Artist Kwame Akoto-Bamfo created several sculptures in a lake to remember black ancestors who drowned during the transatlantic slave trade.

The sculptures feature hundreds of slave head sculptures that appear to be drowning in a water body while other heads lie bodiless on dry ground.

Akoto-Bamfo placed the sculptures in Ada Foah, which was a major slave market in the 19th century when the region was under British rule. He said he borrowed the technique from the ancient Akan tradition of creating portraits of the dead.

"What I hope to do is to capture an experience and let this art trigger a dialogue about who we are as an African people, who we were before and then where we are going", he said speaking to Africa News.

The sculptures started under the Ancestor Project, which seeks to use art and performance to empower, educated, and promote youth interest in African heritage through a group of artists, architects, designers, performers, and volunteers.

In the past, Akoto-Bamfo would use pictures from the past to portray specific expressions and traits in his sculptures; but that has since changed. He prefers to use random models so as to sculpt faces from all over Africa because people from all over the continent were enslaved.

Today he is working on several new pieces for museums in Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama in the United States. One of his pieces already stands in the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama.

Akoto-Bamfo believes the best way to remember the ancestors is to respect their descendants.