"The Wake" is a site of activation offering communities in London an opportunity to gather, listen, grieve and remember the victims of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. At nearly seven metres high, this bronze sculptural installation sits at the juncture between ancestral meditative work and griefwork. In considering what it means to create architectures of care, it became quickly apparent that a design that can be entered and experienced immersively was required.
Inspired by the shape of a cowrie shell, "The Wake" represents the perseverance, prosperity and beauty rooted in African and African diasporic heritage. Simultaneously it represents the cowrie as a site of commerce, used historically to purchase and enslave black people.
Violence does not just happen to black people or any oppressed peoples of the world, it is assigned from birth, intentionally and structurally and there must be active creative resistance to counteract it.
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