The conversation between artists Sonya Dyer and Rivers Solomon invites us to dive deeper into the concepts and collaboration process behind their narrative video work, Portals.

Portals is a narrated video work resulting from a collaboration between artist Sonya Dyer and writer Rivers Solomon. In an interview with curator Barbara Cueto, the artists discuss the concepts and ideas behind the work, as well as the artistic process and their collaboration. Combining 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 to speculate about the future through cultural critique.