Location : New Orleans, Louisiana

Client: The people of New Orleans

Year : 2019 - Present

Status: In Progress

Collaborators: Kresge Foundation

The Storia project seeks to address equitable community development by enhancing access to and elevating the status of civic spaces throughout the city of New Orleans. It is designed to cultivate and develop a unified network of small and large civic space projects throughout the city’s neighborhoods. Storia is aimed at providing a process and platform for communities and organizations to create spaces that honor their stories and focus on building the connections and capacity of residents to support the community’s aspirations for benefiting the neighborhood.

CONCEPT DESIGN

Storia: Djembe is a pavilion that embodies a conversation about cultural displacement in New Orleans, specifically grounded on Black cultures. It was inspired by and named after the musical instrument djembe, a rope-tuned skin-covered goblet drum originating from West Africa. The inspiration draws both from its physical characteristics and its social connotations. For example “Abdoul Doumbia, a Djembefola from Ségou in Mali explains that the word 'jembe' comes from two Bambara words, 'Dièn' which means unity and 'Bin' that signifies harmony. Another belief is that the word comes from a saying in Bambara, ‘Anke djé, anke bé’, or ‘everyone gather together in peace.’” The pavilion Djembe, situated across the street from Ashé Cultural Arts Center and next door to AfroLuxe Boutique hotel, will serve as a gathering space for the local communities. It is meant to be a place for connection, placemaking, and cultural exchange.

design + engagement

A key element of the design for Djembe is its crown and the shadow projections. The idea is to have narratives connecting the crown to the ground through story-telling components projecting shadows down to the ground and overlapping with each other on the ground plane, like a shadow zoetrope. This would create an immersive place making experience that tells stories of New Orleans’ past, present, and imagined future. Selected adinkras will be used as graphic elements to represent the culture of New Orleans’s past and present. The future will be represented by the resulting graphic from a futuresetting Adinkra making workshop with community members. The workshop will be structured following the guidelines, origins, and logics of the Ghanaian Adinkra symbols.