40 ACRES: Chimborazo Park

Skywriting Performance and Event | Richmond, VA | 2022

On May 21, 2022 artist Sandy Williams IV worked with a skywriting crew to trace the dimensions of a 40-acre plot in the sky over what is now known as Chimborazo Park in Richmond, Virginia. University of Richmond student Ryan Doherty conducted months of research prior to this event, in collaboration with Williams, in order to develop pamphlets and a speech, which Doherty delivered at the event prior to the skywriting. This research was also used to justify the creation of a permanent land acknowledgment to the history of the Chimborazo Freedmen Community, approved by the State of Virginia in 2022, set to be installed and unveiled in 2023. This project was made with support from 1708 Gallery, Reynolds Gallery, Oakwood Arts, CultureWorks, Afrikana Film Festival, The University of Richmond, Arts & Letters Creative Co, the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Trilobite Arts, and many other contributors.

“If the archive is a remnant, it is one that keeps whispering to me, insisting on its place in my everyday life.’” – Julietta Singh

The meaning of land shifts along a complex vector that includes our measures of time, our markers of space, our embodied knowledge, external impositions of ownership, and marked and unmarked memory. When an imposition is made atop the existing wealth of cultural, interpersonal, and interspecies webs of a territory, its memory and preservation is threatened. It is threatened by ideas of ownership, of administrative erasure, of claim, and of the simplification of a territory into square footage that can be extracted and molded in the shape of controlled gain.

Chimborazo Park is a territory fraught with such complexities. The park, located on the occupied Powhatan lands colonially known as Richmond, Virginia, briefly held a Confederate Hospital as well as a Freedman community that lived on the land for a year before being violently displaced by the city’s government. Along its topography and its soil lies the memory of a collective promise of renewed agency and reparations following a still incomplete abolition that was tied to the formation of Freedmen communities. That promise continues to whisper to us through layers of mediated displacement and forceful removal.

As our understanding of Chimborazo Park has become abstracted and mediated by the governing bodies that maintain it, 40 ACRES: Chimborazo Park offers an antidote to that. 40 ACRES: Chimborazo Park consisted of an ephemeral performance where a skywriter traced the dimensions of a 40-acre plot in the sky above Chimborazo Park. The piece served as a public acknowledgement, briefly visible for miles. It functioned as a physical metaphor of the legend of reparations, "40 Acres and a Mule," which still holds an invisible presence in our atmosphere.

40 ACRES insists that those remnants of memory and promise are always already here. Claiming us, shaping us, and beckoning us to hold them. Asking us to shape an alternative future with them. 40 ACRES looks upwards to the sky, in an ephemeral act of elevating instead of excavating history. In an act of connecting us to an archive of memory while allowing us to refigure what a promise of reparations can look like. 40 Acres and a Mule. A protected piece of sky. A flourishing piece of land. An existence outside of colonial ownership. A commons.

– text by agustine zegers

Historical pamphlet made available for the skywriting performance and the exhibition of the work at 1708 Gallery.