The Founder’s Pillars is a site responsive Augmented Reality (AR) memorial and multimedia installation that transforms the neoclassical pillars of the New York Stock Exchange and MIT’s Rogers Building into dynamic monuments honouring the African diaspora. It weaves decolonial practises of freedom-making by fusing colonial architecture with African futurist storytelling rooted in textile traditions. This project is included in the Tribeca Immersive 2025: In Search of Us exhibition alongside 10 other work
A continuing and travelling project, its current iterations digitally wrap the columns of both buildings in six animated textiles, each representing a region of the African continent. At MIT, these smart fabrics augment the columns that uphold the name of its founder William Barton Rogers, who once enslaved six individuals. At the New York Stock Exchange a symbol of capitalism built on the commodification of human lives the same fabrics activate its columns, transforming these pillars of institutional power into dynamic sites of remembrance and resistance. An accompanying installation at Water Street Projects features a power loom that digitally weaves African fabrics, revealing the ancestral knowledge embedded in their designs.
Developed through the MIT Open Documentary Lab, The Founders Pillars draws from six regions of the African continent, each represented by a distinct textile, an associated myth or story, bought to life by AI generated films and AR. As a travelling memorial, the project uses sound, animation, and smart textile visualisation to embed ancestral memory and cosmology into digital cloth, activating public space. The experience not only reveals suppressed histories but celebrates African interconnectedness. As a communal audio-visual technological experience, it transforms pillars of colonial power into spaces of de colonial expression.
