Abstract
This paper explores the interdisciplinary framework guiding the transformation of Woodland Plantation Museum, a historic site in Louisiana’s River Parishes, into a trauma-informed institution that engages memory, ecology, and technology through Black epistemologies, descendant partnership, and community-based design. Once a plantation that enforced systems of slavery and extraction, Woodland is now being re-coded into a communal site of reckoning - a place where historical trauma and ecological memory are confronted collectively. It becomes a living archive, where land, memory, and community practices transmit knowledge, and at the same time a future-facing creative nexus, where artists, descendants, and cultural workers convene to generate new forms of care and possibility. By aligning ecological systems with community technologies and trauma-informed practices, this project responds to urgent calls to reconfigure public space, build policy from the ground up, and center historically excluded epistemologies in cultural institutions. In this framework, computation is not only metaphor but method: the plantation is understood as an algorithm of extraction, and Woodland’s practices become new lines of living code that rewrite its logic toward care, ecological healing, and the radical possibilities of collective becoming.
Presenters
Sultana HarrisExecutive Director of Woodland Plantation Museum, Division of Cultural Stewardship and Living History, The Descendants Project, Louisiana, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
The Arts in Social, Political, and Community Life
KEYWORDS
Re-coding, Black geographies, Necropolitics, Cancer Alley, Descendant community, Critical fabulation
