When you think of monuments and public art projects that provoke, that are critical and participatory, you think of Paul Ramírez Jonas. Born in California, raised in Honduras, and now a professor at New York’s Hunter College, he has produced renowned projects including Keys to the City, Public Trust, and the Commons, which have been huge inspirations to me and Monument Lab. Ask him to name traditional styles of monuments going back to antiquity, he can give you studied and detailed response – but he can also point you to projects of his that reinvent the form and expectations for participatory monuments.

“I just had this moment where I realized, if you turn a monument inside-out, a sculptural monument, it becomes a theater,” he says.

We speak to Paul Ramírez Jonas about the idea of Public Noise, a new proposal where he inverts the idea of an equestrian monument and presents a stage for debating what it means to occupy and tangle with public space. Ramirez Jonas made Public Noise as a part of the High Line Joint Art Network’s New Monuments for New Cities. Over the last six months, Monument Lab has been research residents of this project and we are speaking with artists from each of its 5 partner cities – New York, Chicago, Austin, Houston, and Toronto – about monuments, memory, and public space.