Design unveiled for London’s memorial to the victims of transatlantic slavery

Transcript

00:00I started working with cowrie shells at the International Slavery Museum and I was aware

00:04of them being used as a currency throughout the world in West Africa but at the museum

00:09through my research I learned that they were actually also used to purchase people.

00:15So from there I started upscaling them and thinking about how to take this kind of small

00:19menial object and actually bring to fore the weight of it. It offers an opportunity for

00:25community to engage and also have conversations around slavery which I think needs to happen

00:32especially after the last few weeks. I think what was so important about what Kayla has done

00:37is that he's managed to balance the very difficult challenging aspects of slavery so the brutality,

00:45pain, grief, exploitation and he's balanced that with strength and with resilience

00:54and it's quite important for us to try to have something which enables that balance to be

00:59arrived at because we know that it's a very difficult subject, it's quite traumatic for

01:05communities of colour particularly for black communities and we wanted something which

01:09enabled us to be able to connect with the issue but also acknowledge the importance of resistance,

01:16the importance of including the voices of the enslaved in the process.