"The ACTe Memorial was born under the impetus of the International Committee of Black Peoples, a separatist movement, and materialized thanks to the Guadeloupe region.
The idea of a "Caribbean museum of slavery and the slave trade" appeared in 1998. In 2007, President Jacques Chirac entrusted the writer Édouard Glissant with a mission to create a dedicated National Center trafficking and slavery, which he plans to establish in Paris.
The idea is abandoned by President Nicolas Sarkozy, opposed to the idea of repentance. The project is finally taken over by the president of the Guadeloupe region, Victorin Lurel. The creation of the ACTe Memorial is at the top of the measures for overseas candidate François Hollande, with partial funding from the French state.
On October 26, 2004, Regional President Victorin Lurel proposes to create a memorial on the slave trade and slavery. In 2005, the scientific committee was created to clarify the contours of the scientific project under the authority of Professor Jacques Adelaide-Merlande. The project was validated in May 2007 by the Scientific Committee, the Steering Committee and the Regional Assembly.
In June 2007, a project management competition for the construction of the memorial was launched and in January 2008 the Guadeloupean Architecture Workshop BMC (Berthelot / Mocka Celestine) was nominated among 27 candidates.
On May 27, 2008, in memory of the decree of abolition of slavery of April 27, 1848, the first stone is symbolically put at the site of the former sugar factory Darboussier where forced labor still exists in the nineteenth century. Initially, the memorial was to be inaugurated in May 2013, but the construction is delayed and the work ends in 2015.
On the occasion of the national commemoration of the abolition of slavery, the President of the Republic François Hollande inaugurates the Memorial on May 10, 2015, in the presence of the Heads of State of Haiti (Michel Martelly), Senegal ( Macky Sall), Mali (Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta) and Benin (Thomas Boni Yayi).
The ACTe Memorial was 2nd in the Seatrade Cruise Awards in the category "Best Destination of the Year 2015", Hamburg (Germany) - September 9, 2015.
The visitor of the memorial discovers through 6 archipelagos comprising 39 islands, slavery from antiquity to the present day.
The ACTe Memorial is not only a memorial but also a museum, a center for live arts and congresses. It is "a didactic tool encouraging the knowledge of this long forgotten past. "
It is intended as a "center of interpretation, expression and research reflecting the slave trade". The ACTe Memorial is defined as a "place of recollection, information, an educational place to learn a history common to humanity" and presents itself as a signal, "a cultural lighthouse".
It is the most ambitious place of memory ever dedicated to slavery. According to Pastor Jesse Jackson, visiting the site on July 19 and 22, 2015, it is "the most complete and most successful in the world" museums devoted to this theme.
The center was designed by Guadeloupe architects Jean-Michel Mocka-Célestine, Pascal Berthelot (BMC), Mikaël Marton and Fabien Doré (Atelier Doré / Marton). More than 300 Guadeloupe workers participated in the construction of the building.
The buildings total an area of 7,800 m2 under a footprint of 1.2 ha.
They shelter 3 poles: the first is that of knowledge with a permanent exhibition, the second is that of exchange and diffusion, the third is that of meditation with a panoramic garden on 2.2 ha named "Morne Mémoire Suspended connected to the memorial by a monumental bridge 11.5 meters high and 275 meters long.
This building has a mineral facade (like that of the MuCEM of Marseille) with a silver steel interlacing covering a black granite set with quartz chips.
The architecture of the building is based on the concept of silver roots on a black box: The silver roots that surmount the building represent the millions of missing souls clinging to a black box.
These roots refer to those of the accursed fig tree, which thrives on enclosing ruins, thus protecting them from annihilation. These roots have indeed become "a mesh that protects a case but can project into the future," says Pascal Berthelot.
These roots thus invoke the quest for origins and thus suggest a momentum, a growth, a movement to radiate on the world. By protecting the black box, they are the guarantor of memory. The black box houses the permanent exhibition and thus represents the base containing the richness that constitutes the knowledge of the past and on which the collective memory is built in part.
The black quartz facade of this box is a tribute to the victims of the slave trade and slavery, the quartz constellation representing the millions of missing souls."