– Matthew Blunderfield and Mabel O. Wilson

Power & Public Space is a podcast from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. You can find the full podcast series here. Or listen now:

In 2020 The Memorial to Enslaved Labourers opened at the University of Virginia, designed as a collaboration between Höweler+Yoon Architecture, Mabel O. Wilson, landscape architects Gregg Bleam and Frank Dukes, and the artist Eto Otitigbe. 

As Mabel O. Wilson has explained, ‘civic buildings and monuments in the U.S. are often emblematic of a disavowal of the founding precepts of liberty, equality and justice, where they become sites to imagine and enact american whiteness’. In this episode Wilson discusses how the memorial was conceived and designed to assert its position within the campus’s eurocentric architectural context, whilst addressing the university’s history of racism and recovering lost narratives of enslaved people in the process.