Four new monuments to history have landed in Philly. You just need your phone to see them.

If a piece of art and history doesn’t physically exist, can it still matter?

The developers and artists behind the Kinfolk app wholeheartedly say yes.

Kinfolk describes itself as an “archive on a mission.” It functions as an augmented reality app, which displays virtual monuments in physical spaces. A user who looks through a phone’s camera with the app open can see unique monuments to Black, brown, Indigenous and LGBTQ historical figures and places, no matter where the user is located.

And now as part of its national tour, Kinfolk was launched in Philadelphia on Oct. 28, with four new monuments honoring some of the city’s neighborhoods and their influential residents: Chinatown, Norris Square, West Philly, and Yorktown. The neighborhoods and corresponding artists were chosen after meetings between Kinfolk, its Philly steering committee, and community members.

“[This is] building an archive for the future, fighting issues of erasure [and] creating opportunities for education and for awareness,” said Marángeli Mejía-Rabell, a Philadelphia arts and culture producer and organizer who served as Kinfolk’s anchor partner for the project.

Mejía-Rabell and artists behind the monuments explained that although these pieces don’t have the same physical presence that traditional monuments do, they make up for it by being more accessible for creators and viewers, as well as providing more context and information.

“It’s building these connections to really open up spaces for more meaningful dialogue and learning,” she said.

While viewing the virtual monuments, users can listen to or read narrated histories, explore related photos and artifacts, and follow links to more reading about the monument subjects.

Here’s how you can view the Kinfolk monuments:

As Colette Fu grew up in New Jersey in the 1970s, she did not feel proud to be Chinese. Her parents immigrated to the United States before she was born, and outside of the occasional family gathering, she felt alone.

But things started to change once her family visited New York City’s Chinatown. “It was [a] feeling like other people looked like us. That was the only place,” she said.

After she graduated from college, Fu spent several years living and teaching English in Southwest China’s Yunnan province, where her mother was from. The experience and her deepened cultural connection inspired her to pursue her current career as a photographer and artist, now specializing in engineering immense, intricate, unique pop-up books.

Fu is based in Philadelphia, and has lived in the city’s Chinatown, too. When she was approached to design a Kinfolk monument, too many people came to mind for her to just pick one to honor. But a common spirit of the community stuck out to her.

“The main, overreaching theme, word, I was thinking in my head [was]: resilience,” Fu said, explaining how the neighborhood’s fight against the 76ers proposal to build a new arena adjacent to Chinatown is a continuation of the area’s fight to exist since it was built in 1871.

» READ MORE: Major Chinatown business and community group announces its opposition to planned Sixers arena

“Chinatown resisted against the Vine Street Expressway, the Convention Center, and the casinos, and a baseball stadium,” she said. “This is just one of the many things that Chinatown has fought in history.”

Her monument is aptly titled No Arena Movement, featuring light lanterns that float upward and a spiraling red Chinese dragon. Fu sought to build something whimsical and beautiful, but grounded in a strong message. Within the monument’s contextual information, she writes: “The neighborhood is a safe space where children play, adults grocery shop, people commune and break bread ... all of this is at threat of being displaced.”

The first African American NASA astronauts did not journey into space until the 1980s, but Black people made their impact on adventures beyond Earth’s atmosphere long before then.

One of those pioneers was the Rev. Leon H. Sullivan, a Baptist church leader and entrepreneur from North Philly. Sullivan fought for social and economic justice for Black people around the world. Some of Sullivan’s work in North Philly still stands today, including Progress Plaza, America’s first Black-owned shopping center, as well as Zion Gardens, an affordable housing community.

» READ MORE: A city and church are celebrating the late Rev. Leon H. Sullivan, the ‘Lion of Zion,’ for his 100th birthday

Rasheedah Phillips, a North Philly-based artist and lawyer who operates the Black Quantum Futurism artistic and cultural collaborative with her partner, Camae Ayewa, wanted to honor Sullivan particularly for a cause he is less well known for.

In 1968, Sullivan established Progress Aerospace Enterprises, one of the world’s first Black-owned aerospace companies, in North Philly. The company built parts for NASA’s larger projects. “When the first landing on the moon came, I wanted something there that a Black man had made,” he once said.

“It’s just extremely important that we remember these legacies and we remember this work” Phillips said.

Black Quantum Futurism’s tribute to Sullivan and his work was adapted from a physical installation that Phillips and Ayewa built in 2018, called Black Space Agency. Their monument for Kinfolk is titled Black Hole SpaceTime Machine, and is the most interactive of the four Philly monuments. Users who “place” the spaceship-shaped monument in front of them then need to walk “inside” of it to view the references to Sullivan and his work.

Phillips’ work is closely tied to Afrofuturism, an artistic genre and concept that looks beyond the constraints of the present to envision Black people thriving in the future. Kinfolk’s monuments to figures and places that are often left out of conventional monument designs work toward a similar goal, and Phillips is grateful for it.

“It’s extremely important and beautiful to give artists an opportunity to uplift the people and things that are important to their communities, and to carry forward those legacies in different ways [that] can be taken around the world and accessed no matter what time zone ... or location you’re in,” she said.

“I think it’s just a really important service to the community.”