Earlier this month our Head of Programme, Ben Borthwick, interviewed Satch Hoyt about his first UK solo show, Afro-Sonic Mapping Chapter 4, currently on show at KARST.
Ben Borthwick (BB): Please introduce yourself.
Satch Hoyt (SH): Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, whatever time it is. My name is Satch Hoyt. I’m a visual artist, musician and composer. My work is very much focused on the sonicities pertaining to the Black Atlantic and to the transnational African diaspora.
BB: Can you tell us about the mediums and the techniques that you use?
SH: Ah, well, as Francis Bacon said “it’s all trial and error”. He, like myself, was an autodidact – a self taught artist. But, for sure, there are techniques that one goes back to. In regards to my paintings, I tend to class the technique as a layered palimpsestual technique, meaning that there’s not very much on the canvas in terms of actual material, actual paint. It’s very, very thin layers, very veil-like. It’s rare that there’s preparatory drawings. I have this image in my head and I go for it. In a way this is very much like real-time composition in regards to music.
BB: Tell us about your practice and how your experience as a musician and as an artist talk to each other.
SH: I started off in music, on stage, singing and dancing, so there was always this kind of mise-en-scène aspect to the work. I see my paintings very much as what I term as “unfixed graphic scores”, so the actual paintings can be played. The paintings are informed by sound, by music. I believe that music is a very important chronicler, that we can read our histories through sound. I think that we can glimpse certain truths through sound and what I term the “eternal migration of the afro sonic signifier”.
BB: Tell us more about the “afro sonic signifier”.
SH: The eternal migration of the afrosonic signifier, I argue, is that the enslaved acted as portals and carried various mnemonic networks of sound over to the Caribbean Basin and to the Americas. It was the sound coupled with memories of rituals that helped keep Africanism somewhat intact. Within that, I’m also saying that the slave hold on the ships was the incubation space for a lot of the music that we have known and are experiencing today, as in bebop to hip hop. In a situation where you were chained in a very small space with many people, many of whom were not from your culture and don’t speak your language, you only had music and you only had linguistics.
I also don’t believe that Congo Square in New Orleans was really the birthplace of black experimental music. I think that was definitely pre-Black Atlantic. Slavery and plantation life on the continent brought people into contact with those from cultures within and beyond Africa (including indigenous folk and Irish people), a hybridization that eventually helped lead to the creation of Jazz.
BB: Do you have a tool or instrument you particularly like working with and why?
SH: This is a conversation that I’ve only had with a couple of visual artists that paint, but I know that I become very attached to paint brushes. Of course, paint brushes wear out and there’s this affinity that one has with certain brushes, and then they die, you know. That’s kind of hard, hahah, you watch them dying as you’re stroking the canvas. The hairs are falling out and you’re flicking them off.
In regards to music, my main instrument is the flute and percussion. And within percussion, the triangle is very important to me. I think that I’ve taken the triangle somewhere else. In fact, the late Greg Tate, the leader of Burnt Sugar and godfather of hip hop journalism, gave me a name: he said I was the Tony Williams (American jazz drummer and member of Miles Davis’ “Second Great Quintet”) of the triangle. So I have to live up to that!
BB: Can you tell us the story behind the paintings in the exhibition.
SH: I call that series Afro Sonic Maps. They were executed slightly before I actually went on my first afrosonic mapping journey, which was looking at the Lusophone triangle – Portugal, the Congo (specifically Luanda, Angola) and Brazil Bahia. So the paintings, sometimes but not always, depict transatlantic journeys involving enslavement. They are also unfixed graphic scores and cosmic constellations. The paintings act as directives so whoever’s in front of the painting, whatever mood the conductor is in, that’s what she or he can glean from the paintings.
BB: Can you tell us about how you came to do the Unmutings?
SH: Unmuting is gaining entrance into ethnographic institutions (such as the British Museum) and playing the instruments that have laid dormant for decades, sometimes much longer. The idea is that I play the instruments in the museum and simultaneously they’re recorded. I take those recordings into a studio where I work with an engineer to create compositions from the captured motifs. Then, when I do a performance those instruments are on the playback – that’s sonic restitution, the sound of the instrument is heard. I’ve sounded the dormant instrument and brought it back to life for the small moment that I’m actually playing it. Oftentimes, a lot of the experts in these ethnographic museums don’t even know how the instruments sound. When I approach museums, and especially the British Museum, they are often adamant to let me know that they’re the rightful custodians of those instruments and they should be put to their rightful use. And of course, I say: “well, the rightful use of an instrument is that it’s supposed to be played”.
Afro-Sonic Mapping Chapter 4 is on view at KARST until 29 November.
