said Thomas. “It’s the first time in Black history where we see it so prominent.”

Skip ahead two decades, and another doll, Baby Nancy, reflected the state of Black America. Baby Nancy, a 13-inch baby doll, debuted at the American Toy Fair in 1968.

“Oftentimes when people spoke about Baby Nancy, they said she was the doll born from the ashes of the Watts Riots in 1965,” said Thomas. “The company that produced Baby Nancy, I would say, is a definite turning point in sort of the representation of Blackness in the toy industry.”

In the aftermath of the riots, Louis S. Smith II and Robert Hall worked with civil rights activists and community members to launch Operation Bootstrap, an organization focused on creating social and economic equity. Baby Nancy was designed by Shindana Toys, a start-up within Operation Bootstrap. Mattel provided Shindana Toys with a factory, business loans, and consultants.

Baby Nancy was introduced with a short Afro because Shindana Toys was focused on not just representation, but authenticity, creating dolls with a hairstyle that epitomized Blackness in the 1960s.

And, Thomas said, because Shindana Toys made it clear it wasn’t producing dolls from molds created for white dolls, by the time production shut down in 1983, the company had opened the way for representation for other racial groups and ethnicities.

“The impact they’ve had on the toy industry is that they essentially serve as a test model to prove that Black dolls could be sold, that consumers were interested in Black dolls and not just Black consumers,” said Thomas. “They reported many times that the majority of their dolls were being purchased by white customers.”

Bottom line, she said, it’s because of Shindana Toys that by the 1970s, every major toy company had at least one Black doll line. “This is important because prior to that they were having conversations in the boardroom about whether or not America was really ready for an integrated doll market,” she said.

Growing up, I didn’t want a Barbie or a Cabbage Patch doll. My mother bought me an Addy Walker, Pleasant Co.’s first Black American Girl Doll, which was introduced in 1993. In the accompanying books, 9-year-old Walker escapes slavery with her mother to start a new life in Philadelphia. Her skin looked like mine, her nose resembled mine, and, importantly, so did her hair texture.

When the company was acquired by Mattel in 1998, it was able to add depth to the diversity of American Girl’s offerings. “When I heard Pleasant Co. sold to Mattel, I said, ‘Oh, something is about to happen’ because one thing Mattel is exceptionally good at is accessorizing,” Thomas said, citing the brand’s “create your own” feature. “You can go into American Girl Place and order skin tone 003, request green eyes, and freckles creating a ginger if you want.”

“You can either take her home as-is or you can buy a wheelchair for her. Or you can buy glasses. You can buy a cochlear implant. You can make that doll whatever you need her to be where she represents people in the world.”

Mattel was involved in reimagining Disney Princesses, too. When Disney introduced its first Black princess, Tiana, in The Princess and the Frog in 2009, her character not only told an authentic story about another culture, it reimagined who got to be a Disney Princess.

Like Ariel, Princess Tiana was also brought to “life” in a doll.

A lot of the work that went into creating the Ariel doll started with The Princess and the Frog. Launi King, Disney’s global product design director, spent two years designing the Tiana Disney Ultimate Princess doll.

King said she was honored to work on Tiana because the character is Black and had a close relationship with her father in the film. Also, Princess Tiana’s story was different from some of the other princesses: She wasn’t waiting for her prince to show up before she could live her life. King wanted the work process with the doll’s designers to be different as well.

“I have a vision in my mind of who the character is and how I would like her to be designed but then I also needed to speak to them about when you’re designing a Black doll,” said King. “I needed to have that moment where you get to see the beauty of our curls and our culture and our texture. And so that was one of the first things that I asked for was to really showcase the hair.”

Re-creating Black hair is rarely done in mass-market dolls because of the expense involved in mimicking different hair textures on one head. For instance, the Princess Tiana doll wears her hair sleek and styled into an updo and the Ariel doll’s hair is styled with a mix of locs and straighter hair.

“There’s a machine and it can go in and it puts the hairs in individually into the scalp, but you’re not mixing [textures] because that drives the cost up, and you’re definitely not doing things by hand,” King said.

The next challenge with Princess Tiana was to showcase authentic skin tone and facial features. “African Americans have a colorization that’s beautiful. It has highlights and shadows in the skin,” King said. “So one of the things about us being browner is that the light actually has the opportunity to bounce off of our skin in a way that doesn’t necessarily happen when your skin is very light.

“It’s very important as well to focus on the shape of the nose,” King said but that drives up manufacturing costs: “It is very costly to do a different shaped head on an adult, a different-shaped anything, really, because you pay for a tool and that tool can be anywhere from $25,000 to $100,000 dollars just for you to do one doll.”

She said that the more manufacturing leeway given to create specific features on any particular doll, the higher it will retail. “We want to make sure that the dolls are at a price point where anyone can get it,” said King. “OK, so that could be from $14 to $150, but that $14 one should not feel cheap.”

Companies needed to amortize that cost, making sure they could turn a profit, and King says this is why there was such a lack of authenticity in the beginning. “They would do a Barbie doll and what was happening is she would just be made brown, which meant the color of the plastic changed but it didn’t change the fact that that’s not what our noses are normally shaped like and so we ended up with Caucasian-looking dolls with brown skin,” King said. “And this is where I think we’ve come a long way because companies are investing and making sure that we are represented in the most authentic way.”

Mattel’s latest crop of dolls, created in partnership with Black companies, is working to create the range in authenticity that Thomas mentions.

In 2020, Mattel’s The Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Fresh Fierce Collection by The Fresh Dolls from World of EPI won The Toy Association’s Doll of the Year in 2022. “To be recognized by the entire toy industry, was just … Oh, my gosh. It’s still surreal,” said Lisa Williams, founder and CEO of World of EPI, a multicultural doll company.

Williams didn’t play with dolls growing up — her sister did have “a Black fashion doll with European features, with, like a coat of a deeper, darker tan skin tone, right, which was by no means authentic.” But after seeing a 2010 CNN report that reexamined the conclusions of the doll test and found that many of the same attitudes were still prevalent, she decided she wanted to make authentic-looking dolls for Black children.

At the time, Williams was a professor at the University of Arkansas, teaching executive doctoral and MBA students.

“I’m watching this, thinking by this time, we have beautiful [Black] celebrities on the covers of magazines, we’re being voted most beautiful in the world. Barack Obama was president, we had all of that going on,” Williams said. “This is the advancement I thought I would see but I didn’t.

“Something in me broke because I realized we really hadn’t advanced as far as I thought. I just realized that there was a generation of children who were growing up that didn’t know the beauty and the brains of who they really are,” she said. “That day, sitting on my sofa, I vowed to make a change.

“We are mindful about making sure shades of eye color blend perfectly with the skin tone which blends in perfectly with the lip color and the hair color and the blush color all that has to match and be complementary to you to get a beautiful face,” said Williams.

She said she was naive getting into the toy business but has a compassion for and understanding of why true authenticity historically has not been truly represented. “You have to have a ‘why’ you’re doing it. Because if you don’t, you will kind of settle like, ‘Oh, this is good enough,’ right? And that’s what we’re seeing in the market. It was good enough. The dolls weren’t so horrible when we’d throw the dolls in the trash, right?”

The Walt Disney Co. approached Williams to re-create The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder cast as dolls to celebrate the reboot in February 2022 and in September 2022, this time with Marvel to recreate The Woman King cast in doll form.

“It’s such an honor and we worked very collaboratively. But they really did lean in if we said this isn’t quite accurate or I think we can do better,” said Williams. “Like for Nakia’s character [from The Woman King], she actually had locs, not braids, and locs did not exist in the mass-market before us. Clearly, we could have taken existing braids and just said OK, here it is, but we knew that that’s not authentic.”

Williams knows the difference between a braid and a loc, and she knows the community she’s serving knows the difference, too. “So we went to the drawing board, and we went to the fiber manufacturer to get both a fiber and a technique that’s now patent-pending.

“I’m always thinking about the little girl and little boy playing on the floor. What image do I want them to play with?” she said. “Who are they when they play with that doll? And I want them to see themselves and I want them to envision themselves achieving their dreams and they can only do that, in my opinion, when there’s a great connection with the doll that really resembles them.”

What Williams is saying is a nod to what Thomas sees as the future of doll production: moving beyond racial representation to creating real authenticity.

“That is going to require the toy industry to recognize that there is not just the presence of Blackness, but there is a heterogeneous Blackness out there that they have not figured out how to personify or create into an artifact,” said Thomas.

Channing Hargrove is a senior writer at Andscape covering fashion. That’s easier than admitting how strongly she identifies with the lyrics “Single Black female addicted to retail.”

- Iconoclasm (the destruction or damaging of icons and monuments) is framed not merely as anger or vandalism, but as an act pregnant with meaning—an attempt to reimagine social worlds and to challenge the narratives and values enshrined by public monuments.

Title:

Content: Smashing statues

Iconoclasm isn’t just an expression of anger. It’s how we try to make new worlds.
February 17, 2023
(Source image from Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Sometimes, bored indifference can sting worse than outright hostility. I was telling a friend about my present book project, The Storm of Images, which concerns the iconoclasm struggle in the Byzantine Empire during the eighth and ninth centuries. In my view, it’s a pivotal moment in the definition of Eastern and Western Christian traditions, so I was somewhat deflated when my friend asked, in effect, Why on earth would you want to do that? It’s so long ago, and the whole story is, well, Byzantine, a word that through the centuries has acquired plenty of negative baggage.

Fortunately, I was able to articulate a response that went beyond the simply defensive. In fact, I would argue, the whole story of iconoclasm is of perennial significance, a fact that should be as obvious today as in any previous era. Not only is smashing images an absolutely standard and recurring part of what societies do, but it is a fundamental part of religious sensibility, and by no means only for Christians. Simply put, it’s the way that we try to make new worlds.

Image smashing arises from two distinct impulses. Some iconoclasm grows out of hatred of a particular individual or the beliefs and causes that they represent. Here the smashers are striking at the figures represented, seeking to purge their memories as evil and unwanted. Such were the attacks on Soviet and communist images following the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989. More recently, in the United States, we see assaults on statues of Confederate heroes such as Nathan Bedford Forrest or Robert E. Lee. Through attacks on objects, activists are attacking the larger causes represented by those images. The United States has, since 2020, experienced a historically very sizable and socially transformative outbreak of iconoclasm, which has been echoed around the world.

Other smashers may truly venerate or love the individuals depicted, but they reject the depiction itself. In this category, far from condemning the figure represented, activists are driven by the exalted view that they have of that person, and they are rather agitated by the very notion of representing them in material or visual form. Such representation is thought impossible, the attempt evil or blasphemous. Any form of worship or prayer directed at objects is unacceptable, and it is futile to draw distinctions between worship and veneration, of praying to a material thing as opposed to praying through it. This attitude, this rejection of material images as such, was a fundamental driving force in the European Reformation—one at least as important as any particular theological doctrine of any given thinker.

The smashing of images is commonly one sensational aspect of a larger package of religious innovations, often of a quite revolutionary character. These tenets might include an assertion of inner spirituality over external or material symbols, along with perhaps a stern rejection of institutional religion or professional clergy.

Iconoclasm coexists intimately with anticlericalism. It is a rejection of existing notions of authority and a quest for whole new groundings, free of the claims of tradition. Depending on the context, the destruction of religious images can be an assertion of the supremacy of secular authority, of kings and governors over bishops and priests. The fact of destroying supposedly sacred objects—and remaining unharmed—sends a powerful message about the futility of those objects. If they are so potent, why can they not even protect themselves?

For both categories of iconoclast, their achievement lies not in destroying a given statue or altarpiece but in asserting the power to do so, against the power of the old order that hitherto had been its shield and defender. To strike at a statue or image—to bring down a Confederate general—is also to attack the institutions or individuals that erected those figures in the first place and who support their maintenance. It is a symbolic statement of who controls the visual landscape.

Moreover, the mass public violation of older taboos and restraints proclaims the impotence of that old guard. The fact that authorities no longer have the will or ability to prevent the removal of such once-cherished things in itself proclaims the end of an old world and the creation of a whole new order of society or politics. It is zero hour.

Even when the matters at issue are ostensibly secular, such acts of protest often acquire a ritualized format, which has echoes of enthusiastic or revivalist religion. Scenes of the removal of statues or images unforgettably proclaim these moments of revolutionary transformation. They are deliberately theatrical. In a modern context, visual representations of such acts of destruction become iconic in their own right. In their power to teach values, the acts of removal or destruction are as didactic as the images they are combating.

Making images is a perennial and fundamental component of the human religious experience, and so is crediting them with supernatural powers. But no less common is the practice of critiquing or destroying them. Sometimes we commemorate people’s faces; at other times we deface, and with equal passion. In order to be balanced and objective, a hypothetical museum of global religions should properly include its share of hacked and defaced icons, of fragments of toppled and shattered statues. The never-ending dialogue between the two competing approaches, the smashers and the devotees, has often driven religious thought and artistic expression.

John Calvin famously declared that “the human mind is a perpetual factory of idols.” I would adapt that to say that, time and again, history proves that the human mind is a powerful factory of image breaking, of iconoclasm.

- Specific reference is made to the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen, described as often targeted ("a long line of attacks").

Title:

Content: Russian Flag Painted on Copenhagen's Most Famous Landmark

It's the latest in a long line of attacks on Little Mermaid statue
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 2, 2023 10:15 AM CST

The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen, one of Denmark's most famous landmarks, has been vandalized yet again, this time with the Russian flag. Authorities said Thursday that the white, blue, and red stripes of the Russian flag were painted on the stone the statue sits on, Reuters reports. Police said the vandalism was discovered early Thursday. "We are of course launching an investigation to find out who did it and when and how it happened," a police spokesman said, per Jyllands-Posten.

Denmark, like other European nations, has strongly criticized Russia's war against Ukraine. The small statue, a tribute to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, sits off a waterfront promenade in the Danish capital. It has been vandalized many times since it was installed 110 years ago, AFP reports. It has been decapitated twice and was knocked off its base with explosives in 2003. In 2017, it was doused in red paint in a protest against whale hunting. In 2020, during worldwide protests after the death of George Floyd, the words "racist fish" were painted on the base, though Andersen scholars said they weren't aware of any racist elements in the fairy tale. (Read more The Little Mermaid stories.)

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One recent case highlighted is its being defaced with the Russian flag as an act of protest, reflecting the statue’s status as a cultural flashpoint.

- Broader discourse threads question who decides which figures are commemorated with public monuments, noting the "need for a diverse culture of remembrance"—suggesting acts against such monuments can be calls for greater inclusiveness or transparency in public memory.

Title:

Content: Navigation

Who decides who is put on a pedestal?

Monuments in public spaces are a politically charged issue, with closed circles of experts often making decisions about who or what gets memorialised in Switzerland. In an opinion piece, a group of academics and curators argues that the time has come for greater transparency and new types of commemoration.

This content was published on February 27, 2022 - 10:00
Philine Erni, Sarah Grossenbacher, Rachel Huber and Vera Ryser

The Swiss women’s strike in 2019 and the Black Lives Matter movement that began in the United States in 2020 have helped to raise questions about the politics of memory in Switzerland. In the country’s public spaces, there is an absence of memorials to women, people with migration experience and people of colour.

The authors

Philine Erni is an art and literary academic and will be part of the management team of Theater Winkelwiese in Zurich from the 2022/23 season.

Sarah Grossenbacher studied history, sociology and spatial planning and is co-head of urban planning at the City of Lucerne.

Rachel Huber has a doctorate in history. She researches and teaches at the Department of Modernism at the University of Lucerne and is co-founder of the Historians' Network Switzerland.

Vera Ryser is a freelance curator, exhibition organiser and literary academic. Among other things, she co-initiated the project Das Wandbild muss weg!External link (The mural must go!).

End of insertion

Instead, it is mostly white male figures standing on pedestals of bronze or stone. For decades – centuries, even – they have represented Swiss progress, innovation and success. What’s often overlooked is that their success and wealth are built on, among other things, the exploitation of indigenous peoples, the keeping of slaves or their support for the slave trade.

Various voices have demanded that statues of such figures be transferred to museums or re-interpreted and their hidden stories be revealed and displayed.

The year 2021 marked 50 years since Swiss women obtained the right to vote. Many academic conferences and media reports, such as one in the German-language NZZ am SonntagExternal link newspaper, took stock of progress made in that time: roughly 70% of artworks shown in Swiss museums are by men; nine out of ten streets named after a prominent figure are named after a man; and women go largely unmentioned in history books.

The need for a diverse culture of remembrance is clear. But how can such a polyphony be taken into account when dealing with the existing monuments in public spaces?

Who decides? And why is there no public discourse?

Depending on their significance, existing monuments in public spaces fall under the responsibility of either city or cantonal heritage authorities. But deciding which structures can receive heritage status – and therefore become officially part of public remembrance – is the responsibility of heritage conservatorsExternal link. Normally these decisions come without public consultation, even in the case of public monuments that hold great symbolic and political significance.

Thanks to political pressure, in the city of Zurich a working group (Kunst im öffentlichen Raum or Art in the Public Space) is examining 26 statues, while the historian Georg Kreis is looking at “just under 40 monuments”External link. These studies are generally welcome, but they still raise questions: Who are the experts in this case and who is being brought on to offer advice? And why is there no public discussion, despite there being a highly political question at the core: how do we as a society want to remember the past?

Regulations exist primarily on the protection and preservation of monuments. Even artworks commissioned for public spaces are created for eternity, barring damage. Can activism alone prompt a swift removal? Vandalism can touch a nerve, but it only solves the problem of unbalanced representation in public spaces in a selective way. As seen with demands since the 1970s from feminists that public squares and streets be renamed, little has changed structurally: the demands are far too seldom complied with to this day.

Yet involving locals in a discussion is both possible and sensible. In recent years, many municipalities have gathered experience with participative processes. These have taken many forms: surveys, roundtables and workshops, even games and guided tours, both digital and in person. Why aren’t these forums being used to talk about public monuments?

What must we rethink or unlearn?

At this point, it is worth taking a look at the current restitution debate, where the art historian Bénédicte Savoy and the economist Felwine Sarr have called for a “gesture of restitution” with considerable success. “Gestures of removal” or “completion” could serve as a good starting point for a new approach to memory culture. They could also contribute to a new type of relationship between segments of society that are over-represented and those that are under-represented – one that gives a sense of community and belonging.

This approach would be based on the view that history, too, is “in constant flux,” as the historian Achim Landwehr puts it: the past, present and future are all related and historical narratives are constructs of the present-day perspective. This concept of history inevitably calls into question today’s assumption that monuments are valid for eternity.

To forge a new culture of remembrance that’s fit for our times, cities and towns need to actively promote a new type of relationship in public spaces, not just to protect their monuments, but also to renew them. The recent call to supplement the statue of David de Pury in Neuchâtel with works that will initiate a critical dialogue about the original statue of the Swiss banker and slave trader, and the Zurich project group to combat racism in public spaces show that Swiss cities are beginning – albeit slowly and within the constraints of existing structures – to take an interest in a new remembrance culture.

This new culture requires existing specialist juries to relinquish their power and make way for more participative strategies and greater transparency. This way it would be possible, at last, to anchor our towns’ public spaces in the present and distance ourselves from the misunderstanding that “heritage” should serve as a lasting commemoration of a system bequeathed to us by the past.

Existing statues would be complemented by achievements and realities that are part of our society but are not memorialised in public spaces – and therefore remain invisible. They include women, the LGBTQ community and people of colour as well as subjects that remain socially taboo: forced labour and Switzerland’s policy on foreign seasonal workers, for example. One pre-requisite for a diverse, intersectional culture of commemoration and remembrance would be that these “others” can participate in political, legal, institutional and cultural life.

Anyone who wants to contribute to this must work on visibility. It starts with basic research. And we have to establish different and more current forms of remembrance: “edit-a-thons” (where authors create articles collectively on neglected historical women for the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia) or hashtags such as #metoo and #blacklivesmatter. Perhaps these are examples of a future memory culture: they are participative and digital, ephemeral and volatile.

(Translated from German by Catherine Hickley/gw)

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of SWI swissinfo.ch.

In compliance with the JTI standards

More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative

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- Comparisons are made between how art objects are curated/protected versus how they are sometimes attacked or reinterpreted, raising questions about the arbitrary lines between revered heritage and contested symbols.

- The extract does not describe every individual attack on the Little Mermaid statue but provides a framework for understanding them: vandalism against such monuments can arise from political protest, social critique, or desires to reclaim public space or historical narratives.

- Acts of vandalism are described as didactic and symbolic, as they teach values or contest dominant ideals, just as the original monuments aimed to do.

- The summary also indirectly points towards the diversity of meanings attributed to cultural symbols and the contested nature of public memory.

Title:

Content: Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette uses a fake heist film to address real issues in the art world | Pittsburgh City Paper

Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette uses a fake heist film to address real issues in the art world

click to enlarge
Photo: Sean Eaton
Lyndon Barrois Jr.
There’s an elephant in the room at the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Forum Gallery – one you see, and one you feel.

An Art Nouveau-inspired painting titled “Kaleidoscope” comes with gold-lined ears and bold primary colors in an abstraction of shapes that resembles an elephant. There’s a leopard, borrowed from the adjoining Carnegie Museum of Natural History, perched on stacked crates. There’s a bookcase filled with real and fake crystals, artifacts, and other objects. In the center of the room is the empty working station of a questionable presence – a possible art forger.

With Rosette, on view at CMOA through Aug. 27, Pittsburgh-based artist Lyndon Barrois Jr. places museum-goers into the center of a space that nearly resembles a movie set, complete with a never-to-be-realized short script for a heist movie about museum conservators-turned-forgers. Barrois uses his solo show, featuring a whole new body of work, to consider an art movement influenced by stolen artifacts and defined by exploited labor. Even when silent, there’s another elephant presence with you in the room: the legacy of colonialism.

Pittsburgh City Paper spoke with Barrois about the origins of Rosette, the ways art is influenced by colonialism, and the complex idea of ownership in museums.

When did you start conceptualizing the show?

The story of the conservative-forger narrative is something that has been on my mind for almost 20 years. And originally, it was going to be just a full screenplay. It was after my own experience of taking a class on painting conservation. I was also really interested in crime fiction novels. At first, it was like, maybe it’s a novel or novella, and then I was like, no, I kind of see it, so maybe it should be a film. I've been thinking about it in the context of a film for a while, but the structure of that story and the character makeup has changed over time.

Originally, the motivation to forge something was to protect it from a greedy inheritor, or someone who was going to inherit it and do something that the original owner didn't want to be done with it. So it was a sort of, like, protective strategy, to keep the real thing safe. And to allow a fake thing to travel in the world or through a market.

Later, I was reading more about the history between Belgium and the Congo, and things just kind of snapped into place, where I was like, this history feels like a good motivator. I'm interested in this history, I want to do something to speak to it.

The use of cinema in your art is recurring. Where does it originate, and why use cinema as a conduit for your message?

It lends itself to the production of physical things because there's already this way that stories allow objects to carry meaning. And also, I think, as a culture, the way that we consume film and television, you know, cinematic media, we're already accustomed to the language of marketing, and how these things are advertised to us and how we have a sense or a perception of a story before we actually we see the actual film. ... I've always kind of been interested in advertising and marketing strategies.

And so, it was just sort of convenient that film production or the history of Hollywood marketing strategy has existing forms that I can play with or alter or rescale, and kind of translate into paintings or sculptures that also fit within or mimic the aesthetics of posters, lobby cards, film stills, physical props, you know, set environments. Playing with that, like the museum is a prop house. The museum has a collection. It’s a way of thinking of a museum collection as a sort of prop house. What can I borrow to assist the narrative I'm trying to tell? To that point, many of these objects are borrowed. It’s a very meta and also somewhat sustainable choice.
click to enlarge
Photo: Sean Eaton
"Masters of Fine Arts," part of Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette at CMOA

Can you talk about the process of choosing pieces to borrow and your goal in using borrowed pieces?

I feel like every visit we made a different, slight alteration or clarifying decision about what we wanted to do, which is really fun. And then once I got a sense of what objects I was using from the museum, then I could decide, okay, what do I need to make, to play off those things? Some things I already knew. I think I knew I wanted to make lobby card portraits. I knew I wanted to recreate at least two objects that I found buried in a Belgian institutional collection, which are the King Leopold II [work] and sculpture of two children playing. Both of these are definitely meant to reference rubber extraction and labor exploitation. This fragmented sculpture of children playing with their missing limbs was obviously a reference to punishment that people who were put to work in the Belgian Congo and who were amputated as a form of punishment, so I wanted to allude to those things without literally showing them.

There’s a lot of allusion here, and I really want to talk about the literal and figurative elephants in the room. Can you talk about the elephant, and unpack the symbolism?

This [elephant piece] was inspired by a series of essays by Debora Silverman called Art Nouveau: Art of Darkness. She is kind of making a case about these kinds of colonial roots within Belgian Art Nouveau, because a few of the more notable designers of this movement in that part of the world were affiliated with King Leopold, or commissioned by people within Leopold’s circle. So it's a combination of design works or elements from [Belgian painter Henry van de Velde] and [Belgian architect Victor Horta]. And there are other visual examples from different designs of theirs, either referencing something that she described as elephantine, or whip-like or vine-like to reference the rubber vines.

It's also a different visual identity that they take on as distinct from different parts of the world. So yeah, just kind of trying to locate that visual lineage, and these designers, and how their relationship to these resources that were extracted by exploitational means were kind of embedded in their design sensibility.

There’s a tension here, between the desire to appreciate art through conservation and the potential harm done, that comes with keeping art in a way different than what the artist intended. Can you unpack that?

I was told by a conservator that there's an interesting shift between generations of artists, where, I would say, historically, in terms of hundreds of years ago, there was a sense of archival practice. And then we move into modern, post-modern [eras] to where people are making all these material experiments, and however the work is, whatever happens to it, they're okay with it degrading to a certain degree.

But now, with contemporary art, I think we're interested in this weird thing of allowing something to decay or change up to a point, and then we want to freeze it there. And that's much harder to do. I think there's one part of a conversation in which value by colonial entities has been achieved by taking things, like resources, raw, natural resources, to fuel a particular economy.
click to enlarge
Photo: Sean Eaton
"Guardians Gate (Farfanicchio)," part of Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette at CMOA
There's also the case in which objects, like cultural artifacts, fetish objects, are taken from a place for their sort of exotic properties, and then, based on the new ownership, get assigned a particular value. Or even the way that something just simply being in a museum collection changes its value or changes its perceived value, which I guess I could say was also something that I've always been interested in, of using cheap materials presented well, or presented carefully, to hopefully change the perception of how it’s valued. I used a lot of cardboard in my work when I was an artist no one cared about. That was a highly critical aspect of my work. While at the same time, I could go to a museum and see a cardboard sculpture that is being so cared for.

So there are these kind of discrepancies as well. I'm also asking the question about aesthetic value. There's a bit of that in the script text as well. Like, if an object fulfills the same aesthetic experience as an original, does it matter whether or not it's fake? That’s just a question that I've always had ... at what point do I need the actual object? If I have a really satisfying image of it, at what point does an image satisfy the use of an object? At what point does an object simply reduce itself to being an image? These kinds of things, I think, are still at play.

What should museum-goers be considering about the art they’re viewing and the conservation that keeps it viewable, that they may not already be considering when in a museum?

Acknowledging the relationship between things that are seemingly separate. Like, what does an elephant molar have to do with [Patrice Lumumba, former Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo]? Actually, one of the people involved in his assassination took one of his teeth. This is where the name “precious gums” comes from. Little things like that. There are just some things, like, when objects are illuminated by historical anecdotes or historical realities or a particular narrative, that there’s a connection that’s formed between them. … How the past impacts the present and the future always. These kinds of relationships are not just cyclical but seemingly unending.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette. Continues through Aug. 27. Carnegie Museum of Art. 4400 Forbes Ave., Oakland. Included with regular admission. carnegieart.org


**Summary: Intentional Damages to the Little Mermaid Statue, Copenhagen**

The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen, a symbol of the city, has been repeatedly targeted by vandals since it was unveiled in 1913.

These attacks are often seen as acts of cultural protest, statements against authority, or expressions of counter-cultural sentiment, making the statue’s turbulent history particularly resonant for tours exploring Danish culture and counter-culture.

Notable incidents include:

- **1964**: The most infamous attack occurred when the statue’s head was sawed off and stolen.

The head was never recovered; a new one had to be cast.

This shocking act was reportedly perpetrated by politically motivated artists protesting bourgeois values.

- **1984**: The right arm of the statue was cut off and stolen.

Teenagers later handed the arm in to police.

This incident appears to have been an act of youthful mischief rather than a political statement.

- **1998**: Once again, the statue’s head was removed, this time using a hacksaw.

The severed head was returned anonymously by the attackers several days later.

The culprit(s) remained unidentified, though speculation ranged from stirred-up artists to political activists.

- **2003**: The entire statue was blown off its base with explosives.

The perpetrators were never identified; while motives weren’t clearly stated, the attack was widely viewed as a protest or act of rebellion against the iconic status of the statue.

Besides these main incidents, the Little Mermaid has been subjected to repeated acts of paint vandalism—doused in red, green, or pink paint at various times, often accompanied by political statements or slogans.

For example, in 2017, the statue was drenched in red paint in protest against Danish whaling practices in the Faroe Islands.

**Summary: Intentional Damages to the Little Mermaid Statue, Copenhagen**

The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen, a symbol of the city, has been repeatedly targeted by vandals since it was unveiled in 1913.

Title:

Content: Russian Flag Painted on Copenhagen's Most Famous Landmark

It's the latest in a long line of attacks on Little Mermaid statue
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 2, 2023 10:15 AM CST

The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen, one of Denmark's most famous landmarks, has been vandalized yet again, this time with the Russian flag. Authorities said Thursday that the white, blue, and red stripes of the Russian flag were painted on the stone the statue sits on, Reuters reports. Police said the vandalism was discovered early Thursday. "We are of course launching an investigation to find out who did it and when and how it happened," a police spokesman said, per Jyllands-Posten.

Denmark, like other European nations, has strongly criticized Russia's war against Ukraine. The small statue, a tribute to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, sits off a waterfront promenade in the Danish capital. It has been vandalized many times since it was installed 110 years ago, AFP reports. It has been decapitated twice and was knocked off its base with explosives in 2003. In 2017, it was doused in red paint in a protest against whale hunting. In 2020, during worldwide protests after the death of George Floyd, the words "racist fish" were painted on the base, though Andersen scholars said they weren't aware of any racist elements in the fairy tale. (Read more The Little Mermaid stories.)

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These attacks are often seen as acts of cultural protest, statements against authority, or expressions of counter-cultural sentiment, making the statue’s turbulent history particularly resonant for tours exploring Danish culture and counter-culture.

Notable incidents include:

- **1964**: The most infamous attack occurred when the statue’s head was sawed off and stolen.

The head was never recovered; a new one had to be cast.

This shocking act was reportedly perpetrated by politically motivated artists protesting bourgeois values.

- **1984**: The right arm of the statue was cut off and stolen.

Teenagers later handed the arm in to police.

Title:

Content: Poland! It was never on my travel list. In my mind, it’s an East European country ravaged by world wars. So when I was assigned a trip to Poland, I hesitated briefly. Then I said to myself: I know very little about the country, so let this be a voyage of discovery.

A fantastic voyage of discovery it was. Over seven days, Poland surprised and enchanted me with its history, culture, architecture, natural beauty, fresh fruits and cuisine. The swing through Warsaw, Gdansk, Gdynia, Lodz and Wroclaw lent me a new perspective. I saw a modern country with good infrastructure, clean roads, green vistas, rolling fields, ancient baroque-style palaces, ornate churches, centuries-old architecture and fantastic food.

I would have liked a more immersive experience because there was so much to see and take in. I wanted to sit at one of the wayside restaurants in Wroclaw and watch the world go by with a beverage in hand. Take a stroll through Piotrkowska Street in Lodz. Stand a bit longer on the Orlowo Pier in Gydnia with the wind in my face and watch the Baltic Sea. And Gdansk, where do I even start? The charming port city brims with history.

Poland is no stranger to history, and the past is inextricably entwined in its capital, Warsaw. A city that was destroyed in the Second World War and rebuilt from the ruins. The city is a testament to the resilience of the Poles, who repeatedly bounced back from the horrors of wars and partitions. Time stands still in Warsaw, particularly in the Old Town.

Brutal wars and a painful past may be a recurring theme in Poland, but Frederic Chopin occupies pride of place in Polish tourism. Rightly so, because he is the most famous Pole in the world. People throng Chopin concerts worldwide, and some don’t even know he’s Polish. Chopin spent his later years in France and is buried in Paris, hence the confusion.

Chopin is everywhere in Poland. I arrived at the Frederic Chopin International Airport in Warsaw. A visit to the Holy Cross Church brought me closer to Chopin’s heart. Literally. It resides in one of the church’s pillars after being smuggled into Poland, past Soviet border guards by his sister, as Chopin requested before his death.

Stepping outside the church, I came across the Chopin benches. The black granite benches, found in 15 places in Warsaw, play Chopin’s works and offer a map to other bench locations. Walking past them, I found a Chopin lodging where he lived as a young man. Heading to the Royal Lazienki Park, I found a sculpture of Chopin sitting under a willow. An outdoor concert was underway.

A 60km trip to Zelazowa Wola brought me to Chopin’s birthplace (he was born in 1810). A lone building with all things Chopin remains on the premises. Aleksandra Swigut, a pianist, played a couple of the maestro’s works. Warsaw is also home to a Chopin Museum. But there’s much more to Poland than Chopin.

WARSAW: UNESCO HERITAGE EXCEPTION
Unesco world heritage sites generally are of archaeological significance. But Warsaw’s historic city centre is an exception: all the structures were built in the 20th century, although some have a 14th-century feel about them. Poland rebuilt the city with popular donations after Nazi troops systematically demolished 80-90% of the buildings when Poles earned German leader Adolf Hitler’s wrath with the Warsaw uprising of 1944.
After the war, Poland mobilised its people to rebuild Warsaw with the rallying cry: “The entire nation builds its capital.” The rebuild of Old Town started in 1945, and most of the work was completed in less than ten years, although additional reconstruction continued into the1980s, reports say. Pre-war photographs, architectural drawings and 18th-century paintings by Italian artists Marcello Bacciarelli and Bernardo Bellotto acted as visual guides in the reconstruction.
Undamaged bricks, slabs and fragments were used in the reconstruction. The project was completed with the reopening of the Royal Castle in 1984. With that, Warsaw and Poland reclaimed their past and pride.

A monument that pays tribute to David Copernicus stands prominently at Krakowskie Przedmiescie Street, Warsaw. He’s the Pole who taught us that Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around.

Further away is the Royal Castle, a sprawling brick-red building that dominates Castle Square, where Sigismund’s Column haughtily pierces the sky. Difficult to believe that the buildings were rebuilt structures after Germans dynamited the originals following Adolf Hitler’s fury at the Poles’ stubborn resistance.

A few steps away, the Warsaw Mermaid awaited, with a shield aloft and swinging sword over her head. Moving away, I came across the home (now a museum) of Marie Sklodowska-Curie, a Nobel winner in Physics (for the study of spontaneous radioactivity) and Chemistry (discovery of Radium and Polonium, the metal is named after her homeland).

THE MERMAIDS OF WARSAW
Mermaids, there are aplenty in Warsaw, the capital of Poland. But the Syrenka (mermaid in Polish) in Old Town is the most famous. Where did these half-woman half-fish creatures come from? Apparently, there’s no single answer.
Popular legend has it that two mermaid sisters swam across the Baltic Sea and parted ways at Gdansk: one went to Copenhagen, and the other came down the Vistula River and rested near the Old Town in Warsaw. Impressed with the place, she decided to stay, but the fishermen were unhappy with her for freeing fish from their nets. Her beauty and singing won them, but a greedy merchant kidnapped her to make money on travelling shows at fairs. A fisherman’s son rescued her, and a grateful mermaid vowed to defend the village that became Warsaw.
Another one says that when a prince lost his way on a hunting trip, the mermaid shot arrows into the sky to guide him to safety. The third tale is about a griffin (a mythical animal with the head and wings of an eagle and the body, hind legs, and tail of a lion) who defended the city and accompanied fishermen into the Baltic. During a trip, he fell in love with a mermaid, and the two returned to live in Warsaw. The griffin died in the battle with the Swedes, and the mermaid took up arms to defend the city. The grateful people made her the symbol of Warsaw and placed her in the coat of arms.
Stories there are many more, and each is fiercely disputed, according to reports. Mermaids too are many in Warsaw. The one at Old Town Square attracts the most tourists, another one can be spotted near the Swietokrzyski Bridge, and a third stands near the Markiewicz viaduct. More lesser-known statues of mermaids are sighted around the city.

Some grim moments at the boundary of a former Jewish Warsaw Ghetto were followed by a trip to the magnificent Wilanow Palace, a baroque-style summer residence of King Jan III Sobieski built in the 17th century.

Another palace loomed in Lazienki Krolewskie, or the Royal Baths Park: the Palace on the Isle, which dates back to the 17th century. Initially a Baroque Bathouse Pavilion, it was converted into a neoclassical palace before it became a museum.

Slate grey skies with dark clouds and a steady drizzle greeted me in Gdynia. The chilly winds failed to thwart a lazy walk over the 180-metre Orlowo Pier, the wooden structure built during the First World War. A coffee warmed me for a spot of forest-bathing as I hiked the nature reserve with the affable Marek Kaminski, the Guinness record-holder who has been both the poles.

Soon I stepped into Gdansk, a seaside city steeped in history. All the ruins were rebuilt in precisely the same manner. I walked the streets in awe, marvelling at the buildings but not fully knowing the weight of history and a past that tied Gdynia and Gdansk to the start of the Second World War.

Gdansk is the land of Lech Walesa, the man with a walrus moustache, who led the Solidarity Movement from the docks and rose to become the country’s first democratically elected president. I knew that. But I didn’t know of another Gdansk son, Daniel Fahrenheit, who is more known for devising the Fahrenheit temperature scale and less for inventing the mercury-in-glass thermometer.

The city is also the capital of amber, a fossilised resin from coniferous trees. So a visit to Amber Museum is mandatory. It traces the trade and history of amber from 8000 BC and is a virtual repository of all things amber.

Lodz was the next stop. Lodz is pronounced Wuj and written Łódź in Polish. Being a textile manufacturing centre, Lodz is a fashion capital, and a long walk through Piotrkowska Street is also a must for film buffs. It didn’t happen due to a time crunch. The Lodz film school helped film directors Roman Polanski, Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieslowski learn the craft.

The land of gnomes, Wroclaw beckoned me. Statues of little people are found everywhere in the city: in the alleys, doorways, street corners and even the city centre. Although more of a tourist gimmick now, its origins lie in the underground protest movement during the days of communism.

Wroclaw in Lower Silesia is adorned with beautiful buildings, especially around the Rynek (Market Square). Many colourful buildings were rebuilt after the wars but retained their appeal. A buggy ride helped us whistle past many landmarks, but we did make it to the Hydropolis (a water research centre) and the Raclawice Panorama, which houses a 360-degree 3D painting. It’s not a technological marvel but an artwork that fuses art on canvas and real-life objects to depict the 1794 Battle of Raclawice.

A stay at the Ksiaz Castle hotel was a throwback to the past, but the spooky night tour of the 13th-century castle produced spine-chilling encounters with four ghosts of people who served the House of Hochberg. The German and Soviet forces ravaged much of the castle during the wars, and rumours abound that a lost Nazi gold train is said to be buried near the castle.

I didn’t find the gold train but was treated to Poland’s bounty. The seven days sure did change my perception of the country. There’s much more to see and enjoy. So I will be back.

Jen-koo-yeh Polska (Thank you Poland).

This incident appears to have been an act of youthful mischief rather than a political statement.

- **1998**: Once again, the statue’s head was removed, this time using a hacksaw.

The severed head was returned anonymously by the attackers several days later.

The culprit(s) remained unidentified, though speculation ranged from stirred-up artists to political activists.

- **2003**: The entire statue was blown off its base with explosives.

The perpetrators were never identified; while motives weren’t clearly stated, the attack was widely viewed as a protest or act of rebellion against the iconic status of the statue.

Besides these main incidents, the Little Mermaid has been subjected to repeated acts of paint vandalism—doused in red, green, or pink paint at various times, often accompanied by political statements or slogans.

For example, in 2017, the statue was drenched in red paint in protest against Danish whaling practices in the Faroe Islands.