Adeline Rapon

My father left Martinique to build his life in France, far from his culture. My grandfather, who stayed behind, had almost become a ghost. He died after years during which I was unable to see or contact him, and was buried in Gros-Morne. I was only able to visit his grave alone five years later, eighteen years after my last stay in Martinique.

This void is touched upon in my series Vie et Mort (2022). While searching for connections between the living and the dead in Martinique—through All Saints’ Day traditions and the conteur funéraire—I found only their disappearances. The cemeteries were deserted, and the gestures and rituals had been forgotten. How does the erasure of connections with our ancestors dispossess an identity that is already fragile? Since then, drawing on Surrealism, Afrofuturism, and the thought of Édouard Glissant, I have sought to fill this impossible-to-document void through fiction and material gestures.

Lincoln Memorial Park in Miami is a mirror of this history: the first cemetery dedicated to Black people in a city segregated even in death, it was abandoned for decades. One day, Jesse Wooden discovered that his mother was buried there. He subsequently bought the entire site and brought it back to life. Through this act of repair, he became a bridge between the present and ancestry.

It is this transversality that I seek to translate visually: what circulates between African diasporas, shared inheritances, and their erasures. I want to observe the process of reclaiming memory and understand how the mechanics of Forgetting have been reversed in this place.

I want to examine its archives, search for possible connections within the Brownsville neighborhood, and observe the renewed use of a place once thought to have been abandoned.

Miami is a Caribbean-American crossroads where diasporas coexist, where cultural inheritances circulate, resist, or disappear, and where segregation has shaped both the living and the dead. These dynamics resonate directly with those of Martinique, a territory that both inherits and perpetuates the legacy of the slave system.

The project began to take shape when I met Jesse Wooden during my visit to the WOPHA Festival in 2024. The owner and manager of Lincoln Memorial Park Cemetery, he invited me to return. I would like to work alongside him, observe the cemetery’s daily operations, and examine its archival records.

In Coconut Grove, Charlotte Jane Memorial Park is another point of reference: a cemetery belonging to the Bahamian community, it bears traces of a Caribbean diaspora and its funerary practices on American soil. In Overtown, the Hampton House—a 1950s hotel where Black people could stay in a segregated city—is another site of memory that I would like to explore. I also hope to meet artists, researchers, and cultural memory-keepers whose practices are rooted in this history.

Martinique is a small territory where opportunities for triangulation are limited. Miami offers a perspective through the diaspora that the island alone cannot provide, as well as the opportunity to work at the heart of a city where Black and Caribbean memory is both buried and alive. It is from this distance that I seek to understand what Forgetting has done to us, and what we might be able to do with it.