Grassroots Memorials And The Politics Of Place: Commemorating Alexei Navalny In Public Space

This essay examines grassroots memorials created in response to the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, focusing on two memorials established at versions of Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd’s Non-Violence sculpture in Lund and Malmö, Sweden—public artworks that form part of the everyday landscape of these cities. While spontaneous or temporary memorials are often theorized in relation to the sites of traumatic events, the Navalny memorials challenge this paradigm in that they emerged in locations with no direct connection to his death. Drawing on research on memorial practices, I suggest that these memorials worked both as acts of mourning and as politically charged interventions. By appropriating a globally recognized symbol of peace and incorporating culturally specific protest markers, such as rubber ducks, the memorials operated as performative expressions of dissent, democratic engagement, and transnational solidarity, temporarily transforming familiar elements of the everyday life of public art.