‘Strange Fruit’ in Bordeaux, France

This resin and metal sculpture was created by sculptor Sandrine Plante-Rougeol for Memory Week 2019. This sculpture, acquired by the City of Bordeaux and inaugurated on December 2, 2019, is a tribute to the enslaved people, in remembrance of their suffering. So that we never forget these crimes against humanity—the slave trade and slavery itself—and so that they may never happen again.

Plante-Rougeol, a descendant of enslaved people herself, is a committed figurative sculptor, a Zorey of Réunionese and Auvergne descent. The artist’s work invites viewers to think of her work “as a connection of symbols interwoven in space and time.” The symbol of the tree of life and its roots linking heaven and earth also recalls African animist beliefs. 

The tree bears three branches in reference to the triangular trade. Each enslaved figure is turned in a different direction, representing three emotions: anger, fear, and abandonment, stifled beneath the blindfolds covering their eyes in order to strip them of all bearings—their names, their languages, and their beliefs.

“Strange Fruit” is also a mobile whose movement, when set in motion through its metal hoops, recalls the rocking motion of slave ships on the ocean. These hoops come from wine barrels, in reference to 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 voyages deported approximately 130,000 to 150,000 enslaved Africans to the Americas, driving the city’s 18th-century “golden age” wealth through the import of sugar, coffee, and cotton.

The Musée d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux hosts a permanent exhibition on this history. In recent years, the city has begun to more openly acknowledge its past, including the addition of plaques to streets named after slave traders and the installation of a statue of Modeste Testas, an enslaved woman.