Antique Writing Desks Converge with African Masks in Sonia E. Barrett's Sculptures

""These were the laptops of the day," Barrett says of the portable tools that form her Desk series."

""On them, they 'wrote Africa' in letters home, journals, and reports that now form the archives in Europe of Africa.""

""I thought (the desks) could be a way of speaking back to Empire beyond the archived letters written on them.""

European colonization intensified during the Scramble for Africa in the mid- to late-1800s as inland regions became attractive for resource extraction. By the 1870s Europeans controlled about one-tenth of the continent, mostly in the north and far south. The Dutch East India Company established the first European settlement in Cape Town in 1652. The transatlantic slave trade transported over 12.5 million people. Colonists wrote letters and reports by hand using small portable wooden desks with fold-out leather surfaces and storage for pens and ink. Sonia E. Barrett reclaims Edwardian writing surfaces and materials to create mask-like sculptures that respond to colonial archives and histories.

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