Sonya Dyer’s ‘Hybrida Compositus’ (2024) is the culmination of a one-year artist’s residency with The Box in Plymouth (2023–4), which took place in the context of 20/20, the UAL Decolonising Arts Institute’s national commissioning and network project designed to catalyse the careers of artists of colour and change in collections. Speaking at her studio in London’s Somerset House, Dyer sat down with artist, writer, curator and former advisor to the representation and decolonisation process at The Box, Ashish Ghadiali, in September 2024 to discuss the new work and the creative intentions that have informed it.
Ashish Ghadiali: You’re thinking about climate change, about shifting ecosystems, species migration, the fragility of the marine environment. Now your profoundly considered response to these themes is to create a sculpture of this alien being that is really a figment of your imagination and to put it in a case so that it looks like something from the past. Why?
Sonya Dyer: When I first visited The Box, I was given this whirlwind tour of every department and was drawn to the natural history collections, not only because of what was on display, but because of the way they’re displayed: this methodology of putting specimens in glass cases or tanks, and then adding formaldehyde. The curator does an amazing job, bearing in mind the number of specimens they have, but some of the specimens had been discoloured by the formaldehyde. I was struck by the things that were a bit off!
And then, as I got further into the research, I learned they had a collection of specimens of sea creatures that were either extinct or near extinction. I was thinking a lot about what a museum does, and what a permanent collection does (because this is work for a permanent collection). It’s the idea that it keeps things for posterity. It keeps things in one space and holds them for as long as the institution exists. I began to think about this idea of permanence and what that means in a landscape that’s ever-changing.
That led me to this idea of time travel. In a way, keeping something permanently in a building is also an invitation to time-travel. We get to visit these objects and we’re transported to the past. That intrigued me. What can an object do within that context? And what would it be to create an object that is an anachronism but that’s also something completely new? That led to me wanting to bring these forms together into something that doesn’t exist, cannot exist, but bringing it into existence as an art object.
AG: Can you tell me more about the object itself? What’s it made from?
SD: Essentially it’s resin, moulded with clay. And then there are these effects with a more rubberised material to create spikes. Parts of it will be very smooth, and other parts will be spiky. The antenna will be made out of a wire, which will then be covered in the resin to give it a kind of uniformity with the rest of the body. And then we’ll put it in water. The water will play the role of formaldehyde.
AG: Who are you working with? Who’s fabricating the sculpture?
SD: Art and Assembly. [1] They’re really great.
AG: Is the work then a critique of historical systems? You’ve created an object that fucks with all the visual and epistemological signs of the museum’s historicising tendency. Is that right?
SD: Exactly. For me, it’s important not to be reliable. I have a friend who’s from a Yoruba background, and he was saying that there are certain objects in museums from his culture that, when they were stolen by the British, for example, to put in the British Museum or to be written about in some book, the elders would lie about the object because they were sacred objects or they were objects from secret societies or just things that people don’t need to know about unless it is directly their business. The importance of being unreliable within that context has always really stuck with me. It’s a clever way of dealing with the calamity of empire. They steal the object, but they lose the meaning.
I’ve always been intrigued by that kind of trickster sensibility. I grew up with the Anansi stories, for example. Anansi is an Akan trickster spider god who was brought over from Ghana, from what is now Ghana, to Jamaica by enslaved people. (We’re mainly Akan, so by our ancestors). Anansi is a very ambivalent god. Sometimes he helps humans, sometimes he doesn’t, and he doesn’t really care. He’s always been the god that most intrigued me because of his ambivalence about us.
AG: Is the work, then, a way of mocking the practice of museum heritage?
SD: I don’t think I’m trying to mock, but I am questioning these acts of preservation. The past is inevitably misremembered. The way this broader culture has named flora and fauna that exists all over the world is a mythology. Victoria Falls – what does it have to do with Queen Victoria? Pythagoras didn’t invent Pythagoras’s theorem. There is a concerted effort in mathematics to conceal the influence of people from Islamic cultures.
What’s being unravelled is the mythology. I am unmasking what the museum does, drawing attention to the guesswork that has historically played a role in how objects are categorised and also how much speculation is involved in acts of seeing. How much we project onto what we see, what we perceive, what we look at.
And that can be a very creative and generative act. But it can also leave space for us to be wrong about things. I like the idea of being wrong, and of an object being wrong, and of it not quite looking right, of not quite fitting, as a way of drawing attention to this idea that much of what we adore is actually not correct.
I find ‘Nomad Century’ by Gaia Vince such a fascinating book, [2] and what’s interesting to me is that the subject matter is disaster, but actually it’s a solutions-based response to disaster. I’m always thinking about the idea of post-scarcity and, in particular, in relation to ‘Star Trek’, and the future that is represented by ‘Star Trek’, which arises out of tremendous disasters happening right about now within the timeline of its fictional universe.
AG: Forgive me, I’m not a Trekkie! Was the 2020s where ‘Star Trek’ projects a lot of disaster?
SD: World War Three happens around 2026 over concerns about genetic manipulation and human genome experiments – there are eco-terrorists. Essentially, World War Three happens soon! Through that disaster, the remaining humans eventually create a society where everyone has what they need. There’s no scarcity, nobody’s starving, everyone has a home, everyone can fulfil their potential. You run a restaurant because you like cooking, you don’t have to make money from it, because there is no money.
There’s this interview with Yanis Varoufakis – I use it in teaching quite a bit for post-grads – as part of this podcast called ‘Bad Faith’, where he talks about how he watches an episode of ‘Star Trek’ every day as part of his practice. [3] He talks about this one episode – I think it’s in ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ with Jean-Luc Picard – where they find this time capsule that has these humans from our time, and one of the humans was a banker. [4] So they reanimate them hundreds of years in the future, and this banker cannot grasp this idea that there’s no money, that his work means nothing because bankers, you know their livelihoods are based on scarcity, right?
It completely exposes his brain, like, ‘What do you mean? I need to call my broker!’, and he’s like, ‘There are no brokers, there’s no money’. Who are you without that? Who are you without that kind of power? I guess the kind of underlying concept for me is – it sounds very grand, but I’m going to say it anyway – what small contribution can I make to help us get to post-scarcity? What ideas can I help to disseminate, or imagine, or conceive of, that might be a useful tool in helping us get to this place?
AG: So, what is it about this object you’ve created that contributes to post-scarcity?
SD: What is a hybrid? It’s a combination of elements. It’s a combination of living beings that, for whatever circumstances, have come together to create a whole. I was thinking the other day that every generation of my family, that I’m aware of, has emigrated. My grandparents came here when my mother was a child. My grandfather’s father emigrated to Jamaica from India. His mother’s people emigrated from elsewhere in Asia. My grandmother’s ancestors would have been people-trafficked and kidnapped from the African continent. All of those horrific things had to happen in order for me to exist. That is a process of hybridisation. The question for me is: what can we make from disaster? What can we build from change?
[1] Art and Assembly is a fabrication studio in London.
[2] Gaia Vince, ‘Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval’, Allen Lane, London, 2022.
[3] Briahna Joy Gray, ‘Star Trek vs. The Matrix – What’s Our Future? w/ Yanis Varoufakis’, in ‘Bad Faith’, podcast, 28 October 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jks2UFhvQqc&ab_channel=BadFaith.
[4] ‘The Neutral Zone’, ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ (S1 E26).
