Mémorial de l’abolition de l’esclavage

In 1998, for the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, the City Council decided to build a memorial on the Quai de La Fosse. Directed by the Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko and the American-Argentine architect Julian Bonder, the Memorial is located on the banks of the Loire. Inaugurated in March 2012, it consists of a commemorative path, a meditative path and a historical area. The commemorative path takes the form of a green promenade of 7000 m2. Throughout this esplanade are distributed 2000 glass slabs. 1710 of them recall the names of the ships and the departure dates of the slave trade shipments from Nantes. The 290 other slabs indicate the slave trading posts, stopover ports and trading ports in Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas and the Indian Ocean. The meditative path goes through a 90 meters long underground passage, presenting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which appears behind the word freedom, written in fifty languages from the countries affected by the slave trade. After the underground passage, the visitor can see the Loire on the left between supporting pillars, and a huge plate of glass running over 90 meters on the right. The latter carries a selection of texts from all the continents that were affected by the slave trade (Europe, Africa, the Americas, Indian Ocean), across five centuries (from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century): laws, testimonies, literature, songs, fundamental texts of abolitionism ... On the western end of the passage, some historical and geographical elements re-position the Atlantic slave in context.