Like many individuals who develop up in Brooklyn, Adama Delphine Fawundu remembers spending a lot of her childhood and adolescence in Prospect Park. But she by no means recalled studying in regards to the tales behind the 526-acre inexperienced house’s constructions and websites, such because the 18th-century farmhouse that when belonged to the household of Continental Military Lieutenant Pieter Lefferts, located close to the park’s japanese entrance on the nook of Flatbush and Ocean Avenues. As with most of the historic constructions scattered throughout her neighborhood, Fawundu by no means actually thought a lot in regards to the Lefferts Historic Home and its previous till she grew older and gained a higher understanding of New York’s legacy of slavery.
“I sort of thought, ‘Okay, that is it,’” Fawundu instructed Hyperallergic. “‘One thing needed to occur on this home, proper?’”
Now, over 150 years because the finish of slavery in the USA, this historical past is entrance and heart in Fawundu’s new site-specific set up “Ancestral Whispers,” which she created because the Prospect Park Alliance’s inaugural ReImagine Lefferts artist-in-residence.
In 2020, the artist realized her instincts in regards to the Lefferts Historic Home have been right whereas combing by means of information stored by the Brooklyn Historic Society for a analysis challenge. That’s the place she got here throughout Anna and Isaac — two individuals who have been as soon as enslaved by the Lefferts household. Within the years since this discovery, the ReImagine Lefferts initiative, which goals to contextualize the home with regard to its function in enslavement and Indigenous land dispossession, has recognized the names of not less than 25 individuals who have been enslaved on the home between its development in 1783 and the abolition of slavery in New York in 1827.
On view till December 1, “Ancestral Whispers” options 31 kaleidoscopic banners impressed by and named after these 25 people. Hanging from the home’s porch going through Flatbush Avenue, the translucent banners layer various parts together with West African cultural symbols, scans of delivery information and gross sales receipts, and bodily kinds created from pictures of Fawundu, her son, and her grandmother.
Coinciding with the out of doors banner set up, Fawundu’s video efficiency work “Within the Face of Historical past Freedom Cape” (2020) is on view inside the home. The work facilities the voices of Black ladies and nonbinary people reflecting on the difficulty of voting within the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Filmed in Prospect Park and across the Lefferts Home, the piece concerned Fawundu’s “Freedom Cape” (2020), additionally on show, that includes the silhouettes of Black ladies transposed onto historic paperwork comparable to newspapers and voting flyers.
In one other room, a meditative, shrine-like set up titled “Ancestral Hymns…an Ensemble #1 – 12” (2024) presents 12 smaller collage banners that includes parts like hair and flax organized round a circle of candles.
ReImagine Lefferts Public Packages Supervisor Riah Kinsey, who grew up in Queens and now works full-time on the home alongside Undertaking Supervisor Dylan Yeats, defined that one of many first issues he wished to do when he visited the home was set up altars — very like Fawundu’s instincts when she later came visiting the house. Now, the rooms within the Lefferts Home are adorned with clusters of candles and bits of dried grass and flowers. “That’s one thing that she wasn’t planning,” Kinsey defined. “She stated that when she simply began organising within the house, it was simply what she felt known as to do.”
Along with contending with ReImagine Lefferts’s historical past of enslavement, the initiative is reckoning with the positioning’s land dispossession in the course of the Dutch colonization of Manhattan and the Hudson area. Undertaking coordinators are at present working with the Eenda-Lunaapeewahkiing Collective, a bunch of 4 Lenape tribal governments, to include totally different installations and programming specializing in Lenape cultural heritage. They hope to finally have extra communities be part of the challenge to share their voices and histories by means of a panel set up in entrance of the home, in addition to one other work honoring the Lenape creation story.
“Our imaginative and prescient is to unite and listen to the voices of Lenape throughout Turtle Island,” Brent Stonefish, an educator and culture-bearer from Eelūnaapèewi Lahkèewiit, instructed Hyperallergic, including that whereas the Lenape could not be in Brooklyn on account of pressured removing and land dispossession, they’re nonetheless right here, scattered throughout Turtle Island in locations like Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Ontario, and New Jersey.
Native organizations, such because the Weeksville Heritage Middle and the Flatbush African Burial Floor Coalition, are additionally serving to to rework the house into one that may be utilized by area people teams.
“The constructing all the time seemed spooky and haunted to me and it wasn’t inviting,” Shanna Sabio, a co-trustee of the Flatbush African Burial Floor Coalition and founding father of the native group GrowHouse, instructed Hyperallergic. Rising up in Brooklyn, Sabio remembered taking a college journey to the home and feeling very disconnected from its historical past. However she stated that the brand new effort to “reimagine” the positioning has shone a lightweight on historic points which might be nonetheless related at this time.
“At present’s gentrification and displacement are constructed on the blueprint of the unique displacement of Lenape folks from their homeland,” Sabio stated. “Artwork and narrative storytelling make these truths simpler to eat, permitting magnificence to melt the touchdown of those truths and encourage change.”