Sculpting More Community

Feature image: Sculpting More Community – Installation Detail. Image courtesy alpha nova & galerie futura. Berlin JAN 2024

Sonia E. Barrett in conversation with Adeline Gregoire

Sonia E Barrett (B. 1975) is a multidisciplinary artist of Jamaican-German heritage, currently based in London, UK. Working across photography, digital and sculptural installations, Barrett describes her practice over the past decade as always “dealing with what holds us together, what keeps us apart.”

Dismantled, broken, draped. Wood, fabric, rope.

Sonia E Barrett performs composites of plants, animals, elements and people to create interventions that presence their objectification and commodification. She also thinks about how to change perceptions of phenomena in “nature” that are a given. The work seeks to create new questions where there was a kind of certainty. A certainty born from the hegemony of normative western European values.

As I revisit Sonia Barrett’s sculptures, I enjoy the persistent disruption of the familiar – giving way and opening up space for the wildly unrecognizable.

It’s the visual impact of the work, as well as its arresting presence that makes you want to stay and linger.  A coexistence of unrelated, syncretic elements made whole. There’s a strangeness, a palpable mal a l’aise, discomfort yet pleasant intrigue standing in the midst of the unexpected. 

Unexpected. But why were we expecting anything in the first place?
Is “truth” this immutable thing?  This is not what you think this is. 
And you do not know. 

Details of shredded maps. Image courtesy alpha nova & galerie futura

Sonia takes us to a place of undoing, unknowing, disrupting – interrogating. It is within this space of alternate, softened parameters (and often the absence thereof) that a reworking, re-creation, re-aligning occurs. Multiple compatible existences are made manifest.

Over the last few years, Barrett has been bringing people together to make, and to create – in ways that dismantle the master’s tools. “I have also been working on the idea of the celestial as a white European space.  I have been working with disrupting the idea of land as surface that can be divided” she adds.

I met Sonia E. Barrett in early 2023. She’d heard about my work at HOT SUN CCA, randomly at a Tate event in the UK a few days earlier. I remember thinking what an amazing conversation we had. Magical even. Fast Forward to 2024, we finally got around to talking about her latest project: Sculpting More Community (12.11.2023 – 21.01.2024, Alpha Nova, Galerie Futura Berlin, GERMANY). Sculpting More Community is a collaborative intervention, placing women’s work, traditional gestures and postures of women at the center. 

Detail of Artist Sonia E. Barrett braiding the map during workshop session. Image courtesy alpha nova & galerie futura

In nature and substance – this site specific, expansive installation created with paper maps –  interrogates and addresses the colonial division of the world, revealing identity, the idea of power and geographies as constructs:  undoing, pulling apart – that which has been done. 

Sculpting More Community was an iteration of The Map-lective in Berlin.  A group of women gathered for three days to braid maps of Germany and places experienced in German colonization across multiple time periods.  

“We think, feel, chat and share new possible meanings of the map whilst braiding. We created a new map in Berlin, one that cannot be pinned to a wall or put on a table and drawn on as happened at the famous Conference in Berlin 1884/5.”

Reference: The Berlin Conference to divide Africa, 1884/1885. Source: Wikipedia

Interview

Adeline Gregoire: Sonia, I see it’s been a busy year for you. This latest project: Sculpting More Community has really caught my attention. As I read the Gallery’s notes about this exhibition, there’s a song by Tiken Jah Fakoly that just popped up in my head, it’s called  “Plus rien ne m’etonne” (I’m not even surprised anymore…) One of the lines of the chorus is “Ils ont partagé le monde, plus rien ne m’etonne….” (They divided the world, and I’m no longer surprised by it…)

This piece directly addresses the legacies of the colonial machine and especially the imperialistic agenda of “Divide and Rule” which you examine in this new installation work. 

Thanks for your invitation to talk about it.

AG: What is the work you have always felt driven to make? 

SEB: Making work has always been challenging. There has always been a lack of space, tools, resources, time. Everything I have made has required drive. It would be interesting to be able to make, in a casual way. I have always been driven to make work in conversation with members of the black community, now that my practice has become more participatory and group centered I have become more open to different groupings of people, but still really enjoy making with an initiating group of black women.

Selected maps used in the Sculpting More Community project. Image courtesy alpha nova & galerie futura

AG: Can you share a bit about the motivation behind this particular project: Sculpting More Community? 

SEB: The idea grew out of me as an individual artist looking at the intellectual expanse of a Western understanding of Geography and wondering how to grapple with it. The collaborators answered an open call. I have been shown by Alpha Nova about 9 years before in Bayreuth, Germany and we resolved to work together on a solo show…Then, I bumped into Katharina again when she selected a collective. I was one of the artists in What the Hell she doin’? (Kunstmuseum Wolfsberg, 10.9.2022 to 8.1.2023) to show at “Empowerment Art and Feminisms”, it has only recently borne fruit.

AG:    Sculpting More Community pushes us to interrogate colonial divisions of the world.  The work is in direct conversation with the current global climate of unrest, oppression, violence and again – the recurring question of borders.  Why is this important to you? 

SEB: I really hope that this work interrogates colonial divisions on a meta level.  Instead of just challenging the idea of borders as places where nation states end on the map and on the land. I want to challenge the understanding that the surface of the “territory” is the only and most important space. The work challenges that this space is utterly known and knowable. There is also a challenge to the idea that these areas can be thought of as separate and distinct at all. 

On this idea of separateness, in his poem The Second Coming (1919), W.B. Yeats writes:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world (…)”

Perhaps to respond to Yeats, when the edges no longer hold, maybe only then is real order recognised.  In my practice, I’m interested in what happens next. What happens when the edges of things do fall apart? For instance, the edges of nomenclature, race, genus, nationality? I’m thinking here of those persons and things (plants, trees, objects) whose identities have actually already been smashed together as a kind of fodder for capitalism…With my work I act on this premise: what if, rather than “falling apart” we imagine that things grow together when the centre cannot hold.

In my person I am multi-ethnic, but to be of mixed heritage and Caribbean is like saying I am mixed mixed. My brother was born in Hong Kong,  I could have been born in Cyprus…nationality is therefore something I have to hold lightly.

Sculpting More Community – Installation Detail. Image courtesy alpha nova & galerie futura

AG: The   basis of this work employs actual physical maps of the world, which are undone in a literal way, then collectively revisited. So what’s in a map?

“The map is a top drawer colonial tool. The shredder is a tool that is used to protect you from sharing documents that enable identity theft.  The map was an enabler for identity theft, effective like no other. “

SEB:  So for this project, we all shredded and braided, dread together.  The map is a top drawer colonial tool. The shredder is a tool that is used to protect you from sharing documents that enable identity theft.  The map was an enabler for identity theft effective like no other. Africa was constituted and divided using a map.  It was critical that this project took place in Berlin as this is the city where the colonial powers met with their pens to draw on the map and divide up Africa (1884/1885). Our map (however) is active decolonisation because it integrates maps of Europe with maps of Africa making them indivisible and it creates a map that cannot be meaningfully drawn on. This map is the way we need to understand our world in order to undo colonial, spatial and territorial sensibilities. It goes beyond asking for open borders,  but  more working to undermine a thinking that can assume them.  This is about stepping away from the obsession with surfaces and separating these surfaces and fixity.

Sculpting More Community – Installation Detail. Image courtesy alpha nova & galerie futura

The map is challenged in four key ways.

Firstly, the tendency to privilege fixity in things that are static in the environment, such as roads, mountains, and borders. This is a problem, as everything that is most valuable about the space is in movement: air, water, nutrients, and gasses present naturally in the environment. These become almost invisible on the map; what is not seen cannot be attended to. The new map takes the old and makes it tell of the movement of some of the most important elements that are “off the Eurocentric map”.
Secondly, the tendency to suggest total knowledge about space. The/ A map (as we’ve come to understand it) is total, there are no obvious gaps. This is problematic because it creates a sense that we are in control and all-knowing about the space giving us a god-complex. This new map shows more holes with its swirling organic movement than “coverage.”

Thirdly, the map privileges the surface. Privileging surfaces of landscapes and ignoring all that goes on above and below the surface. This is problematic as most of the environment is above or below the surface – which is but a sliver of space. This map takes the singular flat map and creates a multitude of surfaces that dip and rise above and below a single plane.

Fourthly, it challenges the idea of “here and there”, that the map shows us that square B2 is distinct and separate from square H4, this is problematic as it suggests human rights abuses can take place here and over there we can enjoy human rights. Or that we can pollute over there but enjoy a clean environment over here.

The new map un-grids the separate spaces and combines them again and again, naming and un-separating.

Sculpting More Community – Participants at workshop with Artist Sonia Barrett
Image courtesy alpha nova & galerie futura

AG:       I’d like us to chat about this entire process (call for volunteers) and your decision to place women-womxn, feminine, specifically afro-indigenous feminine gestures (hair braiding, weaving) at the centre of this rebuilding, and manifesting new maps? 

SEB: I feel we have practices that are more intelligent that we give ourselves credit for. Braiding and dreading for instance, are acts of care and I thought it would be powerful to employ it with the maps. As a meditative practice, it gives us the opportunity to keep our hands busy and set our minds free to think around, under and beyond the map as we were working with it. 

Sculpting More Community – Workshop participants shredding and braiding world maps with Artist Sonia Barrett.
Image courtesy alpha nova & galerie futura

It must be noted that existing maps centered single white men. A reworking as a collective of black women has a kind of logic. The answers will never be all with one person. Working collectively is more fruitful, natural and comprehensive. The Map-lective is a collective of mapmakers who are dealing with the maps linked by triangular trade, involving the shipping of plants, trees, people, ores and animals from the African continent and Caribbean to the USA and Europe. Together we create new maps that reflect the interconnectedness of these spaces and challenge the hegemony of the map as understood in a Eurocentric way.

“By braiding and dread locking the map to create an immersive aerial sculpture we use black and brown community-based practices of care-mongering to counter Eurocentric practices of war-mongering to which the map is central.”

Sonia E. Barrett

AG:    In my own curatorial practice I’ve become more interested in the rituals of care and community which we instigate and cultivate. I see care as revolutionary, a new sort of rebelliousness. This installation moves me to reflect about the way in which we exercise our agency and reclaim our power by holding, taking up space and creating space-s for each other, amidst systems and narratives which can easily make us feel powerless as human beings.  

Do you think that art making, artists and Art could enable other understandings of “personal strength” and “presence”?

SEB: Care and community are practices that often require pouring into. They are ongoing, in many ways they can be exhausting practices. Artists are not superhuman or at least I don’t feel that way. I feel that the demand to constantly tackle certain themes and issues with the power of art is almost counterproductive. I yearn for more open-ended commissions. I do believe art can rise to the occasion and enable a presence and strength that allows you to box above your weight so to speak. Holding space for each other is critically important. The person who holds space often does so at the expense of their own path. What is so sad is that we are asked to compete for a false scarcity of recognition.  The artists who shared the Turner Prize in Britain were holding space for each other in a powerful way that I think we need to see more of.  Creating publications, creating archives of other artists  (Sonia Boyce’s powerful work for example), curating shows (Lubaina Himid was so awesome at that, what would have been missed if she hadn’t stepped up?) but also working with people from non-arts backgrounds are other, equally powerful ways of holding space.

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Photography credits: Courtesy Katharina Koch, Yvonne Thein, alpha nova & galerie futura. Berlin, GERMANY. January 2024

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BIOGRAPHY

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References

“The Second Coming” W.B. Yeats (1919)  Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe (1958)

Sound on //

Video with lyrics (French) Plus rien ne m’étonne Paroles
Tiken Jah Fakoly, B. 1968 Ivory Coast. Musician; Conscious Reggae; Political commentary