Enrique Cavelier and Celina Abba have been invited to showcase their research project “Plantation Futures” at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 as part of the Intelligens Cannon.

“Plantation Futures is an experimental video installation that envisions the future of Louisiana’s “Plantation Country.” The intertwined legacies of chattel slavery and ecological degradation in the lower Mississippi region have long marginalised the voices of the enslaved, their descendants, and the land itself. This video challenges colonial narratives and proposes an alternative future for the region that recognises suppressed histories and non-human entities as essential forms of natural intelligence.

Through the digital model and an eco-poem, visitors immerse themselves in a world where interspecies kinship and empathy foster ecological and communal restoration. This project functions as a counter-archive, using the erased landscapes of the Mississippi River as palimpsests to explore ancestral violence and planetary futures. The installation combines eco-poetry, archival research, and digital technologies, reimagining landscape representation as a dynamic archive. The poem serves as a collaborative medium for listening to the water, the soil, the archive, and ourselves, challenging the dominant singular narrative that has prevailed in the region for over four centuries.

Amid the escalating climate crisis and deepening social inequities, Plantation Futures envisions new strategies to confront the fractures between environmentalism and anti-Blackness. By bridging past and present, it challenges the rupture rooted in plantation logics, opening pathways for remembrance, justice, and radical transformation.”