International Slavery Remembrance Day

Meet our guest curator

Amouraé B. Chin (Amouraé Alliyah) is a multidisciplinary researcher who has co-curated International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition 2025 with Royal Museums Greenwich.

Her methods privilege care, collaborations, site-specificity, and research-as-practice. With a background in history with creative writing, she interprets the threads, ruptures, and remains of spaces that speak to her diasporic heritage, while tending to archives through informal 'mapping' techniques.

Amouraé's archival work and poetry was showcased in The London Archives' year-long Unforgotten Lives exhibition (2023-24); whilst her arts-based research has featured in displays at MAIA (2024), the Institute of Contemporary Arts (2025), and Architecture Fringe (2025).

International Slavery Remembrance Day 2025 has been her first major curatorial project.

Opening ceremony and keynote speech

The day will begin with a performance from Ethno Vox choir and an introduction from keynote speaker, Dr Aleema Gray.

Dr Aleema Gray is an award winning Jamaican-born curator, researcher and public historian based in London. 

She was awarded the Yesu Persaud Scholarship for her PhD entitled Bun Babylon: a community-engaged history of Rastafari in Britain. 

Aleema’s practice is driven by a concern for more historically contingent ways of understanding the present, especially in relation to notions of belonging, memory and contested heritage in the African and Caribbean diaspora. She was the Lead Curator for Beyond the Bassline: 500 years of Black British Music at the British Library and the founder of HOUSE OF DREAD, an anti-disciplinary heritage studio dedicated to the preservation and activation of African and Caribbean histories.

Reflection Space, Atlantic Worlds Gallery | 12pm-3pm

Head to the Reflection Space in the Atlantic Worlds gallery to create personal collages in response to The Keeper of All The Secrets by Jacqueline Bishop, and explore wider themes of care, resistance and collective memory. 

This calming experience will focus on self-expression, emotions and creativity and is led by Stephanie Okoye.

Hidden in the archives, a poetry performance by Jeremiah Brown

Atlantic Worlds Gallery | 11.45am - 12.15pm

Poet Jeremiah Brown will perform a selection of poems inspired by materials within the Caird Archives. Having spent time looking at materials ranging from plantation inventories to correspondences from Marcus Garvey, Jeremiah will provide a performance of sharp, heartfelt and insightful poetry.

The myth we made while drowning: imagination as resistance with Blu Smith

Ocean Map | 12.15pm - 1pm

This workshop invites participants to descend into the mythic underwater world of Drexciya – an imagined Black Atlantis born from resistance. Through film, storytelling and collective dreaming, we explore imagination as a radical act of survival and a means of myth-making.

The market woman's basket

Learning Space | 11.30pm - 3.45pm

Led by artist Love Hannington, this family-friendly series of drop-in workshops will invite participants to weave their own market baskets using wool, paper bowls, and paper plates.

Quilting as resistance 

Rethink Space | 11.30am - 1.30pm

Engage with the rich cultural history of quilting as a tool for resistance, self-expression and liberation with Jahnavi Innis. Participants will produce individual quilt blocks which document their personal histories, and advocate for social change.

Zine-making workshop: Hair and resilience

Rethink Space | 2pm-4pm

Explore themes of hair, resilience and identity with Korantema Anyimadu in this collaborative workshop. This session is suitable for ages 12 and above, with 20 spaces available.

Letters to the ancestors 

Group Space | 11.30am - 2pm

This creative session will be taken by Deptford People's Heritage Museum – a Black-led museum located near Deptford Docks – and organisation Red Ribbon. 

They say: 'In this workshop we take back the practice of letter writing used by the colonisers to share their tales of ‘new’ lands. Using quill pens, resistance quotes from enslaved people and freedom songs learned from our own families and communities we will travel in time tracing ‘common winds’ through the past, present and future.'

Games without wires 

Figurehead Space | 11.30am - 3.30pm

Join the Caribbean Social Forum for a day of traditional board games for all ages. 

Film screenings are hosted by Ishy Pryce-Parchment and take place in the Lecture Theatre.

A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message by Rhea Storr

This film combines contemporary and historical footage of the Leeds West Indian Carnival to explore Storr's response to the festivities. The film raises questions around forms of authority, participants and observers, and the visibility of Black bodies, particularly in rural spaces.

Through a Shimmering Prism, We Made a Way by Rhea Storr

Focusing on three sisters, this film looks at Black diaspora. Taking as its starting point empty carnival and parade routes in London, United Kingdom and Nassau, Bahamas, the film reflects on progress, the architectural histories of colonialism and the female body in public spaces. 

If I could name you myself (I would hold you forever) by Hope Pearl Strickland

This film examines the connotations of cotton, from associations with enforced labour and exploitation to herbal resistance and rebellion.

a river holds a perfect memory by Hope Pearl Strickland

Meandering across waterways in Jamaica, Falmouth, Northern England and Rochdale, this film charts the links between water, memory, labour – and the impact of the industrial revolution.

S8 Dominica Montage.Ver. 1.2 by Nathaniel Télémaque

Scored by a series of soundscapes recorded with Dominica's natural poetic landscapes, this short montage film highlights the country's unique geographies.

Framing the affective afterlives of slavery – in conversation with Nathaniel Télémaque

Nathaniel Télémaque talks to guest curator Amouraé B. Chin (Amouraé Alliyah) about his formative trip to Dominica. This discussion will focus on how the experience shaped his creative process to the questions it raised around home, heritage and belonging.

salt:dispersed by Selina Thompson

In February 2016, two artists got on a cargo ship, and retraced one of the routes of the Transatlantic Slave Triangle – from the UK to Ghana to Jamaica, and back. 

Their memories, their questions and their grief took them along the bottom of the Atlantic and through the figurative realm of an imaginary past. It was a long journey backwards in order to go forwards. This show is what they brought back.

Le Roi n'est pas mon Cousin by Annabelle Aventurin

Bringing together poignant interview clips, excerpts of text and symbolic imagery, The King is Not My Cousin is a familial documentary essay centred around resilience, history and sacrifice.

Talks

Gathering secrets: Black feminist memory, healing and resistance in the archive with Whose Heritage Curatorial Fellow Dr Nydia A Swaby

Inspired by Jacqueline Bishop’s The Keeper of All the Secrets, this talk and workshop invites participants to explore Royal Museums Greenwich's collection by centring the lives, labour and healing knowledge of Caribbean and West African women. 

Working with photographs, rare books and objects – from market scenes and botanical prints to 18th-century herbals and expedition narratives – we will uncover fragments of knowledge hidden in colonial archives. 

Through close looking, collective reading and speculative storytelling, participants will 'gather secrets' that speak to the themes of care, resistance and survival in Bishop's work.

Talk: Black women's freedom, movement and work in the eighteenth-century British world

This talk by historian Dr Montaz Marché will retrace some of the lives of Black women working in London. It will highlight the shifting dimensions of labour, economy, identity and freedom in their working lives.

Panel discussion: Transatlantic legacies: creative agency, Black motherhood and reproductive justice

Bringing together PhD researchers Akosua Paries-Osei, Caroline Bazambanza and chaired by expert Dr Jenny Douglas, this conversation will explore enslaved women's use of ethnobotanical knowledge, as well as contemporary experiences of Black motherhood and care networks.

Singing workshop with Ethnovox

Join the Ethnovox choir to learn the song lyrics that will be performed during the Emancipation ceremony.

The day’s commemorations culminate in a procession from the Queen's House to the River Thames. Join us to reflect and scatter petals into the river in a collective act of remembrance, before listening to a closing speech. 

Please note that the walk is 10-15 minutes long. Royal Museums Greenwich will close at 5pm so make sure to take your belongings with you.