PortalsSonya Dyer and Rivers Solomon
June 2024 - December 2025
Web-based Commission, las-art.foundation
An underwater odyssey merging storytelling in science fiction and world-building in digital art, Portals, is part of the web-based commission series, To Fracture Time Is to Create an Otherwise.
Portals is a narrated video work, which results from a collaboration by artist Sonya Dyer and writer Rivers Solomon. In a combination of CGI, found footage and narrated storytelling, Portals recounts the odyssey of a central character, Amal. Set in the Strait of Gibraltar, where thousands of migrants have lost their lives trying to reach Europe and others have perished in forced migrations, the work follows the transformation of Amal, who drowned at sea and entered a mythical world through a network of portals across the Mediterranean. The process of unearthing and retelling the stories of those lost becomes an act of resistance and a way of imagining an alternative, non-Eurocentric history. The world-building process creates a counter-mythology that revises the past in order to speculate about the future through cultural critique.
Biographies
02Dr. Sonya Dyer
Rivers Solomon
Portals is a narrated video work, which results from a collaboration by artist Sonya Dyer and writer Rivers Solomon. In a combination of CGI, found footage and narrated storytelling, Portals recounts the odyssey of a central character, Amal.