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DOC 234—34/2
Capsules of Memory (2025)

Soundscape,
Three Channel Video Work,
Cotton ‘Gossypium’,
Black- Eyed Peas: Cowpea ‘Vigna unguiculata’ ;


Capsules of Memory is a meditation on memory, spirit, and resistance. Hayes brings together video, sound, textiles and natural materials as a ritual offering—grounding a connection to what was severed by the transatlantic slave trade. This installation stands as an homage to the 12 million African people who crossed the Atlantic: those who carried seeds, rituals and wisdom, as a tether to the motherland(s), and those who gave themselves to the water in search of sanctuary. This crossing generated lasting trauma, but memory refused to disappear. Quiet traces of Afro-Indigenous roots remain within Black American culture today, carried quietly through seeds, spirit, and ancestral inner knowings.

The Black-Eyed Pea (Vigna unguiculata), a seed of good fortune, and Cotton (Gossypium), a cash crop tied to slavery, embody cycles of loss and renewal. As enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas, seeds such as the Black-Eyed Pea were secretly braided into hair as maps to freedom. This birthed a living thread that traced the African diasporic foodway through the Middle Passage and later became the panacea for restoring depleted soils on cotton plantations.

Water, soil, seeds, and food become a vessel of remembrance. This work is the artist's way of excavating fragments of memory that have been erased, distorted and lost. 

Visitors are invited to participate in a seed swap—offering a seed collected or found, placing it inside an envelope provided, and exchanging it with another visitor’s seed—extending the work into communal memory, reciprocity, and shared resistance.














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