I received a scar from the landscape. It’s an interesting gift, a reminder of the questions and feelings from that summer. As I recovered the subsequent weeks from the car accident in Costa Rica that ripped open my hand and broke a bone in my palm, I couldn’t shake the breathtaking ability of some landscapes.

Nature can be incredibly deceptive—beautiful spaces harbor sinister pasts. An island’s warm beaches entice visitors to play, masking a painful history and foreboding peril. I have a deep tie to the beaches of Cabo Verde, an island used as a holding cell for enslaved Africans like my ancestors, by the Portuguese. I’m doubly tied to the archipelago nation whose waters followed me one summer. The same animated waters I played in all summer were the same waters that shut down Houston airports during Hurricane Harvey, and impeding my desperate return from Costa Rica to Texas with a gnarled hand.

Landscapes are unable to mourn or narrate their histories. raconte-moi une histoire explores the innocuousness of the environment by amplifying the landscape’s whispers. It is part pavilion and part aeolian harp—inspired by my stitches and scar both in design and construction. The pavilions layered construction and topographic benches, mirror the layering required to build landscapes and narratives. It produces music when the wind resonates the strings thereby playing with the idea of translating and amplifying the landscape’s history and providing it with an outlet to release the emotions it holds.