Memorial Garden for the Victims of Slavery (Design Competition)

National Memorial to the Victims of Slavery – Trocadéro Gardens (Paris)
Non-winning proposal – Tender phase, competitive dialogue

Wagon Landscaping submitted a landscape design proposal as part of the tender phase of the competitive dialogue procedure for the creation of the National Memorial to the Victims of Slavery, to be located in the Trocadéro Gardens in Paris. The memorial was intended to bear the first and last names of 215,000 women and men who were still enslaved in the French colonies in 1848, the year slavery was abolished by the provisional government of the Second Republic.

These names, now brought to light, are the result of an exceptional research effort carried out over more than thirty years by volunteers, associations, genealogists, teachers, and researchers. The project was therefore rooted in a process of recognition, transmission, and active remembrance, set within a major heritage site of strong symbolic significance and embedded in everyday urban life.

The landscape proposal developed by Wagon Landscaping sought to make the landscape itself a sensitive and lasting medium of memory, articulating spaces for reflection and commemoration with historical legibility and a strong relationship to the broader Parisian landscape. The project aimed to reconcile the solemnity required of a memorial with the openness and accessibility of a public garden.

The client for the project was the French Ministry for Overseas Territories, with OPPIC acting as the delegated project owner.

Design team (consortium)
AREP – Designers Unit – Soja Architecture – ON Conception Lumière – Cronos Citylab – GLG Images – Wagon Landscaping