Long before it became the first slavery memorial in the French West Indies, the Darboussier Sugar Factory powered France’s Caribbean empire. In the 19th century, the 77,000-square-foot factory, located in Pointe-à-Pitre, the largest city on the butterfly-shaped island of Guadeloupe, exported goods produced by slaves to mainland France. Today, strings of quartz, meant to represent the lost souls of the slave trade, crawl up the factory’s black-box-like exterior, embodying what has become the memorial’s unofficial motto: Memory Inspires the Future.