LaRissa Rogers and Luis Vasquez La Roche's Operations of Care (OoC) is an alternative monument, community garden, and gathering space at Visible Records (VR). Operations of Care, reposition a long tradition of reaping from the ground and sustaining oneself from ground provision to offer what Vanessa Agard-Jones articulates as “going to ground” or “ground thoughts” as a birthing place for something we urgently need now. Stemming from Calvin Waren's text Black Care, Operations of Care offers new possibilities surrounding memorialization, community care, and reciprocity through a community garden and gathering space.

This alternative monument consists of raised community garden beds shaped like plinths and constructed from tabby– a material bulletproof by nature and made from a mixture of lime, sand, and water historically used by enslaved Africans and Black communities as a substitute for concrete. The beds frame the pre-existing Common Field Community garden at Visible Records and use soil from the locations of former Confederate monuments in the area that have been pulled down. In the beds, fruits, vegetables and herbs are harvested and made available for the Charlottesville community via the Little Free Fridge at Visible Records. Some Plants and herbs were medicinal and essential for enslaved Africans to survive off the land as a self-liberatory act.

Other vegetables and fruits were crucial in maintaining African culinary traditions for enslaved Africans, freedom seekers, and free people of color. Borrowing from Saidiya Hartman, the project prompts us to consider “how can we refuse to silence the ongoing past and foster a radically different kind of care to bear the present?” The plinth-like beds are also made for lounging– and act as seating for those to gather and rest.

This project aims to create a new language around what a monument can be, that does not rely on singularity or permanence. Through ecological attention, we aim to name another method in which we may view what it means to memorialize Black lived experiences, and Black archival lives when trying to understand how lives have been lived in spaces of impossibility. We turn to land –a living and breathing archive that transforms with time.