Forced from home, and all its pleasures, Afric coast I left forlorn; To increase a stranger's treasures, O the raging billows borne. Men from England bought and sold me, Paid my price in paltry gold; But, though theirs they have enroll'd me, Minds are never to be sold. (William Cowper- British poet) There are concert halls, street names and statues to commemorate the men who exploited slavery. But there is precious little to remember the thousands of victims of the slave trade. The demands for some sort of suitable memorial to the slaves are growing. But what would it look like? Inside Out has decided to kick off the long overdue public debate to recognise the awful plight of the thousands who were forcibily taken to the Americas against their will. It is important to remember and never repeat the errors from the past just because everything thet we forget can be resuscitated in other circumstances. How can we preserve the memory without preserving the feelings, the hard feelings, the suffering and most of all the sories and the memory of those who lived the terror? A memorial is an object which serves as a focus for memory of something, usually a person (who has died) or an event. The memorial isn’t a comfortable architectural object, it isn’ without start and ending. It always tells a story, it always make you live at a certan degree the burden felt in tose times. It has to make you suffer a little in order for you to understand what is it all about and to remain in the memory. The idea of this memorial for the slaves is that the architecture follows the „natural” steps that the process had. The three most important phases from this point of view are : the brutality of braking the connectios with their mother country, the enslavement- suffering, the darkness of the future and the eliberation. Extending these ideas, the architectural object has three major volums. The first one- the one that shelters the entrance is a concrete tube, covered on the outside with cor-ten plates. On the inside, the walls are covered with mirrors. The tube reduces its height and length in order to cursh you. The height is very low- at the end of the tube i tis 190 centimeters. And like the „soon-to-be” slaves, the visitors cand see the light at the end of the tube, but when they get there, they fiind themselves in a giant cage. The paradox from this point of view is that the visitors cand see the end of the journey, the freedom and th exit- dressed in glass, but the only way to get there is underground. Taking the helical stair from the cage volume, the visitors will descend into a volume covered with earth. This volume has no windows, no source of natural light, so that the closing of the space to make people unconfortable and willing to get free. Taking another helical stair, this time up, we arrive in the last volume,the glass one. This represents the freedom. It is filled with light and has a close connection with the nature. This is the road to freedom.