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“An oral ruttier is a long poem containing navigational instructions that sailors learned by heart and recited from memory. The poem contained the routes and tides, the stars and maybe the taste and flavor of the waters, the coolness, the saltiness; all for finding one’s way at sea.” –Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

Stone Maps (Ruttier for the Dispossessed)—the first site-responsive installation of Entanglements, a series of sculptural and architectural interventions by the artist Kiyan Williams that trace the histories embedded in the landscape and built environment of Boston—is an earthwork composed of braided, monolithic stones situated on Copp’s Hill Terrace in the city’s North End. Overlooking Boston Harbor, the installation lies at the heart of the former New Guinea settlement, one of the first Black communities in Boston; and is adjacent to Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, where over 1000 Black Bostonians are buried in unmarked graves. Among the unmarked graves are believed to be Phillis Wheatley Peters, the first Black woman to publish a book of poetry, and her child.
As a point of departure, Williams retraced the transatlantic voyage of the ship the Phillis that trafficked Wheatley Peters from her birthplace of Senegambia to Boston in 1761. The artist gathered volcanic basalt stones from along the coast of Dakar, including Gorée Island, a colonial-era slave trading post. At Copp’s Hill Terrace the stones are arranged in a quincunx, or an “x”, a symbol of the crossroads between the earth and the cosmos, a convergence across time and geographies, and energy radiating in all directions. The stones form a cosmogram that aligns with the Sun, Polaris, and other celestial bodies during the summer and winter solstices to trace the nautical routes between the United States, Senegal, and England, mapping the transatlantic networks that shaped the life of Wheatley Peters and more broadly the landscape of Boston.

Drawing its title from Dionne Brand’s seminal text A Map to the Door of No Return, the installation is a sculptural ruttier, a compass to navigate perpetual uprootedness, and a wayfinder for the infinite possibilities of living and being in diaspora.

Entanglements is a multi-part commission by the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture’s Un-Monument initiative, and supported by grants from VIA Art Fund and the Mellon Foundation.

(RUTTIER FOR THE DISPOSSESSED)

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