LatinaLista —
Campaign: HAVE YOU SEEN ME? A MEMORIAL TO SLAVERY
The United States and countries around the world still have not come to grips with the slave trade and its long-lasting effects.
Have You Seen Me? is a work of art that seeks to build a contemporary memorial to slavery.
HAVE YOU SEEN ME? transforms the iconic 1980s “kid on the milk carton” missing person advocacy campaign into a memorial for Africans who were lost during the Slave Trade.
The bottles feature real missing people on them. The portraits are derived from historical documents depicting real people who were captured into slavery.
By putting the faces of real slaves on hand-crafted, archival, milk bottles, project creators are seeking to both repurpose the European obsession with pure white porcelain, as well as pay homage to the slave’s life – by attaching the precious images of individual slaves to a precious material, the artists give the slave a dignified voice in a context historically unavailable to them.
This memorial to slavery depends on the involvement of a widespread group of people – not just for the funds to continue production, but for the housing of the bottles.
To date, five unique editions (consisting of fifty bottles in each edition) of Have You Seen Me? bottles have been produced.
The process of making those 250 individual bottles (plus countless prototypes) has been cumbersome and costly.
The current situation is not sustainable. To immediately produce the next five bottles in the project and continue the project it has become apparent that an industrial-quality production kiln is required to make the process more efficient, cost effective, and under the complete control of the artist.
The project’s organizers need help to make this happen.
Because in the end, the memorial is the network of bottles in everyone’s homes.
