Plantation, by Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda, was the proposal chosen in 2020 in the voting process for the Memorial of Homage Enslaved People. Four hundred aluminum sugar canes (an allusion to the 4 centuries of slavery) and a circular bench as a meeting place in the middle of a burnt plantation, in mourning, this will be the Memorial to be inaugurated in Campo das Cebolas in Lisbon. One of the most international African artists refers to the evocative and meditative meaning of the memorial, questions Portugal’s relationship with its past and explains the motivations and ideas behind the conception of his proposal around the plantation regime, and its implications. A memorial that summons the dialectic between the nightmare, the dehumanization of Africans and Indigenous people for the prosperity of Europe. “The economic factor is the main encourager of this tragedy. It is mirrored to this day in Western societies, because the accumulation of wealth, which allowed the birth of the modern world, was done on the shoulders of enslaved women and men.”
