Breonna’s Garden Will Feature at the Upcoming SXSW
A unique AR and VR experience for solace and remembrance.
Last year, in solidarity with Breonna Taylor’s family, artist and curator Lady Pheønix developed Breonna’s Garden, an augmented reality (AR) experience that serves as a virtual safe space to process the grief of the racial injustices that were intensified during 2020.
The project was first conceived when Lady Pheønix caught word that Breonna’s younger sister, Ju’Niyah Palmer, was receiving death threats online for grieving her sibling’s death on Instagram. Having initially served as a healing tool for Palmer, the Garden has developed into a larger space in which all the communities who were affected by the tragedy can come to as a place for solace and share a message for someone they miss.
Breonna’s Garden has featured at a number of noteworthy events and institutions, such as the Tribeca Film Festival and the Perez Art Museum Miami, and will showcase again at the upcoming South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin. To commemorate the occasion, Lady Pheønix and organizers of the Garden will host a unique exhibition where audiences will be transported to a sanctuary of tributes to Breonna by her family and friends, along with the global community that rallied around her.
The project has been described by some as a new artistic model of transformative justice. One to which scholar Mia Mingus said in a statement is “a political framework and approach for responding to violence, harm and abuse. Transformative Justice can be thought of as a way of ‘making things right,’ getting in ‘right relation,’ or creating justice together.”
Made in partnership with a long list of creative professionals, the original AR Breonna’s Garden is available to experience via the app, while the upcoming VR exhibition will take place at SXSW from March 11-20.
In other art-related news, Ukraine’s Ivankiv Museum of Local History has been destroyed by Russian forces.
