Sonia Barrett

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel: Sonia, we met at Transart Institute in 2009. That was actually my first year with the program. I think that you enrolled in my walking seminar the year after. I am glad that we have remained in touch and that I continue to see your ideas take shape.

Something that initially resonated with me in relationship to your creative practice was your connection to sociology. I am a firm believer that it is great for people embarking on an art path to study other disciplines/fields. In my case, I am a theologian. How has it been for you to bring these two fields, art and sociology, in conversation?

Sonia Barrett: Sociology is not something I have formally studied but Durkheim, Comte and Marx were thinkers I came across at university. I can see why you connect me to sociology as I take the approach that I have a focus on understanding the broad patterns and conditions that are present in society. I focus on social issues. I don't really believe in universal laws in the humanities. But I feel that Furniture is a kind of Social Static in Europe,  a prevailing social convention across time that fixes a kind of  “thingification “ (Cesaire) of people, plants and animals at the heart of spaces of multigenerational financial wealth.

NDEREOM: We have common roots in the Caribbean: you in Jamaica, and I in the Dominican Republic. You have lived most of your life in Europe. I, in contrast, have remained in the American hemisphere. Any thoughts about your upbringing in Europe and the pace at which you work, as well as about the subjects that you are interested in approaching artistically?

SB: I guess it is now true that I have lived most of my life in Europe, but it wasn't always the case. My most formative years were in Hong Kong for my first formal schooling, and in Zimbabwe I had home schooling. When I came to Europe, it was to finish my education in England and Scotland. Time in Zimbabwe blunted my senses for Europe. The soil was ochre, the sky purple, and the moon a giant sphere, a close neighbour, not a distant relative. In Hong Kong, my mother and I were strange and continuously touched in the market. Europeans and Africans were the exception; Asians were the norm. My pace of working is fast in Europe. Working in Jamaica, I have tried a couple of times, which is much heavier. Europe has shaped the subjects I approach because I am often confronted with urgent issues here and work is my meditated response. In Italy, it was the first time I was able to share stepping away from this response with "Sky," I was interested in the conversation I saw across the Caribbean and Africa of the not-enoughness of us and our hair and wanted to consider us and our hair as celestial as a way to claim space. Pushing this further, I made work out of Willow in a housing estate (social housing space) with a group of women. This second work is a tool to view the connection between one womb and another, enabling us to step back or forward in time along womb lines.

NDEREOM: In my opinion there are no other places like the Caribbean. Its complexity is mind-blowing to most US-Americans and Europeans, I think. You deal with the subject of race in your art, and you concomitantly address issues of class, which I am aware are totally interconnected. Why is this important for you? I am asking because in many parts of the Caribbean class seems to take center stage, especially when it comes to race. There is so much about this that, I feel, is left unexamined in the USA.

SB: Class is so important, and this intersects with race and colourism. Everywhere, art is used to show black people as acceptable, or even overdelivering on Eurocentric norms (exceptional) will evade class. Class sits hyper present for me in those works, though, where the unprivileged are not pictured.  In a sense as the people that hold everything up we will always be working class. But that term has always seemed suspect to me we as the middle classes are also working to keep class divides in place we all work to make it what it is. Stopping participation is very political. I loved your work The Passerby Museum, so much because it just rips though the conventions that we all subscribe to of what gets to be kept as special. Working with furniture is to rip though who gets to sit who makes space to facilitate sitting. Class action for a “seat at the table” is a bit pointless when having a table is part of the problem. Making art is a class privilege and to make and keep it without all of those privileges is almost impossible.

NDEREOM: I recently heard someone say, and I wish I could remember who, that the whole middle class thing is a damaging myth; it separates many in the middle from building solidarity with the oppressed. I was never into the middle class trappings, which I could not afford, and which I also found either bland or depressing. So much of middle-classness is about keeping up with the González and, as I grow older, I don’t give a s*it what others think of me. It is liberating. Back to you. You got to work in Philadelphia with Jennifer McGregor. Can you talk about this experience, which I understand was crucial to what you have been doing years after?

SB: I was selected to participate in Art in the Park and decided to work with Bebashi. This vital organisation dedicates itself to black and brown individuals who are HIV-positive or living with AIDS. I spent days sketching the clients and service providers next to the river. Sketching was a tool to come into dialogue outside. The conversation informed the work. The sketches became the basis for painting interludes on wax print tablecloths common among elders of a certain age in the black community. I collaged the people and images of the virus onto the tablecloth and shared the work on tables in the park. The spot I selected to work in was a cruising space, so there were so many interesting conversations around the tables. I worked with Tablecloths for several years before working with the table. The project was the first time I came to Philadelphia without the goal of selling my work and meeting people in conjunction with me outside of an art fair setting. It gave me my first gallery show and publication in an art Journal. It was so great that Jenifer let artists take the lead. I could choose which community to engage with and where to situate my work in the park. Drawing black people in the park was where I started, so it was great to get to do that in the framework of this opportunity.

NDEREOM: I recall this project, which impetus makes me ponder on the over commercialization of Black portraiture by the Art Industry. In your case, the work was so horizontal and it reached the people you were working with, rather than the mostly white collectors who can purchase the fancy paintings of Black sitters which are produced and marketed today. I wish you would retake that work. There is something about it that is needed now. One person who has similar work in communities is Scherezade García, a painter who can trace her lineage back to the masters in the Dominican Republic, those who have been working on Black portraiture before this became a trend in the US: Danilo de los Santos, Ada Balcácer, and Jorge Severino, among many others. Years ago, Scherezade taught a workshop with The Border of Lights, where she gathered Haitian, Dominican, Haitian-Dominican and Dominican Haitian young women and invited them to work on self-portraits. It is crucial to shed light on the many histories of art-making because some tend to overshadow others, especially since the Art Industry machinery is constantly looking for the “new” and shiny to keep itself chewing and spewing new objects to sell for a good buck, and many of the young curators are not bothering with researching who has done what and when.

BTW, I can tell my age by my use of tablecloths. I still have them, and I love using them! You recently met Gina Athena Ulysse at the Dakar Biennial. Tell me about this encounter of Caribbean presences? I wish I would have been there with both of you.

SB: Thanks for introducing us. We were both so very busy, but Gina is a force; she delivered a performance reading at the Centre for African Civilizations that was a powerful amalgam of many key black texts.  I would love to spend more time. Her work on the front of the Biennale building was wonderful rich and thoughtful.

NDEREOM: You have been to Africa before at Syowia Kyambi's residency. Syowia is another one of the amazing artists who I have gotten to mentor through Transart Institute. I have never been to Africa. How have these visits to this continent shaped your ideas?  So much of who many of us are in the Caribbean is linked to that part of the planet.

SB: Yes, Syowia is a very generous soul. Her work resonates with me especially her work using clothes. I lived in Zimbabwe and travelled independently to Morrocco, Tunisia, and the Gambia while at University before going to Syowia’s residency. I met Syowia for the first time in Uganda. We both mentored art students there one summer, sharing our practices and advice. Some of those students have achieved quite a lot regarding visibility. I recommended her to Transart and also your class in particular. I take every opportunity to visit the African continent it has made me understand the parts of my practice that were evident to others but a mystery to me. It has taught me that there is such a thing as knowing before knowing. As an artist, I have learnt that I'm accomplished enough to act on what I see before I know. Speaking with other artists in Africa has told me so much about my work, and it has given me confidence that I am channelling something real. Bodily research reveals what book knowing sometimes later confirms. Enactment (making the work) extends the knowing into something beyond a solution, something more like a re-realming. I like that practical new ways of working and being can often emerge. This is why I feel art needs text!

NDEREOM: Are you in Germany or the UK these days? You may remember my dear friend Alanna Lockward who did so much to shed light on the Black presence in Germany and in Europe in general. This is not a question and I am pondering about being and belonging as a Caribbean person in such a context. As I mentioned before, I have always lived in the Americas.

SB: Alanna’s practice is seminal, and the work Alanna is undertaking to archive of it impressive. I live in the UK and have done for the last 5 years. I have work stored in Germany and the UK because of Brexit. In the UK, I show what I could get out before Brexit, and in Europe, I show what I have in Germany. I live in hope that one day, I will have everything in one place. Alanna was a force in Germany, just like May Ayim.  Natasha Kelly is doing a lot of this work, but there are always many ways to do this work, some more, some less recognized, and we need all of these ways. You should come to Europe. I would love to see how it affects your practice. That said, I love how so much of your practice is rooted in a concern with place belonging and exclusion. Do you remember I gave you all the votives from the Autobahn churches between Bavaria and Berlin as a parting gift? I thought the Motorway church was such an interesting spot concerning your walking and spiritual practice. I visited every motorway church on the way to Berlin, gathering notional images and things for you, and was surprised to see a few have really active communities around them.

Being and belonging as a Caribbean person. To be Caribbean is to be worlded at birth. Following my father, a Jamaican man who was moved around the world in defence of the British Empire straight out of school, has added many layers to that world. England is the belly of the beast perhaps I belong there as an indigestible creating community via sculpture, creating the occasion and the space to gather.

NDEREOM: The adored Caribbean! I call it the cross-road of the world. In my opinion, it is both paradise and hell. Most days I love it, other days I do not. I talk about the excess of beauty in the in the Caribbean, as well as some of its ugly side. For example, the rise of right wing ideology and fascism in the Dominican Republic. We can talk volumes about the islands, but tell me what occupies your mind at the present moment, creatively?

SB: I want to paint again. I also feel the need to support direct political action. I want to scale up and scale down simultaneously. It is a time of change for me. I am nearing the end of two decades of single motherhood. All of my making has been in struggle with these commitments. I cannot even imagine just making work and looking after myself.

NDEREOM: Art seems so necessary and so vacuous in the midst of the collapse of our planet. I have stopped calling myself an artist. I think of myself as a creative. I can’t stomach the shallowness of what I see and the excesses in which the Art Industry is involved. I then see artisst like you, who are really speaking truths. Nowadays I am mostly a hermit (but not really), so please let me know when you are back in New York City. Thank you for this dialogue. I can picture you laughing and thinking deeply as you engage these questions.

SB: I no longer drink coffee, but the coffee place we went to is still in my memory, a busy space with canary yellow and green and smoky, dark, rich coffee. Your directions used a church as an orientation; I remember thinking how apt that was. Your practice is so tender, and I would always take any opportunity to spend time with you in New York. I recently had the chance to stay with Mary Ting, who also profoundly impacted my practice. I loved your collaboration with her at the market.

I have a Radical Black Feminist World-building practice. I started my work in the drawing rooms of multigenerational colonial wealth. Some people think I am just smashing them up. Actually, I am using them as laboratories to work out ways to leave service and objectification.

NDEREOM: Tea will be! This interview is airing after our meeting in London. I am so glad that we got to connect in the UK. I will always remember your laughter when I texted you in panic. “I am a country mouse from New York City.” That say, Soho Square was packed!

Images courtesy of Sonia Barrett

Sonia Barrett’s links: Website / Instagram / British Art Studies

Sonia Barrett is a visual artist who seeks to disrupt the comfortable spaces of neoliberal Capitalism. She starts with the domestic lived spaces of people with intergenerational wealth involved in Triangular trade. She uses a variety of materials to create discomfort in those spaces and with the tools that enabled them.

She works to institute and reclaim space though large sculptures for envisioning and enacting a new world in partnership with others.