Photo description: Southward view from the boardwalk of Domino Park. The sun sets as it illuminates the silhouette of downtown Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Williamsburg Bridge, and the beautiful East River.
The Design Trust Equitable Public Space Fellowship Program supports the next generation of urban designers, architects, landscape architects, and planners in contributing to complex public space challenges in our global city. Fellows have the opportunity to have a real impact on New York City’s public spaces through Design Trust projects, gaining public exposure and cross-sector experience. Below is a blog post written by our current EPS Fellow Catherine Betances reflecting on their independent research around Afrofuturism, memory, and waterways.
"I want to write a poem the size of the waters
so that in every stanza, the world does not
forget what happened to the Black Cuban
who did not make it past the rafts; the trans
Algerian sisters who did not make it past
the Spanish checkpoint; the eleven-year-old
Afro-Salvadoran twins who promised each other
that at least one would live past El Rio grande;
and the Jamaican couple who chose the ocean as
home because what other options do you have
when living as forever displaced?"
-Excerpt from the poem “the catastrophe of the illegal negro was/is planned” in the book to love and mourn in the age of displacement by Alan Pelaez Lopez
Before I begin, I want to take a moment to express my gratitude to all of my teachers, past, present, and future — particularly my ancestors and their loved ones. When I look out to the sea, as the waves crash against the shore, I think of those beloveds who were lost across the Middle Passage. I think of you fondly, and please know that the diaspora is holding you close. You are safe with us.
Afrofuturism goes beyond speculative science fiction; it is time-bending. According to one of the architects of the term, the late Greg Tate, Afrofuturism connects “the dots of people, cross literature, film, music, politics and historical events in the [B]lack community.” Afrofuturist creators imagined many underwater worlds and cosmologies, including Drexciya, dikenga, submerged Black towns, and other “Black Atlantis dreamscapes,” where “the metaphor and the lived reality of submergence offers a fluid and unrestricted future as well as world-building and self-determination that a deeply grounded or firmly landed life cannot always afford” (Reservoir Noir: Dreaming through Submergence - Morgan P. Vickers).
A new movement of academics, poets, and artists — inspired by the mythological Drexciya and other African and African Diasporic worlds — are proposing an international ocean memorial for the 1.8+ million people who died on ships that carried enslaved Africans, the seabed being their final resting place.
“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was… Like water, I remember where I was before I was straightened out.”
-Toni Morrison
Memorials can take many forms in public space, often working as the “public record of memory in the city.” But memorials don’t only have to exist literally with a street name, statute, or monument. While those historical markers are important, they often “impose themselves on public spaces and those who occupy these spaces” (Contested Histories in Public Spaces).
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Huge thanks to the Design Trust programs team for supporting me in this research.
I am deeply grateful to Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Dr. Njelle W. Hamilton, Ayana V. Jackson, Dr. Yuko Miki, and Morgan P. Vickers for all their teachings during the panel, “Aquatic Space: Water in the Afrofuturist Imagination,” part of the Claiming Space: A Symposium on Black Futures - Past, Present, and Potential, a series on Afrofuturism from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. I HIGHLY encourage you to watch each of their video presentations, too! I also want to thank the Preservation Side B team (who presented at the 2021 Hindsight Conference) for introducing me to the work of preservation and memorials.
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Catherine Betances (she/they pronouns) joined Design Trust in September 2021 as one of the Equitable Public Space Fellows, supporting in program management and development.
The Equitable Public Space Fellowship is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts.