DXARTS graduate student Chari Glogovac-Smith is a recipient of the UW's Black Opportunity Fund Award. This grant will support Chari's travel to the Carolinas to be in community with the Gullah/Geechee people, and contribute to their ongoing research of "Speculative Landscapes," exploring historically black landscapes and the cultural progression of the communities tied to the land.
The Black Opportunity Fund acknowledges the ongoing harmful legacies that settler colonialism, racism, White supremacy, and racial capitalism have on Black communities; works to address these inequities and injustices, and to fund a strategic agenda that meets immediate and ongoing needs of Black students, faculty, and staff.
About Speculative Landscapes:
Speculative Landscapes is an ongoing artwork that explores historically black landscapes along with the cultural progression of the communities tied to the land. The project began with the Gullah people, a group of descendants of West and Central Africa who purchased land, and built a sustained community in Carolinas. However, as the property values went up, real estate capitalists found loopholes that allowed for the slow erosion of the communally held Gullah land. Today, where there was once Gullah farms, churches, schools, and graveyards, there are vacation resorts and golf courses. Maps are often tied to colonialist ideas of ownership, boundaries, and territories. They also create documented versions of a reality that are assumed to be true. With this mapping in mind, the artist created a “deepfake” version of an area where a historical grave site was being encroached upon by a vacation resort. Using segmentation, they removed all of the buildings, speedboats, and signs of disturbance around the cemetery site as a restorative speculative gesture.
Source: https://dxarts.washington.edu/research/creative-work/speculative-landscapes