Mathieu Tremblin
A scarf is attached to a tree trunk [Fig. 1]; a bicycle, painted white, is fixed to a fence at a street corner [Fig. 2]; a small DIY garden containing wooden crosses appears on the side of the road [Fig. 3]. From uncommon objects scattered here and there to recognizable micro‑sculptures bearing small messages, our daily urban environment is populated with non‑spectacular memorials. In contrast to the dominant form of the public monument, these intimate memorials serve as discreet reminders that a person, significant to a particular group, has died at that location. They are primarily addressed to those who knew the deceased, and their meaning often lies in the fact that they do not seek a broader or official audience—except in cases where the death might help prevent similar tragedies.
Not all memorials are directly concerned with death; some celebrate the vivid energy of social struggles—like the public exhibition of a piece of the Berlin Wall at the entrance of European Parliament [Fig. 4]. Yet they share a common function: materializing and sustaining a collective conversation around the memory of a person or entity, directed toward a community seeking to remember. The celebration of this memory can be as integral to the process of grief as it is to an emancipatory act.
Memorials can take the form of either a score or a monument: a textual record compiling elements of remembrance, or a sculptural or architectural space that both symbolically expresses what is to be remembered and provides a physical site where the collective can gather to engage with that memory.
When conceived outside institutional power frameworks, community memorials resemble memories in action, standing apart from the imposing, vertical forms of traditional public statues—some of which were dismantled during the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. They can be closer in spirit to a discreet stone plaque at a street corner, such as the one commemorating Malik Oussekine in Paris—a student killed by French police during a demonstration in 1986.
The creation of such human‑scale memorials in public spaces can itself serve as a symbolic lever for change. Since the 1990s, Stolperstein have been installed across European cities and beyond to embed the memory of the Holocaust in everyday spaces [Fig. 5]. Each Stolperstein consists of a concrete block topped with a brass plate, ten centimetres square, engraved with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution, and embedded in the pavement before their former home. German artist Gunter Demnig initiated this practice through an unauthorized intervention on 16 December 1992; since then, more than 40,000 Stolperstein have been installed worldwide. What began as an individual action grew, with community and municipal support and donations, into a dispersed and desecrated memorial emerging from the sidewalks.
In the recent years, feminist and decolonial activists have harnessed the symbolic resonance of street signs to make their narratives visible in urban spaces. By covering street signs with simple A4 laser‑printed posters, they have sought to rebalance the city’s odonymy, inserting women’s presence or challenging commemorations of colonial oppressors [Fig. 6].
Encompassing both intimate and community concerns, actions undertaken by anonymous citizens or artists can be considered informal memorials. Rather than directly addressing an explicit memory, they operate as traces, reminders, and warnings, as observed by English anthropologist Rafael Schacter in Monumental Graffiti: Tracing Public Art and Resistance in the City (2024). Within the framework of a playground of the invisible organized by the Novo collective, the 'Informal Memorials' selection of streetworks explore how urban situations can become personal counter‑monuments illuminating unaddressed power imbalances or encouraging the continuation of liberating acts.
Fig. 1 – “Intimate memorial, Mons (BE)”. 2012. (Photography: Mathieu Tremblin)
Fig. 2 – “Intimate memorial, Mons (BE)”. 2013. (Photography: Mathieu Tremblin)
Fig. 3 – “Intimate memorial, Montpellier (FR)”. 2024. (Photography: Mathieu Tremblin)
Fig. 4 – “Fragment of the Berlin Wall, Strasbourg (FR)”. 2024. (Photography: Mathieu Tremblin)
Fig. 5 – Gunter Demnig. “Stolperstein, Bruxelles (BE)”. 2024. (Photography: Mathieu Tremblin)
Fig. 6 – “Anonymous poster ‘Place des droits des peuples opprimés’ [Place of the rights of the oppressed people], Strasbourg (FR)”. 2024. (Photography: Mathieu Tremblin)
About the Curator
Mathieu Trembin (°1980) is a French visual artist, curator, researcher, and associate professor based in Strasbourg, France, whose work extends throughout Europe and beyond.
Tremblin’s art practice is tied to the use and wear of urban space: through documentation, action, and storytelling, he makes the public dimension of the city legible and tangible, while encouraging its appropriation. He approaches attitudes and traces as subtle signals of urban life, micro-history is to be written in order to weave an understanding of the urban phenomenon on other scales.
The process of qualifying and symbolizing these forms of urbanity activates an imagination in which the commons of urban margins are brought back to the center of attention. This approach takes the form of playful urban interventions, editorial experiments, curation, and residency programs.
His research focuses on support and narrative approaches for urban intervention practices; on methods of sensible diagnostics; on the permeabilities between analog and digital in the fields of publishing and the urban environment; on protocols and processes of collaboration and co‑creation; and on the connections between creativity, microhistory, and social struggles. Notable initiatives in this vein include Éditions Carton-pâte, Paper Tigers Collection, Office de la créativité, Post-Posters, Fonds documentaire de l'Amicale du Hibou-Spectateur, and Die Gesellschaft der Stadtwanderer.
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La responsabilité d'un curateur urbain est d'identifier et de qualifier des dynamiques informelles créatives existantes, puis d'encourager et soutenir celles portées par des personnes désireuses d'enrichir et contribuer à l'histoire sociale de la ville.
The responsibility of an urban curator is to identify and consider existing informal creative dynamics, and then to encourage and support those driven by people who wish to enrich and contribute to the social history of the city.