By declaring that this particular stone is the last stone of Belgium, by burying monumentality, any subsequent monument, glorifying whatever fragment of the history or self-perception of Belgium, needs to respond to Luc Deleu’s claim to have ended a genre, to the urgency with which the work asks for other forms of addressing social or historiographic troubles than conventional monumentality. The Stone purports to terminate the cycle of commemoration, in a way that contradicts subsequent monuments, attaching itself parasitically to them and denying their right to exist. The project materializes in the residents’ prolonged efforts to persuade the local authorities to change the name of the street, and all entries corresponding to it in all archival, bureaucratic systems of the municipality. It is a long-term, intensely frustrating process, that demands countless readjustments of bureaucratic personae. Everything, all the thousands of details, need to be slightly shifted around the task of commemoration, which is not consigned, and externalised, in an object. Nothing is more invisible than a monument, as Musil said, but in this case, nothing is more intricate, awkward, painful and delayed. The responsibility of commemoration is instead taken over by the social body, rehearsed daily, together with other forms of ‘identity’.
Mihnea Mircan, Monument to concomitance, conference 26.10.2010