Dig Site
The square is an ancient wellspring—the source of a city’s cycles from which time flows, and into which time returns. So, when a heavy blow is struck and power presides like a boulder in a stream, the illusion that time has halted, history has ended, and the torrent has fallen silent is created. The fantasy to consecrate a space in one’s eternal memory, arresting time and place, has aroused rulers for eons. But the square is bound by no form; it has been the clay stage for man’s theatrical propensity for millennia: countless dictators, democracies and demi-gods have declared in the square that all of history has arrived at their moment of glory and must therefore be carved in imperishable stone. Yet all have fallen and passed. The fear of mortality has certainly impressed itself on the square but never conquered it. The square moves on with the rage and lull of running water, for it is an idea born of a need to live together whose only prerequisite is change. It offers itself to whoever is willing to show up and stick their feet in the mud.
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In November 2024, I found myself in an anxious affair with Trafalgar Square. I went several times a week and on every visit felt more distressed than the last. And yet I was inexplicably drawn to its loathsomeness, like some gruelling fantasy you would very much like to purge yourself of, but which continually gets the better of you. A lot of my time there was spent sitting, observing, indulging in its lore, feeling feeble under its weight. There was a bitter feeling, as though a single rotten pip in my innermost gut was slowly metastasizing. Bad apple.
One particularly vacuous morning, when the square seemed to have lured and then leached from its visitors all those aspects of life which allow for joy and animation, I experienced a series of illuminating moments. It was as though the square had, in its brashness, corroded my every expectation, stripped me of my assumed self, and exposed something long untouched in me to the blight of the human condition.
A faint and nimble fog swept across the sunlit square like a murmuration of golden gleamings—its flock of dewy pearls slowly swooping through the low-hanging sky. I was sitting on a dusky bench in the northwest corner as this sunny spectacle passed before me. My bones rattled. The sun was deprived of its usual warming properties and seemed rather like an image of a yellow circle plastered on a bleach-blue backdrop. The air was icy cold, although a photo would say otherwise.
On every other occasion I had seen the same homeless man encamped on the bench where I now sat. The only remaining trace of him was the undulating map of stains encircling me on the ground. I felt in the space around me the slow seeping of a life which lingers after its body has withdrawn, as though I was sitting on the stump of a freshly felled tree. The contours of the man’s fading presence revealed obscure information, like a map with no scale, location, or colour. Only deep gorges and crevasses. But the square would soon be wiped clean of any living vestiges, as happens every Monday morning, so I sat there for the rest of the day, concealed by the neglect the homeless man left in his wake.
Tourists sporadically walked by, posed, took photos, moved on—their smiles pierced at the corners, pulled up by phantom strings. They paid me no attention. I watched with vacant eyes as the morning parade of cars, trucks, and bikes lurched along the borders of the square, but their sputtering engines had no spurring effect on me. They only served to intensify the quiet violence of the square’s inner stillness—a false sense of calm below which swelled a nervous apprehension. But I knew by then not to expect what at first I awaited with teenage elation: the sprawl, the gathering, the friction, the titillating spirit of the city square. But there would be no release, no gush of life, no renewal here. Trafalgar Square felt terminally ill; its mighty, impregnable stance left a sickly feeling all around.
There are four plinths in Trafalgar square, three of which have remained unchanged since the square’s inception in the 1830s. Two were draped that morning in a thick shadow, stubbornly clinging to the drawing night, from which emerged the austere figures of Henry Havelock and Charles James Napier. Both were 19th century British generals famed for their ruthless quelling of Indian insurrections during the British-Raj. To my east, atop the third plinth, King George IV rode his brawny horse long past the mortal field, bathed in the sunlight pouring over the angled horizon. And directly ahead of me stood the overseer, Lord Nelson, on his mast-head 52 metres above ground, gazing out on to the vast Metropolis as he would have the open seas. Unmoved by the passing of time, the four figures posed haughtily in their triumph over death, consecrated by the artifice of national memory.
The fourth plinth, which towered over me then, has displayed a wide range of contemporary artworks since 1999, having stood vacant the prior 150 years. On view at the time was the work Mil Veces un Instante by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles. The sculpture was a ‘skull rack’ made of the cast faces of 726 trans people all facing inward to form the four walls of what looked like the shell of a great tomb. Their refusal to look outward and make contact with all those in the square—forming instead an insular enclosure—sent ripples of shame through me; the sculpture suggested that trans people could only be represented here, in the city’s most emblematic site, in death and dishonoured privacy. The contrast between the bloated chests and lofty gazes of the military men and the deteriorating open air grave was sharp and telling; the men endure the passing of trivial time with ease, impressing themselves upon each generation’s image of English history, while the memory of these trans people withers with the casts of their hollowed out faces. On each of these faces were traces of personality—some were smeared with lipstick, others had fake eyelashes on—yet none were expressive enough to break from the perfect symmetry of the rectangular rack. From where I sat, head cocked back, the cloudless morning sky filled their hollowed eyes and pursed lips with a flat and pale blue, as though heaven awaited on the other side of mutilation.
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In 2020, a different tower of skulls dating back to the 15th century was excavated from the grounds of the Zócalo—the central square in Mexico City, built on top of what was once the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. The tower was part of a temple, known as Huey Tzompantli, dedicated to the war god Huitzilopochtli and the rain god Tlaloc, made of the remains of male warriors, as well as female and child sacrificial victims (López Luján 36). In photos from the excavation process, the craniums of the skulls protruding from the dig site looked at first like cracked earthenware, but on closer inspection I saw in these vague bulbous shapes pairs of deep black holes from which eyes once refracted light but which now, like the toxic gases released by thawing permafrost, emitted a sense of diffusing death.
This temple, which was considered by its Mesoamerican creators to be a treacherous and delicate passage for communication between them and their gods, had been trapped in the sediments of a denser time, slowly coursing below the throngs of people darting across the surface. And for the first time since the Spanish Conquistadors pillaged and demolished the temple 500 years ago, erecting in its place their own houses and, later on, an enormous cathedral, the skulls faced the square with a haunting quietude.
Having coincidentally read of this discovery only two weeks before, I sat in Trafalgar Square for hours, in search of the inverted gestures of the bone-white faces, feeling absolutely convinced that they too had been excavated from the square. I was sure that, below the weight of the stone blocks which sealed the square, remains of masses of people and artifacts were buried. I sensed below my feet the immense depth of decomposition and, in it, the forgotten histories of all the wayward lives whose short yet profound time above ground had been erased. I felt a sickening lightness, as though I were floating in a vast, subterranean ocean. And I imagined that a labyrinthine structure of human remains and keepsakes might erupt at any moment from the splitting chrysalis of the square to form colossal ruins above ground. With rubble strewn about, they would crumble skyward in a soaring feat.
Carlos Fuentes knew the importance of unearthing the square only too well. When Mexico City’s grand plaza, the Zócalo, was dug up in the late 70s to build a new subway station, and they discovered the seven nested structures of the sprawling Aztec site of worship, Templo Mayor, he was there. He revelled in what he had long dreamed of, just as I did in Trafalgar Square, that the past might one day return to curse and bless the city with its stubborn stones, bones, potteries and poetries. His words were, “remember the future, imagine the past, I believe that this is the truthful articulation of time as it is lived, inevitably, in the present” (Fuentes 338). He recognised that the past is the only soil from which the future may sprout, thus to deny people their past is to rob them of their future. But to imagine the past is to dredge from the ruins of memory the stones and symbols which would make a transient perpetuity possible. In doing so, we bind our memories to our desires, our past to our future, and we prevent the severing of peoples and their cultures from the continuation of history.
It is no coincidence that the Zócalo was built atop the Aztec empire’s holiest site of worship, and that Trafalgar Square, the official centre of London, serves as a fossilized celebration of Britain's triumphs in battle and imperial glory. The city square has historically been the stage for spectacular power struggles, where the friction of discourse and protest generates new ideas and ways of living together, but also where colonial enterprises centralise their body to display the full force of their violent capacity. More often than not, the central square of a city functions as an exhibit of an immortal image the state deems worthy of its representation, one which demands awe and order from its visitors, and sets in stone a collective memory.
But, like a kernel in a barren wasteland, at the brink of absolute repression, the square has historically proven the grounds of eruption, of renewed life: the Red Square in 1968, Tiananmen Square in 1989, the Euromaidan in 2013. Below its governed surface, there is buried a fragmentary record of the fires, wars, picnics, protests, rituals, and massacres of the city at large. They are deposits of waning memories. The act of recovering and interacting with these records is what simultaneously binds us to our past and propels us into the perennial present. It is the antithesis of digesting the state’s pacifying narratives—saturated, processed, glamorized ferocity.
To the staunchly contemporary gaze, the unresolved questions which shape the past and haunt the present brush by at the speed of a trend. But to those who patiently investigate the present by enfolding the past, a slower glimpse of truths as they have persisted or morphed over time is afforded.
I have long dreamed of a city square which resembles a ruin—a form which alludes to where we come from and is abstract enough for the perceiving mind to have to project into its absences; it fosters a union between human subjectivity and a form open to its input. A ruin could never be made whole the same way twice. The asymmetry of decay contributes to this: the angle at which you look at a ruin will always determine what is made of it. Newly built Western structures, whose symmetry and right angles betray an alarming devotion to order and control, conversely do most of the work on behalf of the perceiver.
The ruin is defined by its formlessness but is always perceived in the knowledge that an intent is the reason for its being, no matter how distant that intent may now seem. It is what distinguishes it from a natural rock formation (unless, of course, we presume God a master designer), yet it is precisely the partial loss of perceptible intent which affords the ruin its beauty or horror, depending on the viewer. When we can no longer identify any intent in the heap of materials, then the ruin is dead and its formlessness, upon crossing an arbitrary threshold, returns to nature. Ruins most clearly present to us the eternal play and infinite range of possible forms between creation and destruction. We might witness the change instantaneously, as in the flash of a bomb, or over generations, as in the sedentary motion of decay.
The layers of history on top of which cities are built consist of countless surfaces—decrepit buildings, decomposing bones, and ever more plastics—the forms of which are in flux. These are the material signifiers of society’s movement through time, and they hold important, unanswerable questions. So when the highly governed surfaces of our cities act on public space as its solution, as an enclosure of meaning, then to dig up what lies beneath is to shock meaning into a state of collapse. The overwhelming experience of foreign or decrepit forms has the potential to free us from the pacifying effects of the narratives woven so seamlessly into our cities we receive them as perfectly natural. Once dug up, however, it is important we resist the temptation to cut, chisel and build with these objects the house of our history, at the gate of which will be tour guides enticing you with tempting discounts and clever stories.
To excavate the square—to allow it a ruinous presence—is therefore to defy the quiet, sustained and enforced violence of completion. It is to lay bare the abundant forms buried below ground without forcibly drawing from them the meaning of their creator’s intent; it is for the Catholic church on the Zócalo to face the excavated skulls of the Templo Mayor and be burned by its gaze, piercing the veil of time.