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Cedar Annenkovna reaches through the 12-inch slot on the cell door. The steel bars reach well above her head and anchor into a cement block in the ground below.
Standing on the front lawn of the St. Charles Baptist Church, the prison cell is immediately noticeable to passersby, without the usual display of security alarms and armed guards. Annenkovna walks around the side of the cell, where instead of running into cement walls, she crouches down to pick a leaf off the nasturtium plant that grows from the cell floor.
The cell door is not bolted down in cement but instead into a densely packed, crumbling organic matter. Behind the bars, the 54 square feet would look to most people like an inefficiently designed garden bed, but beneath the surface is an art installation providing social commentary on the practice of solitary confinement in America’s prison industrial complex.
Solitary Gardens, a New Orleans-based art project run by the nonprofit Freedom To Grow, collaborates with institutions and organizations nationwide to construct these garden beds, designed to the exact dimensions and layout of solitary confinement cells. The project aims to interrogate and call for the abolition of the American prison industrial complex.
“This [cell] is your bunk bed… your toilet and sink [which] is your kitchenette, your all-purpose functioning area, your laundry,” Annenkovna said.
She builds the space in the air. She moves around the small cell, gesturing to certain parts and pulling her hand to hip height to demonstrate reality. “Where the plants are, that’s your living space.”
At the project’s original site, located on Andry Street in the Seventh Ward, the remnants of cell garden prototypes can be found throughout the outdoor space. Some have cardboard walls, others wood, but the foundation of the St. Charles Avenue garden bed is made of the final construction product. They use biodegradable crops such as cotton, grown on-site at the Andry Street lot, to create the material.
Louisiana soil is familiar with cotton.
For centuries, enslaved individuals of African descent were forced to work in fields picking cotton. When the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865, it was intended to end slavery in America. However, a stipulation in the text created an exception, allowing forced labor as punishment for a crime, which the American carceral system still employs.
Less than a 3-hour drive northwest from the Solitary Gardens’ Andry Street location is the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
The country’s largest maximum-security prison, LSP, is the pinnacle of the transition from slavery into the prison system. Land that was once slave plantations is now a penal plantation where incarcerated individuals work field crops, like cotton and sugarcane, earning two cents an hour.
Every incarcerated person at the Louisiana State Penitentiary begins their forced labor in the fields, and nearly 75% of these individuals are Black. In the intense Louisiana heat, they are under the watchful eye of the armed guards, withheld water and proper sanitation. They harvest cotton and other crops for hours at a time.
At Solitary Gardens, cotton is cultivated along with indigo, sugarcane and tobacco – the largest chattel slavery crops – and is repurposed to form the walls of their garden beds. They call it “witch mixing.” The crops are harvested and then hand-mixed into a nonhydraulic lime base. Sweat and spells, prayers and meditations, together they call for collective liberation. The process is labor intensive by design, intentionally demanding, but all the while transformative. In the end, they have created their foundation, which they call revolutionary mortar.
Volunteers work until exhaustion as the construction process remains labor intensive until the end. The revolutionary mortar is tamped down using the rammed earth method to form the 6 feet by 9 feet perimeter and map the bed, toilet sink and desk. The breaks from work serve as an invitation to reflect, to gather and discuss the centuries of forced labor practices and the practice of solitary confinement. Working at an intimate level, the generation of discussion is an attempt at reaching people on an individual level, a strategy that is reflected in the grassroots nature of the organization.
Louisiana has a higher incarceration rate per capita than any independent, democratic nation on this planet. It is first in a country that leads the world, not just in incarceration but in the percentage of incarcerated individuals being held in solitary confinement.
Often referred to as “23 and 1” because of the minimum of 23 hours spent in the cell and the single hour individuals get to walk their cell block, visit the showers or exercise, solitary confinement is internationally recognized as a violation of the 8th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
In December 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Nelson Mandela Rules, a revised version of the body’s standard minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners. Rule 43 prohibits indefinite and prolonged solitary confinement, declaring it a cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment or punishment. It defines “prolonged” solitary confinement as a period over 15 consecutive days.
The Louisiana Department of Corrections has not collected data on the time spent in solitary, leaving research institutes and community organizations to gather that information on their own.
“Louisiana on Lockdown,” a joint report produced by Solitary Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana and the Jesuit Social Research Institute at Loyola University New Orleans, included a survey of just over 700 individuals being held in solitary confinement in Louisiana. Of this, over 77% of respondents reported being held in solitary confinement for more than a year, while 30% said they had been held for more than 5 years, far exceeding any standards set by the United Nations.
After laying the revolutionary mortar, the rest of the Solitary Garden beds are filled with soil where flowers and vegetables are planted and cultivated.
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jackie sumell, creator of the Solitary Gardens, is an artist by trade and an activist by chance. She referred to her conceptualization of the project as a mental “download,” pieces of a greater puzzle clicking into place. After her close friend and mentor, Herman Wallace, passed away only days after being released from over 40 years held in solitary confinement, sumell searched for a way to carry his legacy on. Inspired by the digital media piece she and Herman made throughout his time in solitary, The House That Herman Built, sumell drew on Herman’s love of flowers and gardens in her creation of the project.
“We can’t just illustrate what’s wrong with systems of punishment and control; we have to inspire folks to dream beyond it,” sumell said. “We need hope. We need possibility. We need alternatives. We need these qualities of mutualism, the ability to take care of each other and the gardens are a magnificent teacher for that.”
Each Solitary Garden is named after the individual who, through written correspondence with members of the organization, designed the garden bed while being held in solitary confinement. The first solitary garden that Annenkovna visited was the one she designed through correspondence with sumell. When offered the space, she researched plants with the healing properties she wanted to share with the world. Deciding on rue, mullein, garlic, yarrow, mustard, dill and peppermint, she called these the “seven sisters.”
“There’s a deep spiritual aspect to it,” Annenkovna said. “Medicine that comes from the earth is composed of sunlight and water and soil and all the elements that we’re made of. And beyond that, there’s this sacred energy that gives life to living things that we share with the earth and all of creation. When you harvest vegetables, you give thanks, and you receive them with gratitude, and you prepare medicine for other people with that concept of gratitude in mind, you’re creating like a magic elixir made with love.”
The Seven Sisters are harvested from the garden, dried and brewed into an elixir used for the physical and spiritual healing of others.
Obie’s garden sits in front of the Baptist Church on St. Charles Avenue.
Obie is a 43-year-old man who, at the age of 20, was sentenced to life in solitary confinement while awaiting a death sentence. Obie is an artist who uses oil, graphite, colored pencils and whatever materials he can gather while incarcerated to create art that transcends the cell. His design of the St. Charles Solitary Garden is another way his art reaches the world.
The impact of the project reaches those directly affected and, as Annenkovna said, reminds incarcerated people of the value of their contribution to the world. Beyond activism, she said the project brings compassion and attention to people who might otherwise be forced to forget that they are worthy of these affections.
Obie chose aloe vera for his garden bed. “I like its medicinal uses and its ability to survive,” he said in a note to Solitary Gardens. “I like how it holds water/moisture for us. Symbolically, we need those who keep us lubricated mentally, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually… so that we don’t get rusted (stuck) and useless to those around us.”
Obie’s garden at the St. Charles Ave Baptist church was created in collaboration with the St. Charles Center for Faith + Action and the Impacted Solitary Survivors Coalition. The Center for Faith + Action was created by the church and is now run by Caroline Durham, who serves as the Executive Director. The center’s role, Durham said, is to teach people of faith and spiritual groups about the harms of the criminal legal system.
The Audubon neighborhood in Uptown New Orleans, through which much of St. Charles Avenue runs, is steeped in a history of slavery and segregation.
In the early 1700s, plantation land made up most of uptown, owned and run by various men of note, including Louisiana Governor and “founder” of New Orleans, Jean Baptiste LeMoyne de Bienville. Over the 18th century, the land was divided into smaller plantations, where slaves were forced to work hours harvesting indigo, tobacco and later primarily sugar. By the 19th century, the city had become the center of the domestic slave trade. It was found that over one million enslaved people were forcibly transferred into the Deep South through New Orleans.
St. Charles Avenue also marks the boundary of one end of the Tulane University campus, which has historical roots in slavery. A 2019 article in The Tulane Tullabaloo by staff writer Jackson Faulkner called out the University’s “lack of institutional self-examination [which is] compounded by a deep historical silence which has erased any contemporary memory of Tulane’s plantation history.” Faulkner highlights the fact that Tulane is built on lands that used to be slave plantations, operated and owned by the first person in the country to grow sugar commercially, Étienne de Boré.
As the revolutionary mortar decomposes from the solitary gardens, it mixes into the soil of this very land. “The plants reconnect us with the earth and redefine our roots,” Annenkovna said. “We remember where we came from and what sustains us, and we get our power back.”
Audubon is considered the wealthiest neighborhood in New Orleans, with nearly 75% of its population being white. There is a legacy left behind from slavery there. In putting a solitary garden bed on St. Charles Avenue, where the streetcar rolls and passersby walk miles to see the gorgeous mansions, Solitary Gardens’ goal is to have conversations take place in an area where they otherwise might not have.
Crossing Broadway Street on a walk along St. Charles, a cell door stands in the shadows of the church tower.
“This is the way the prison system is set up,” Durham said. “[The system] puts [people] behind these walls, puts prisons far away, so that they don’t have a connection to their family, and as a society, so that we don’t have to see it. So now they see it.”
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The plants growing in the solitary gardens, once cultivated, contribute to the cycle of healing and restoration. From the gardens, these plants move on to the Abolitionist’s Apothecary, a mobile, community-focused initiative centered on health, autonomy and collective well-being.
Soothing salves and tea blends are among the products created from plants and sold at the Abolitionist’s Apothecary. The shop emphasizes abolition’s dependence on continuous learning, creativity and curiosity. It calls for an abandonment of the reliance on America’s established systems of punishment.
“Art has this superpower in that it can seduce and destroy ignorance,” sumell said. “It could call you in, like walking by that garden bed [and asking] what is this? Curiosity is the first and arguably most important ingredient for abolition.”
Louisiana has a recidivism rate of nearly 30%, one example of the failures of the prison industrial complex. At Solitary Gardens, the aim is to not just point out these failures but also encourage visitors and volunteers to explore their imaginations for alternatives.
“If prisons made us safe, we would be the safest country in the world,” sumell said. “We have more people incarcerated than anywhere else, so how do we create a system that actually keeps us safe?”
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