Lineage for a Phantom Zone

Lineage for a Phantom Zone is an immersive audio-visual installation that imagines a dream that the artist Sondra Perry wishes that she could have had. The work explores personal history as the roots of dreams, the erasure of Black history in the American South, and the dream space as a passage for reaching sites of heritage that are inaccessible. Upon entering the gallery space, the audience can smell the scent of oranges, immediately evoking a family myth. Perry’s grandmother has told the artist that when she passes, Perry will know as she will smell oranges and so the scent of this fruit is laden with both grief and intimacy. To accompany the exhibition Fieldwork Facility were invited to design a book with editorial content developed by A Vibe Called Tech. We approached the book as a dream sequence where each of the book’s essays, stories and conversations was affected by different dream phenomena. Each text has a single letter altered, as a whole the seven texts’ interventions spell out ‘oranges’. The book creates a surreal experience demanding the reader to engage with the texts further.