Castles as Coffins

The artist Paa Joe makes coffins. But these aren’t your standard-issue pine boxes—they are red snappers, Spalding basketballs, giant shoes. In the Ghanaian tradition of abeduu adekai (roughly translated, “receptacles of proverbs”), the dead are honored via figurative,” named for the doors through which countless souls passed on their entry into forced servitude. “Nobody would be buried in a slave castle coffin,” Joe has said, but these miniatures signify death just the same, looming as reminders of the millions of lives lost to and the histories decimated by the slave trade.