Reconstructing Narratives
Pen Park Cemetery Survey RAS report, Paper, Whiteout// Dimensions Variable//2021.
Photo courtesy of Welcome Gallery. Photo taken by Stacey Evans.
“By considering that relationship between imaging and imagining in the registers of Black annotation and Blackredaction. I want to think about what these images call forth. And I want to think through what they call on us to do, to think, feel in the wake of slavery - which is to say, in an ongoing present of subjection and resistance.”
- Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Reconstructing Narratives uses the original Pen Park survey conducted by the Rivanna Archaeological Services and commissioned by the city of Charlottesville in early 2020 to employ different methods of redaction to create a new analytic, interrogating the meta narrative. The new analytic is then used to construct counternarratives that are forgotten, discarded, and or otherwise buried through scientific and or professional language and imagery within public documents. Through this process I excavate how the ongoing past continues to “disproportionately and devastatingly affect Black people and the everywhere we are,” while unearthing a visual process of how white washing is fabricated within historical documents. I also attempt to employ Black archival practices through a rewriting of the document that accounts for the Black lives lived.
The first version of the RAS report is unaltered and is displayed as is. The second version uses redaction to cover up the family history of the white families who owned Pen Park plantation. The third version uses whiteout to highlight and correct the scientific, professional, and or biased language used that further dehumanizes the Black life and unmarked slave graves on Pen Parks Golf course. The last version of the RAS report is my attempt at making a more honest doccument through imagery and language. The four versions of the document are then displayed in four columns mimicking the antebellum architecture that remains within the city of Charlottesville and its surrounding areas.