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Izabella Scott

IZABELLA SCOTT is an editor at The White Review.



Articles Available Online


Shola von Reinhold’s ‘LOTE’

Book Review

September 2020

Izabella Scott

Book Review

September 2020

To read Shola von Reinhold’s ornate, multi-layered novel LOTE (2020) is to encounter a baroque mind. It tells the story of a queer Black...

Art Review

November 2019

Actually, the Dead are Not Dead

Izabella Scott

Art Review

November 2019

During Bergen Assembly’s opening days, I am asked to attend a number of mock funerals, including one for a...

Cities display a worship of history in the monuments and memorials that they choose to erect, through which the past is paraded like a religion In his book Hope and Memory, Tzvetan Todorov writes: ‘While history makes the past more complicated, commemoration makes it simpler, since it seeks more often to supply us with heroes to worship, with enemies to detest; it deals with desecration and consecration’ But in Berlin the past is a very strange and warped place – not one to celebrate per se In its monuments and memorials one sees a more agnostic effort to come to terms with a recent past filled with fascism, fanaticism and false futures As in any major European capital, Berlin is full of the familiar vestiges of wars waged and won in the name of colonial ambition Out of the centre of Tiergarten Park rises the Victory Column, presiding proudly over the traffic island The huge image of winged victory has one hand held aloft against the traffic, the other holding a staff like a magnificent lollipop lady On successive corners of the Victory Column roundabout are several large bronze effigies of Prussian generals, but the names have been removed and their gestures of victory are pathetically obsolete Nearby is a huge statue of Otto von Bismarck, the author of German unification and the first Chancellor of the German Reich He struts boldly, flanked by allegorical figures: atlas holding up the world, Siegfried forging a sword to celebrate German industrial might, Germania pinning a panther symbolising the suppression of rebellion, and a sibyl reclining on a sphinx reading the book of history These boastful symbols seem absurd given how the twentieth century unfolded Berlin’s is a confused landscape that commemorates both victors and victims, both German and other In his work on public memory and national identity, Pierre Nora writes about our obsession with commemoration that has come to dominate ‘all contemporary societies that see themselves as historical’ In Nora’s eyes, monuments such as the Bismarck statue were designed to align history with the sanctioned version, to boost

Contributor

September 2015

Izabella Scott

Contributor

September 2015

IZABELLA SCOTT is an editor at The White Review.

Book Review

August 2019

Jordy Rosenberg’s ‘Confessions of the Fox’

Izabella Scott

Book Review

August 2019

It’s hot as fuck, said the friend who handed me Confessions of the Fox, a faux-memoir set in eighteenth-century...

Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Echo Chamber

Art Review

November 2017

Izabella Scott

Art Review

November 2017

A lattice of diamonds and crosses, painted onto a 21-metre long wall at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, scatters my gaze. Artist Navine G....
Hot Rocks

feature

November 2016

Izabella Scott

feature

November 2016

‘We have received around 150 of them,’ Massimo Osanna tells me, as we peer into four small crates stuffed full of dusty freezer bags....
False shadows

Art

August 2016

Izabella Scott

Art

August 2016

The ‘beautiful disorder’ of the Forbidden City and the Yuanmingyuan (Garden of Perfection and Light) was first noted by the Jesuit painter Jean Denis...

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Interview

Issue No. 2

Interview with William Boyd

Jacques Testard

Tristan Summerscale

Interview

Issue No. 2

On a wet, grey morning in March, William Boyd invited us into a large terraced house, half-way between the...

feature

May 2014

How Imagination Remembers

Maria Fusco

feature

May 2014

How imagination remembers is twofold, an enfolded act of greed and ingenuity. I believe these impulses to be linked...

poetry

Issue No. 13

Morning, Noon & Night

Claire-Louise Bennett

poetry

Issue No. 13

Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice. It ought not to be too ripe – in fact there should...

 

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