Raymond Thompson Jr

This place-based project utilizes archival fragments, historical ephemera, and my images to expand narratives about the Black experience and our connection to the North American landscape. This work is based on local historical archives of runaway slave ads, lynching news articles, Black folklore, and other location-specific historical events. Maroons were enslaved people who had escaped their captors but did not flee to the North. Instead, they created a life in hard-to-access swamps or the wild spaces between plantations. The survival strategies and techniques the maroons used to survive in the ungoverned space between plantations can be considered "freedom practices." These practices could include practical approaches as well as more spiritual methods. Through these recently reclaimed threads of stories, we can radically re-envision Black people's connection to the American landscape. This project is also a personal. I have chosen to locate this work in the place where parts of my family's origin story begin. Ultimately, this body of work is about my process of learning how to engage with a landscape infused with trauma to produce ways of knowing that exist outside of that paradigm.

Website www.raymondthompsonjr.com