This project is named after Katherine McKittrick’s canonical text: Plantation Futures
Oak Alley Plantation, located in Louisiana, is the most famous and visited plantation in the United States. Today the plantation is preserved as a cultural landscape reflecting and glorifying the values of the Antebellum era. What is absent at Oak Alley and all the plantations upon which the United States was formed is the recognition of the forged Black landscapes used for refuge, joy, and resistance: the swamp, the ditch, plot.
The plantation was a complex of white supremacy that linked the exploitation of racialized bodies and non-human agents to fertile lands and commodities. These landscapes emerged as an economic and political model based on dislocated forced labor, intensive land exploitation, and global commerce supported by land dispossession, labor extraction, and racialized violence.
The project questions the concept and practices of heritage in the profession of landscape architecture as it is embedded in the colonial imaginary and its racial legacies. Moments for accountability and restoration are conceived, such as the Citizen Assembly, which holds industry and systems of dispossession to account through new forms of democratic processes and landscape-based evidence collection. Black ecologies emerge through layering archival narratives, poetry, and literature, foregrounding lost narratives within the plantation. These narratives envision radically different futures, where interspecies kinship and empathy surface as new ecologies that point to new Black futurities.
The plantation was a complex of white supremacy that linked the exploitation of racialized bodies and non-human agents to fertile lands and commodities. These landscapes emerged as an economic and political model based on dislocated forced labor, intensive land exploitation, and global commerce supported by land dispossession, labor extraction, and racialized violence.
Celina Abba
Spatial Researcher at Forensis, Forensic Architecture
Celina is a designer and researcher who explores the intersections between architecture, human rights, and living systems. She works as a spatial Researcher Forensis, the Berlin office of Forensic Architecture. Her research delves into lost narratives of land and people. Uncovering these narratives allows for speculating new Black futures that are rooted in care and kinship.
Currently, Celina is working on research project that traces the length of the Mississippi River, revealing the continuous reproduction of racial and ecological violence and illustrating the intricate ties between historical and contemporary forms of exploitation and oppression. By examining the legacy of plantations, the practice of sharecropping, and the evolution of prison farming, Celina is uncovering the persistent impacts of these systems on both people and the environment.
Celina graduated with distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design earning a Master of Landscape Architecture (2023). Her achievements at Harvard include the Landscape Architecture Thesis Prize, the prestigious Charles Eliot Traveling Fellowship, and the Landscape Architecture Foundation Olmsted Scholar award. She also holds a Master of Architecture with Distinction (2020) for which she received the AIA’s highest honor, Additionally, Celina holds two Bachelor's degrees: one in Biology and the other in Environmental Design Studies.
Spatial Researcher at Forensis, Forensic Architecture
Celina is a designer and researcher who explores the intersections between architecture, human rights, and living systems. She works as a spatial Researcher Forensis, the Berlin office of Forensic Architecture. Her research delves into lost narratives of land and people. Uncovering these narratives allows for speculating new Black futures that are rooted in care and kinship.
Currently, Celina is working on research project that traces the length of the Mississippi River, revealing the continuous reproduction of racial and ecological violence and illustrating the intricate ties between historical and contemporary forms of exploitation and oppression. By examining the legacy of plantations, the practice of sharecropping, and the evolution of prison farming, Celina is uncovering the persistent impacts of these systems on both people and the environment.
Celina graduated with distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design earning a Master of Landscape Architecture (2023). Her achievements at Harvard include the Landscape Architecture Thesis Prize, the prestigious Charles Eliot Traveling Fellowship, and the Landscape Architecture Foundation Olmsted Scholar award. She also holds a Master of Architecture with Distinction (2020) for which she received the AIA’s highest honor, Additionally, Celina holds two Bachelor's degrees: one in Biology and the other in Environmental Design Studies.
Enrique Cavelier
Landscape Architect at BBUK
Enrique is a landscape architect and researcher fascinated by the entanglement between cultural and natural narratives told by the material manifestation of landscapes. He is currently collaborating as a landscape architect at BBUK studio in London and as a visiting tutor in the Master of Landscape Architecture at the University of Greenwich.
Working between professional practice, research and teaching, he is interested in creating new spatial and temporal relationships between people, ecologies, and
cultures.
Enrique graduated with distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design with a Master of Landscape Architecture (2023), where he was awarded the Landscape Architecture Thesis Prize and the American Society of Landscape Architects Honor Award. He also holds a Master in Situated Practice from the Bartlett School of Architecture (2021), where he was awarded the Bartlett Medal and a Bachelor of
Science in Architecture with high honours from the University of Virginia (2014), where he was awarded the Design Excellence Award and the Sean Steele Nicholson Award. Over the years, Enrique has worked in multiple architecture and landscape architecture practices in New York, Bogotá, Paris and London.
Landscape Architect at BBUK
Enrique is a landscape architect and researcher fascinated by the entanglement between cultural and natural narratives told by the material manifestation of landscapes. He is currently collaborating as a landscape architect at BBUK studio in London and as a visiting tutor in the Master of Landscape Architecture at the University of Greenwich.
Working between professional practice, research and teaching, he is interested in creating new spatial and temporal relationships between people, ecologies, and
cultures.
Enrique graduated with distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design with a Master of Landscape Architecture (2023), where he was awarded the Landscape Architecture Thesis Prize and the American Society of Landscape Architects Honor Award. He also holds a Master in Situated Practice from the Bartlett School of Architecture (2021), where he was awarded the Bartlett Medal and a Bachelor of
Science in Architecture with high honours from the University of Virginia (2014), where he was awarded the Design Excellence Award and the Sean Steele Nicholson Award. Over the years, Enrique has worked in multiple architecture and landscape architecture practices in New York, Bogotá, Paris and London.
