Grafting Black Life (practice-based research)
Site-specific art installation (cyanotype on vellum paper and sound recording) and research project
Dr Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye, Lecturer in Black Geographies, University of Edinburgh
25 September 2026 – 11 December 2026
Institute of Geography
University of Edinburgh
Drummond Street, Edinburgh EH8 9XP
Scotland, United Kingdom
How can we honor Black ancestors and ecological relations, including those entangled with the colonial histories of the spaces we inhabit? How can Igbo and diasporic practices of ancestral relation, ritual, and creative engagement with archives offer ways of intervening in these spaces?
This creative research and site-specific work intervenes in a University of Edinburgh campus building’s direct and entangled connections to plantation enslavement and colonial empire. The Institute of Geography building, originally constructed by the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, was supported by wealth derived from plantation enslavement. In 1750, the Royal Infirmary took possession of Red Hill Pen, a 420-acre livestock estate. This “possession” was the land as well as 39 enslaved people, including children. For more than 140 years, the Royal Infirmary claimed possession of Red Hill Pen, including multiple generations of enslaved (and then apprenticed) Black peoples and the land itself. In the first stage of this project, I undertook archival research at National Archives, viewing colonial slave registries that tabulated enslaved people as property, and Lothian Health Services Archives, viewing inventory documents, cash books, reports, and correspondences concerning Red Hill Pen’s financial production as exploited human labor and land. Important too are other kinds of “archives” of remembering these histories that tell how us to understand these relations, particularly the work of Edinburgh Caribbean Association founder and historian Lisa Williams in her 2024 poem Blood Money, which asks us to “leave some space for Red Hill Pen.”
Grounded in Igbo territorial ways of knowing that center ancestral relation, ecological relation and archive as ritual, this installation is an offering to ancestors that also confronts these histories and remakes ways of knowing through Black creative spatial practice. As a US-born Igbo diasporan with roots and familial relations to southeastern Nigeria (ala Igbo), I intervene in these place-based legacies by centering Black thought and practice (including that of my ancestors). Drawing on my maternal lineage of growing, working with, attuning to plants, and plant grafting, this project develops grafting as conceptual and methodological approach. I draw on my previous work on plant grafting, and I continue to learn from their inventive ways of nurturing plant life, working with plants, and producing beautiful plant arrangements within constraints of enclosure – plantation, colony, and other forms.
This intervention reworks colonial archives (including correspondences, inventories, and government slave registries) and their logics through a creative practice with cyanotype printing (producing blue-colored prints using iron salts, water, sunlight) and sound, while also producing ritual archives that honor ancestors. Through cyanotype printmaking, I fragment colonial archival records and bring them into material relation with plants from my mother’s family home in southeastern Nigeria and from around the Geography building. Through this practice, I work through sentences and phrases within these archives that equate enslaved people to real estate and property – and subvert this by attuning to an Igbo reality of interdependent ontological relation between human and human that sustains territorial-oriented ancestral relations. Arranging, exposing, disassembling and recomposing these materials, I work with and against the archive’s classifications through representations of Black life. Through sound installation, I graft together Igbo, Jamaican, and Scottish environments and voices (human and nonhuman). I sonically emplace together ancestral sites and rituals, plant conversations between women, a contemporary tour through Red Hill, and my own Igbo greeting to ancestors, where I address named and unnamed ancestors and acknowledge our intergenerational and maternal relations. This intervention, sited at two crossroads within the building — spatially and spiritually meaningful locations for ancestor work — materially and sonically upturns colonial logics of separation, distance, and possession through an attendance to Black ecological life.
From the grounds of colonial and plantocratic dispossession, Black relationalities between humans and earth plot, take root, and grow. This installation tells a story of Black relationality and the intense entanglement between our geographies – Edinburgh, Scotland, Red Hill, Jamaica, and Igboland.
Grafting Black Life: Archival Resource Document:
Grafting Black Life: Site-Specific Installation Soundscape [on Soundcloud]
Acknowledgements: I am grateful to my mother, to her sister, my aunt, and to my grandparents, and all of my ancestors who inspire and gift me with knowledge and appreciation for plants and flowers. I am grateful to Olajide Adegbite and Yanique Norman for their support installing this artwork in the Institute of Geography building. I am grateful to Ken Tomlinson, who provided permission for me to use his walking tour of Red Hill within the sound recording.
This research was funded by the Moray Endowment Fund and approved by the School of GeoSciences Ethics Committee at the University of Edinburgh.
