Mémorial de l’Abolition de l’esclavage - 8a Biennal 2014

Julian Bonder

Embedded in the ground of the city (of every city) there are stories to be uncovered and unearthed. Nantes has decided to confront its own difficult past, as the premier slave trading port in France, with about 45 % of all 4000 French Slave Trading Expeditions. The Memorial transforms, physically and symbolically, 350 meters of the riverfront of the Loire along Quai de la Fosse, in the center of the city into a new public space and commemorative landscape. This memorial is a metaphorical and emotional evocation of the struggle for the abolition of slavery, above all historic, but which still continues into the present. As a Working Memorial, it provides both space and means for remembering and thinking about slavery and the slave trade; commemorating resistance and the abolitionist struggle; celebrating the historic act of abolition; and for bringing the visitor closer to the continuing struggle against present-day forms of slavery. A sub-surface preexisting space, residue of construction of the ports and embankments walls of the Loire in 18th, 19th, 20th Centuries was transformed into a ‘Passage’, an Underground Memorial Space requiring complex engineering to construct a protective ‘cuvelage’ due to the tides of Loire. By shedding light over difficult aspects of the past, both in Nantes and the world, and as an ethico-political, urban, artistic, landscape and architectural project, this new public space, has already become a catalyst for transformative action, human rights activism, and civic engagement, with more than 400000 visitors since its opening (March 2012).

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