Unseen Routes: Mapping Black Albany’s Past, Present, and Possible Futures

Unseen Routes is a digital map installation rooted in Black memory, speculative cartography, and the layered histories of Albany, NY.

Artist–Scholar Statement

I grew up understanding Albany as more than a grid of streets and buildings — it was a place layered with memory, rumor, erasure, and the kinds of stories that sit just beneath the surface of official history. For Black families like mine, the city has always been a living archive, even when the maps don’t acknowledge our presence. Unseen Routes began with a simple question that would not leave me alone: What happens when you try to map a history that was never meant to be seen?

This project is my answer — or maybe it’s the beginning of one.

Unseen Routes is a digital map installation shaped through the BaKongo Cosmogram, a diasporic system of knowing that understands life, history, and memory as cyclical rather than linear. The cosmogram’s four movements—birth, life, death, and rebirth—offered me a structure that could hold the weight of Albany’s Black past while still making room for possibility. Each quadrant of the film engages a different mode of seeing: archival ghosts, thriving community presence, forced disappearance, and speculative futures. The cosmogram doesn’t just organize the piece; it frames how I understand the city itself.

The imagery is intentionally layered and abstract. I’m not recreating Albany’s geography the way a surveyor would; I’m building a visual language for the spaces where Black life once flourished and where its traces still linger. Historic neighborhoods swallowed by highway expansion, riverfront sites tied to enslavement, libraries that vanished under redevelopment — these are the routes that remain invisible to most contemporary maps. Through digital collage, animation, and soundscape, I’m inviting viewers to feel the weight of what’s missing without collapsing the past into nostalgia or the present into grief.

As a scholar, my work is rooted in Black speculative traditions, memory studies, and historical inquiry. As an artist, I move through image, sound, and ritual to reach the things the archive does not always name. Unseen Routes is where these strands meet. It’s research, but it’s also a practice of listening — to place, to ancestors, to the stories that refuse disappearance.

Albany is often framed as a governmental city, a place of policy and procedure. But beneath that veneer is a deep, multigenerational Black history that shaped the region and continues to shape it. This project is part of my commitment to bringing that history forward, not by simply recovering what was lost, but by imagining what might still emerge. In the end, Unseen Routes is both an act of remembrance and an act of possibility. It asks viewers to consider not just what Albany once held, but what it could still become if we let memory guide us toward a different kind of future.

Watch the film below (8:10):

Project Materials

Unseen Routes is part of my ongoing research and creative practice rooted in Black Albany's past, present, and possible futures.