Memorial for Souls Can’t Go Home is an installation inspired by roadside memorials. In this work, artist Orlando Thompson questions what happens to a soul when it’s forcibly removed from its host body due to one of the many systems that plague Black people, especially access to resources and over-policing. Black communities across the globe suffer from deaths that are preventable because racism sanctions violence against the Black body as means of control. “As these systems become exposed through social media,” Thompson says, “I see a lot more makeshift memorials being erected in remembrance of people killed in malicious ways. I imagine their souls gain density, keeping them bound to this planet and unable to ascend to what is beyond the physical. This project explores what a dense soul could look like and how it might behave.”

Memorial for Souls Can’t Go Home is a multisensory installation. Beckoning sounds of a human voice, fragmented and indecipherable, emanate out in an ominous ensemble of noise akin to crickets in a field.The room is dark and your eyes will need to adjust. Your presence disturbs the peace of the sculptures and their songs begin to pause as you approach them. When you move closer, you see the objects in more detail and notice a faint glow. You notice yourself noticing, and the objects notice you, too.

Read a review by an Altamont School student who says this exhibition “changed [her] opinion about contemporary art.”