Bordeaux’s ‘Weird Fruit’: A Sculpture Honoring Enslaved Lives & Confronting History

Sandrine Plante-Rougeol's 'Weird Fruit' sculpture in Bordeaux, a tribute to enslaved people, symbolizes the triangular trade and their suffering, confronting the city's past as a major slave port. It serves as a reminder of crimes against humanity.

The tree bears 3 branches in reference to the triangular trade. Each enslaved number is turned in a various direction, representing three feelings: rage, desertion, and concern, stifled under the blindfolds covering their eyes in order to strip them of all bearings– their names, their languages, and their beliefs.

Plante-Rougeol, a descendant of enslaved individuals herself, is a fully commited figurative carver, a Zorey of Réunionese and Auvergne descent. The musician’s job invites visitors to consider her work “as a link of icons interwoven in space and time.” The sign of the tree of life and its origins connecting heaven and planet likewise recalls African animist ideas.

Bordeaux’s Acknowledgment and the Sculpture’s Tribute

The Musée d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux holds an irreversible exhibition on this history. In recent years, the city has started to even more honestly acknowledge its past, including the enhancement of plaques to streets named after servant traders and the setup of a statuary of Modeste Testas, an enslaved woman.

This resin and steel sculpture was developed by artist Sandrine Plante-Rougeol for Memory Week 2019. This sculpture, gotten by the City of Bordeaux and inaugurated on December 2, 2019, is a tribute to the enslaved people, in remembrance of their suffering. That we never ever forget these criminal offenses versus humankind– the servant trade and enslavement itself– and so that they might never ever take place once again.

Historical Echoes: ‘Weird Fruit’ and Bordeaux’s Past

“Weird Fruit” is additionally a mobile whose motion, when propelled through its steel hoops, remembers the shaking activity of slave ships on the ocean. These hoops originate from red wine barrels, of Bordeaux, the city for which this sculpture was created.

Bordeaux was France’s second-largest slave-trading port after Nantes, with roughly 480 to 500 expeditions departing between 1672 and 1837. These trips deported approximately 130,000 to 150,000 enslaved Africans to the Americas, driving the city’s 18th-century “golden age” wide range through the import of coffee, sugar, and cotton.