Aria Dean on Designing an Anti-Monument The artist on her proposed New Monument for Franksa Tomten and how minimalist aesthetics speak to the complex history of Sweden’s colonial past Travis Diehl Your proposed New Monument for Franksa Tomten (2020) would replace a pair of granite and bronze sculptures commemorating Swedish settlers in Delaware – a 1938 monument designed by Carl Milles that sits in Fort Christina Park in Wilmington and a replica installed 20 years later at Stenpiren in Gothenburg – with seven-metre-high monoliths of solid iron. To these would be added a third on the Caribbean island of St. Barts. Aria Dean I identified three key dates in Swedish colonial history: the departure of the Swedes for America, the transfer of the then-colony of St. Barts from France to Sweden, and the establishment of the Swedish West India Company. People talk about Scandinavia with this sense of exceptionalism regarding colonialism and the slave trade, but Sweden did get involved in the movement of goods, and people, to the ‘New World’. In 1784, Sweden traded France a small plot of land in the port of Gothenburg – Franksa Tomten