Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Annicia Streete, Brendan Harmon & Nicholas Serrano
African American cemeteries and burial grounds are an invaluable part of the historical geography of the Louisiana River Parishes. Originally built peripheral to plantations along the Mississippi River, today these sites occupy remnant parcels of isolated land surrounded by corporate agricultural and industrial facilities. Climate change, industrial development, precarious land-tenure records, and a dwindling population of descendants continually threaten these cultural landscapes, and allowing these sites to succumb to time and land development would perpetuate the centuries-long process of social concealment and dehumanization of black subjectivity in America. These cultural landscapes defy traditional documentation methods in preservation practice. Their rich history and spatial spirituality juxtaposed against their current state of disrepair seemingly counters “geography’s discursive attachment to stasis and physicality.” We propose that immersive point clouds enriched with oral histories, archival documents, and ambisonic soundscapes have the potential to combine material traces and narrative memory into what of landscape into what Édouard Glissant described as a “poetics of landscape” whereby narrative acts of the individual, community, and land create history. This paper presents our efforts to create immersive virtual platforms as both a documentary and an expressive act, a process with the potential for self-assertion and humanization of descendant communities, and to partially preserve traces of their history.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.113.81
Volume Editors
Sara Jensen Carr & Rubén García Rubio
ISBN
978-1-944214-48-7
