Forest Islands of Our Ecological Diaspora is a multi-year research project centered on Louisiana’s burial groves—small sections of original forest that were preserved from the ravages and deforestation of sugarcane monoculture, where historically enslaved Africans buried their loved ones. The surviving burial groves are carefully stewarded microecologies that mirror West and Central African sacred groves. Imani Jacqueline Brown understands these groves as time capsules of lifeworlds that thrived against all odds: they have survived generations of racial violence, industrial encroachment, and climate disaster to stand still today as the frontlines of multispecies, multigenerational resistance to the continuum of extractivism, which spans from colonialism and enslavement to fossil fuel production and climate change. Brown’s project unites kin on both sides of the Atlantic to recover and remember the ecological praxes that are central to cultural production across the African diaspora. As portals that carry not only across time but also across space, the groves open onto a constellation of an “ecological diaspora.”

Brown will devise a multi-modal research format, inviting Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia-Henda and Congolese artist Sammy Baloji to join Louisiana-based practitioners, including Creole string ensemble Les Cenelles and activists The Descendants Project, in collective research into their shared eco-cultural heritage. Forest Islands of Our Ecological Diaspora is hosted by A Studio in the Woods, an artist residency organization in New Orleans in partnership with Teiger Foundation, Lambent Foundation and Kalleopia Foundation.