Author: Cecilia Muzika-Minteer
Sonia Boyce, In the Castle of My Skin, 2020, sculpture, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK.
We are all reading the earth, trying to remember, trying to gain a better understanding of the space we sense around us, the places we experience. In Spring, 2024, in the seminar Space and Place, we have considered the sensorial foundation of place, the compounding and constant propagation of space, and the multitude of actors, systems, rates, and scales involved. “Geographies” as a term has continued to evoke this tension and entanglement; I have begun to think of geographies as the complex layering of realities produced by the ways bodies and systems read and write the earth. We might think of geographies as reading the earth though our bodies, rather than through invented systems, acknowledging that we participate in writing enmeshed layers of the planet through our actions.
Practices of writing the earth have often been agents of imperial, colonial and capitalist logics, designing the planet, and people on it, as objects to be categorized and defined by their material value within violent and imagined hierarchies. Material, intangible, emotional, and sensorial details of geographies exist through time despite the fact that systems of power often write the earth as a definitive object rather than an embodied experience. Geographies, in its plurality, helps us better understand how the systemic production of space recreates inequities by design and also gives us an opening to make a disturbance. Though humans make-up an outer layer of the earth, creating a sensorial skin that is part of the planet, not all bodies are treated the same by spatial practices and imprints of systems. The artwork of Sonia Boyce has helped me better sift through this complexity and consider the production of space and formation of place through depth of time and our senses.
Boyce’s experimental sculpture In the Castle of My Skin was first exhibited in January 2020 at Birmingham’s Eastside Projects. Through her career Boyce has continually returned to the vastness of embodied experiences which portrayals of modernism often subvert. Within this sculpture she materializes layers of geographies through both her artistic process and the scalar tension her work interrogates. She is constantly challenging designed spatial boundaries, particularly urban space, by questioning the writing of history and intentionally creating space by centering human connection. Boyce invited co-curators Anna Barham, Harold Offeh, Luc Pheles, Alberta Whittle, and a collaboration between Lindiwe Matshikiza and Flora Parrot, to help mold the sculpture through improvisational processes and space created through social bonding. This piece is the result of a multi-dimensional process and actively takes up space, growing in the crystalline formation of the mineral pyrite. The spatiality of the sculpture is also in conversation with the literary voice of George Lamming’s 1953 book In the Castle of My Skin. Lamming’s autobiographical novel follows the embodied experience of a young boy living in Barbados through the social and political changes of the 1930s. In revisiting a sensorial reading of space and place within revolutionary writing, Boyce evokes various scales and rates of spatial production and centers back on the body’s ability to sense both its own agency and the violent spatial practices that attempt to stifle and erase.
As a sculpture, In the Castle of My Skin is expansive—the crystalline form referenced on a massive scale is covered is segments of wallpapers created by Boyce over more than a decade. Five co-curated artworks, made by the six noted artists, work with a range of sensorial experiences where layers of time interlace, where space is imaged, performed, drawn, embodied, spoken, digitized, and sensed. Within Boyce’s sculpture, Whittle’s design is in conversation with Professor Christina Sharpe’s book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being and importantly seeks “to challenge conditions of racialized objection and find new methods for refusal” as noted in Eastside Project’s exhibition guide. The space engages with both the skin on our bodies and the skin of the earth of which we are part, blurring the boundary between the two through experience and performance, in a sense confronting and re-considering geographies. The space of the sculpture, the individual art pieces, the interlaced experiences of the artists through the process, the visitors, the digital spaces within the sculpture, and George Lamming’s embodied revolutionary writing are all unfolding and changing constantly.
Humans may always want to read the earth and systems will probably continue to write it as a definitive object; thus, countering geography is just as important as countering any other practice which upholds violent systems. But there are other ways to read the planet, other ways to sense and understand it that don’t require writing at all. Geographies permit us both to acknowledge the systemic production of space pressed upon our bodies and also acknowledge that geographies ultimately return to the human body through sensing and remembering.