How might memorial landscapes contribute to present struggles for justice?
In allyship with a coalition of activists and descendants, this project develops interpretations and memorial designs for The Shockoe Hill African Burying Ground in Richmond, Virginia. The burial ground, where an estimated 22,000 African Americans were buried between 1816-1879, is not recognizable as an important site of memory. The site has experienced “racialized purposeful forgetting”, a term planning historian Andrea Roberts uses for the intentional suppression of Black belonging from narratives and places.
The work contributes to the resuscitation of the burial ground by interpreting the burial ground’s historic and spatial context. I propose Shockoe Valley as a Black cultural landscape that connects the burial ground to Shockoe Bottom, site to the first African Burying Ground and Lumpkin’s Jail auction house. This urban network will strengthen site memorialization by contextualizing it within a larger landscape and historical narrative.
The project develops three memorial landscape designs for the city-owned parcel. The designs are conceptually distinct, and evolve from historical inquiry, site readings, and varying approaches to memory and memorial. All emphasize the importance of memorials as social spaces that create opportunities for lived practices of memory making and keeping.
