Kinfolk spotlights underrepresented historical figures and events through an unexpected medium: augmented reality monuments.

Point your iPhone camera at your living room floor or an empty sidewalk to place a virtual monument of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer or of Seneca Village, the thriving Black community displaced to make way for Central Park.

We spoke with Kinfolk’s executive director, Idris Brewster, and head of product, Angela Fan, about the research, care, and intention behind the app’s standout features—and why AR monuments felt like the right way to reimagine who gets to take up space in the world.

Each of the app’s AR monuments is built in collaboration with artists, historians, and the communities represented. Kinfolk worked with the Gabrielino-Tongva tribe of California to honor their late leader Beatrice Alva with an AR monument.

“Design decisions went through the elders of the tribe, who voted and deliberated on whether to add certain plants or instruments and how they wanted to depict Beatrice Alva,” Brewster says. “Historical accuracy was everything.”

After you place a virtual monument in your space, tap it to view archival images and historical documents sourced from institutional archives. In letters by Ida B. Wells, for example, she shares her intention behind creating Chicago’s Negro Fellowship League, a social service center.

“An ethos of Kinfolk is: How can we connect people to the source?” Brewster says. “Reading a summary of a letter is one thing, but seeing an image of it and the way it was written is a different experience.”

Over 30 locations around the country have their own exclusive AR exhibitions. At Brooklyn Bridge Park’s “Dreaming with the Archives,” local artists created virtual works rooted in the African diaspora.

“Monuments are a symbol of our collective memory and the values that we as a nation hold,” Brewster says. “We’d love for people to go out and find the history around them.”