Seeking the Remedies: Devising and Prototyping an AR Memorial to the Headquarters of Brazil’s Underground Railroad and Museum to the Enslaved

The RemediesAR project centers on the creation of an augmented reality (AR) memorial to the Church of Our Lady of the Remedies in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. The Remedies church served as the headquarters of the Underground Railroad in Brazil in the 1880s. Abolitionists based at the Remedies coordinating the mass flight of enslaved people throughout the surrounding province, helping bring about the formal abolition of slavery in 1888. These abolitionists created a museum dedicated to the enslaved inside the church, replete with objects of bondage and torture that the enslaved had carried with them into the city. Despite the historical significance of the church/museum and calls for its federal preservation in the 1930s, city officials demolished the building in 1942-’43 as part of a seminal modernization campaign that was motivated, in part, by anti-Black racism.

A varied group of artists, musicians, scholars, activists, and software engineers in Brazil and the U.S. are collaborating to construct the AR memorial. This memorial will sit in the exact location where the Remedies was located in center-city São Paulo and offer users five discrete and short immersive experiences relating to the Remedies. The team will produce these narratives through devising, a creative process in theater wherein the script is produced through collaboration and improvisation. In the course of outlining work already completed and our future plans for this project, this presentation will highlight how location-based AR offers novel possibilities for public history interventions, generally, and the advancement of reparative racial justice, specifically.