From the Map Room to the Oval Office: Sonia E. Barrett’s Political Landscapes
Sonia E. Barrett’s practice uses material transformation and collective labour to dismantle imperial authority and connect colonial histories to contemporary geopolitics.
Sonia Barrett is a contemporary artist whose work operates at the intersection of installation, sculpture, and performance. Her practice is grounded in a sustained engagement with colonial history, imperial authority, and the lived realities of contemporary geopolitics. Working across international contexts, her projects unfold through collaboration, often involving women from diverse cultural and socio-economic backgrounds and deliberately destabilising her own centrality. This intentional decentering is both methodological and political. It reflects a broader commitment to collective processes and to rethinking how artistic authorship operates within histories shaped by domination and exclusion.
Material Transformation as Decolonial Reversal
A core pillar of Barrett’s practice is the physical reconfiguration of the tools of empire. She works directly with historically charged materials, such as maps, furniture, and architectural spaces, stripping them of their authoritarian power and reconfiguring them into unstable, participatory forms.
Particularly emblematic is her engagement with antique colonial furniture: mahogany desks and chairs with zoomorphic “animal foot” motifs serving as symbols of the exoticised colonies brought home to support the weight of imperial administrators. Barrett focuses on these objects as the literal sites “on which the empire was written” and from which imperial orders were historically dispatched. By dismantling these desks and transforming them into broken installations or wearable masks, she performs an act of physical and symbolic re-appropriation. This transformation is symbolic, physical, irreversible, and confrontational. It exposes the continuity between historical and contemporary structures of power while refusing to preserve objects that embody imperial violence.
Dreading the Map: Collective Labour and Spatial Politics
Barrett’s installations often situate these transformed materials within historically charged architectural spaces, creating a layered confrontation between past and present. A primary example is Dreading the Map, which originated as a provocation within the Royal Geographical Society’s Map Room in London, a temple of imperial knowledge and spatial politics. In this project, six women gathered to shred and braid colonial maps, refuting the map’s claim to singular authority over territory. Barrett describes it as starting out as ‘a bit cheeky.’ “Let’s shred and braid!”
The map grew up and unfolded its own thesis, complex and richer as it has been employed in different countries, and has become incredibly heavy. It has travelled from London to the Dakar Biennale (where Barrett was awarded the Sculpture Prize 2026), through Berlin, and most recently to the Guatemala Bienal. As the work migrates, it accumulates a physical and intellectual “weight”; The literal mass of the paper is accompanied by the staggering accumulation of collective labour that fuels its growth.
Barrett is very intentional and thinks expansively about how her work can operate, and she has deliberately learned to make space for others to think within it, “Making is thinking.” The installation typically stages a transition from order to disruption. Intact maps are displayed on walls, asserting their authority, before giving way to braided forms suspended in space. The act of shredding, handling, and braiding materials becomes a way of reclaiming agency. This is particularly evident in her collaborative processes, where other local women in each context are invited to contribute. These times are frequently described as meditative and calming, creating spaces of pause and shared attention. Their gathering, to interpret and handle the map, is itself a refutation of what a map represents: singular authority over territory. Barrett’s practice critiques power and constructs alternative modes of being together.
The Guatemala Bienal and Decentred Authorship
The Guatemala Bienal offers a particularly acute articulation of this structure. There, a large-scale installation (approximately 20 metres) in a central colonial building in Guatemala City—the very site of the national revolution—juxtaposed British colonial maps with local Guatemalan cartographies along an extended wall. The maps then left the wall and entered the air, transformed into braided strands in collaboration with women from the Garifuna community.
In the Guatemala project, Barrett also embraced being “completely decentered” as the language barriers allowed the work to unfold independently of her direct involvement. This condition reinforces its premise that meaning is not fixed but emerges through collective engagement. The installation acquires a degree of autonomy, continuing to evolve through others’ contributions and extending beyond the boundaries of the exhibition space, as participants take fragments home to continue braiding with sisters and daughters, turning deconstruction into a family ritual. The work grows organically, an accumulation of physical material and emotional labour.
Geopolitical Continuity and Existential Urgency
However, Barrett resists the reading of some viewers who register her work as emotional rather than explicitly political. To her, the affective response is inseparable from the work’s political content and from the historical and contemporary geopolitical conditions. This entanglement is currently manifested in the fact that Dreading the Map is physically trapped in Guatemala, as political tensions have made travel through the Caribbean unsafe.
Extending her engagement with contemporary politics, Barrett developed a series of furniture works in response to the January 6th events in the United States. This series emphasises the persistence of imperial aesthetics within modern political environments. The recurrence of animal-foot motifs in the Oval Office, echoing those of colonial furniture, becomes a point of “grim irony,” suggesting that the visual language of authority continues to circulate across historical and geopolitical contexts. Through these interventions, Barrett establishes a continuity between colonial administration and contemporary governance, refusing to treat empire as a closed historical chapter.
These conditions are compounded by broader systemic pressures, including the threat of the UK Reform Party’s stated policies regarding the deportation of Caribbean populations in Britain; the trauma of the Minneapolis shooting; and climate-related destruction in Jamaica, which also affected her family home. These realities frame Barrett’s work not as a retrospective critique but as an urgent response to what she describes as a “very existential” present.
Conclusion
Sonia E. Barrett’s artistic practice operates as a sustained and urgent confrontation with the enduring structures of imperial authority and Western hegemony. Defined by material transformation, collective labour, and a deliberate decentring of authorship, her work does not simply represent colonial histories; it actively dismantles their material and symbolic authority, linking historical violence to the existential pressures of contemporary geopolitics. The act of braiding becomes a shared rhythm, a form of attention that contrasts sharply with the abstraction and speed of geopolitical decision-making. Maps are neither fully destroyed nor restored but remain in a state of ongoing transformation. Authority is not replaced with a new system but destabilised, rendered provisional and uncertain. The artist herself does not occupy a fixed position but moves within a network of participants, materials, and contexts that continuously reshape the work. Through acts of fragmentation, recomposition, and collective labour, she opens a space in which these histories can be re-examined not as closed narratives but as ongoing processes, still active, still contested, and still subject to transformation.
Read More
Sonia E. Barrett, interviewed by Phil Cohen, "Sonia E. Barrett," Livingmaps Network, accessed June 16, 2026.