Memorial to the Abolition of the Slave Trade

Mémorial de l'Abolition de l'Esclavage

Nantes France | 2008-2012 | 28,000 sq.m

Recognition European Prize for Urban Public Space, Special Recognition 2012; European Union Mies van der Rohe Award, Shortlisted 2013

Collaboration Ron Henderson; Julian Bonder, Krzysztof Wodiczko; Maximo Rohm; Michael Blier

Trees (25)

Credits Philippe Ruault, Wodiczko+Bonder; Ron Henderson

Wodiczko+Bonder were artist and design architect for the Memorial with Ron Henderson / Lirio consulted on the riverfront approach paths, tree planting, and asphaltic memorial surface embedded with glass blocks that document the slave ships.

In the eighteenth century the river port of Nantes was a main departure point for French slave-trading expeditions. The ships took part in the “triangular trade” slave-trade system between the Atlantic coasts of Europe, Africa and the Caribbean or American colonies. A good part of the city’s wealth derived from this cruel activity and is displayed in the sumptuous palaces constructed by families engaged in the trade.

The Quai de la Fosse, a wharf that occupies the right bank of the Loire between the Anne de Bretagne Bridge and the Victor Schoelcher footbridge was the setting of the port’s main activity. Oblivious to the views over the river, people used its surface as an open-air car park until recently. Its surface concealed a triangular-shaped structure of reinforced concrete resting on top of an eighteenth-century quay wall. The rising waters of the river meant that the space was partially submerged every day.

The open-air car park has been transformed into a riverside walk of some three hundred and fifty metres in length. Encrusted in its paving are plaques with inscriptions of the names of the almost two thousand expeditions of French slavers, with the dates of departure and the ports from which they set sail, half of them from Nantes. All of them bear the words “Navire Négrier” (Slave Ship) as an explicit reminder of the purpose of these expeditions.

The ground-level path offers access to a lower level where the pre-existing triangular-shaped spaces have been protected from rising river waters by means of a waterproof concrete basin. The construction of the space required complex engineering work which had to be programmed according to the rising and falling river waters. The form of this section coincidentally evokes the hold of a slave ship, a cramped effect that is reinforced by the narrowness and partially submerged position of the gallery. (text by David Bravo Bordas, architect, European Prize for Urban Public Space)