Memory feels solid when we recall a birthday, a favorite song, or the smell of a childhood kitchen, yet it is closer to vapor than stone. Artist and filmmaker Sondra Perry understands this instability and turns it into a generative force. Her immersive installation, Lineage for a Phantom Zone, commissioned by Muse through the Rolls-Royce Art Programme, treats recollection as an active organism that keeps mutating each time it is summoned. Rather than cataloguing documented facts, Perry builds a speculative dream that expands the idea of autobiography into the terrain of possibility. Viewers are pulled into a liminal realm where fragments of personal history join ancestral stories, Afrofuturist myth, and the sonic traces of a shared Black Atlantic experience. This deliberate refusal of strict chronology positions memory as a fluid archive that is constantly writing and overwriting itself. The strategy is less about recovering lost data and more about acknowledging that what we learn about ourselves often appears first in dreams, metaphors, or flashes of sensory déjà vu. In this way, Perry’s dreamscape functions as living memory, always in motion, always negotiating the gap between what was lived and what might have been imagined.
Perry’s method resonates with recent scholarship on collective remembrance that rejects neat timelines in favor of nonlinear, overlapping narratives. Thinkers from Maurice Halbwachs to Saidiya Hartman have argued that communal identities crystallize around stories that oscillate between reality and invention. Perry brings these theories into the gallery setting through large-scale projection, layered sound, and material gestures that solicit the whole body of the spectator. The dream is not decoration; it is the skeleton of the piece, providing a structure flexible enough to hold grief, joy, discontinuity, and resistance all at once. Because dreams are untethered by conventional space-time, they allow Perry to jump between family anecdotes, speculative futures, and mythic pasts without ever having to declare a single authoritative version of history. The result is an archive that breathes and sweats, inviting the audience to ask how many stories can fit inside one life.
This approach also speaks to a broader movement among contemporary artists of the African diaspora who treat imagination as a survival technology. By framing personal lineage through dream logic, Perry joins a lineage of practitioners, Walker, Arthur Jafa, and Cauleen Smithwho create counter-archives that operate outside institutional record keeping. The dream places her narrative in conversation with histories that were never fully documented, never safely preserved in state archives, yet persist in embodied knowledge, oral storytelling, and the sensory residue of everyday rituals. When orange perfume drifts through the installation space, it becomes an olfactory citation of Perry’s grandmother, asserting that memory can be inhaled as readily as it can be read. In the same gesture, Perry reminds us that archives are not neutral vaults but contested zones where absence, erasure, and longing constantly battle for visibility.
Multisensory Storytelling in Lineage for a Phantom Zone
Stepping inside the installation feels like entering a lucid dream that has already begun without you. Video footage ripples across curved screens, sometimes stretching into panoramic horizons, sometimes collapsing into intimate close-ups of hands, faces, night sky. A choir of manipulated voices loops through the room, slowed to a viscous tempo so that every syllable seems coated in centuries of dust and desire. The sound architecture, designed in collaboration with master audio engineer Josh Millrod, refuses to stay in the background; instead, it crawls across the viewers’ skin, making the gallery walls pulse like living tissue. Archival clips from public-domain home movies converse with computer-generated imagery, then dissolve into fields of saturated color before morphing again. Time fractures, recombines, and drifts out of sync, allowing a single gesturelike a mother braiding her daughter’s hairto echo forward and backward across generations.
Central to this atmospheric experience is the fragrance of citrus. Perry often recalls her grandmother’s belief that she would return after death through the unmistakable smell of oranges. By diffusing that scent throughout the gallery, Perry performs a ritual of ancestral invocation that transcends visual representation. Smell bypasses rational analysis and lodges directly in the limbic system, the same neurological region activated by dreams. In other words, the oranges transform the entire room into a sensory archive where memory arrives first as aroma, then as feeling, and only later as language. This crucial gesture rubs against the grain of Western archival practice, which historically privileges written documents over embodied sensation.
The print edition of Lineage for a Phantom Zone, released by the Black-owned agency A Vibe Called Tech under the guidance of Lewis Gilbert and Charlene Prempeh and designed by Robin Howie’s Fieldwork Facility, extends Perry’s multisensory logic onto paper. Readers encounter a book that behaves more like a portal than a catalog. Fieldwork Facility fractals the orange myth across the typography through a sequence of subtle distortions: letters tilt, sink, blur, or quietly disappear, enacting dream phenomena such as the collapse of consistency and the sudden mutability of physics. Over the span of seven essays and dialogues, these letter-level mutations cumulatively spell the word oranges, turning language itself into fragrant residue. Each intervention is small enough to escape immediate detection yet powerful enough to destabilize habitual reading patterns, forcing the eye to navigate uncanny topographies within the text.
Contributors include Isaac Julien, Bola Shonubi, Tade Thompson, Kareem Reid, and Hugo-award-winning novelist N. K. Jemisin, whose speculative fiction backgrounds amplify Perry’s own interest in alternate realities. Rather than providing detached critique, these writers serve as co-navigators, advancing new pathways through the installation’s philosophical terrain. Jemisin explores the possibility of dreaming as collective technology for Black futures; Julien reflects on experimental cinema’s power to fracture historical time; Thompson maps the neurological architectures of memory; Shonubi and Reid weave performance theory with diasporic mysticism. Their combined voices create a chamber of resonances that permits readers to wander in multiple directions without ever feeling lost.
Physical design decisions heighten that sense of exploration. The book’s custom-dyed pages shift subtly in hue, suggesting twilight gradations between memory and forgetting. Micro-embossed textures catch ambient light so that turning a page creates miniature constellations shimmering across the surface. A silk-screened foldout tucked near the midpoint carries a faint citrus oil that releases a whisper of fragrance each time it is touched, echoing the installation’s olfactory dimension. At the end of the volume, several blank spreads invite readers to record their own dreams. This open structure underscores Perry’s belief that archives only thrive when they welcome new material. By inscribing private nocturnal narratives next to critical essays, the reader becomes both custodian and generator of the archive.
What emerges is an expanded field of storytelling that toggles between screen, sound, scent, and page. Media theorist Laura Marks has argued for the idea that certain artworks invite touch even when physical contact is impossible. Perry’s project offers an entire suite of haptic literacies: the vibration of bass frequencies through a gallery floor, the tactile memory of orange peel, the slippery grammar of rearranged letters, and the mental touch of a dream that feels more real than waking experience. By fusing these channels, Lineage for a Phantom Zone demonstrates how multisensory storytelling can bypass defenses, drawing audiences into a vulnerable state where ancestral knowledge may be felt before it is conceptually understood.
From Personal Myth to Shared Futures
When reflecting on her artistic foundations, Perry frequently insists that her family operated not from scarcity but from a radical abundance of culture, humor, and improvisational ingenuity. They manipulated what was availablehand-me-down camcorders, off-brand cleaning supplies, whispered superstitions in that process produced a microcosm of Black creative survival. By translating these practices into the language of installation art and experimental publishing, Perry elevates ordinary acts of remembrance to the scale of collective mythology. Her grandmother’s citrus omen becomes a portal across time; her mother’s stories mutate into speculative blueprints for identity formation; her own memories merge with those of countless unseen ancestors. Each dream frame paradoxically grounds the work by asserting that personal myth can hold as much truth as documented facts.
This ethic of self-mythology resists systems that view Black life primarily through the lens of trauma documentation. While acknowledging violence and loss, Perry refuses to let sorrow monopolize the narrative. The dream archive makes space for absurdity, humor, and cosmic speculation. Such tonal elasticity is crucial for imagining futures beyond oppression. Here we see the influence of Afrofuturist thinkers like Octavia Butler and Sun Ra, who used science fiction and cosmic jazz to expand the parameters of Black possibility. Perry’s dreams do not escape history; rather, they bend its trajectory so that new constellations of meaning can appear.
Lineage for a Phantom Zone also interrogates the politics of digital preservation. Contemporary culture often equates archival value with data storage capacity, but Perry reveals how a sensory memorysweat collected on a dance floor, a fragment of lullaby, the flicker of VHS staticcarries an affective density that cannot be quantified in terabytes. Her work therefore, speaks to ongoing debates about the ethics of museum acquisitions, the vulnerabilities of cloud-based archives, and the need for community-driven stewardship models. By embedding intangible sensoria into her archive, Perry asks institutions to rethink what they consider preservable.
Interactive participation further shifts responsibility from institution to individual witness. In the gallery, visitors walking through projection beams create temporary shadows that become part of the image field, inscribing their bodies into the unfolding dream. In the book, readers who scratch the scented page activate a latent story through touch and smell. These micro-activations insist that archives are co-produced every moment they are experienced. Each new dream added to the blank spreads at the book’s conclusion becomes a speculative thread woven into the larger fabric of Black cultural memory.
Ultimately, Perry’s dream archive models a practice of future-oriented remembrance, a method for dreaming forward rather than merely looking back. Unlike nostalgic recreations that sanitize the past, her phantom zone acknowledges fracture and incompleteness while refusing defeat. It proposes that what we carry from our ancestors is not only pain but also methodologies for imagination, community, and joy. Viewers leave the installation with the distinct sensation that their own memories might be portals waiting to be opened, their own dreams potential archives yet to be curated. The work therefore operates at the intersection of art, ritual, and social technology, suggesting that the future of collective memory will depend on how courageously we let our dreams guide us toward new vocabularies of belonging. Perry offers a compass that points away from static heritage displays toward a living, breathing archive: one that glows with possibility, tastes of citrus, and hums with the frequencies of yet-unwritten histories.
Reimagining Memory Through Phenomenological Dreamwork
Sondra Perry’s work in Lineage for a Phantom Zone is not merely a visual or auditory experience. It is an ontological journey that probes the foundations of memory, identity, and existence. Rather than presenting memory as a static archive of the past, Perry invites the viewer into a reconfigured territory where the past is not remembered in a traditional sense but instead re-dreamed through a phenomenological lens. This is not nostalgia. It is an inquiry into how experience etches itself into the mind, body, and soul, even when those experiences are imagined, interrupted, or fictionalized.
The concept of the “phantom zone” in Perry’s work does not refer to a concrete location. It is not a metaphorical allusion to trauma or displacement. Instead, it functions as an affective field, a liminal cognitive space born from the friction between what we recall and what we dream we recalled. It is a realm shaped by the emotional logic of dreams, a space where facts are less important than the psychic impressions they leave behind. Perry does not merely mine her personal history for stories; she constructs scenarios that never occurred but could have, thereby exposing emotional truths that traditional memory might obscure.
In Lineage for a Phantom Zone, Perry presents a vision that exists outside of linear temporality. Time does not unfold; it loops, fragments, and reforms in unpredictable rhythms. The immersive nature of the work, including saturated soundscapes and fragmented voice-overs, induces a dreamlike state in the viewer, mirroring the surreal logic of dreams. The statement, “We can see people but they’re far away. Because of that, we can’t recognise anyone’s face,” encapsulates the emotional tone of the project. It evokes the ache of near-recognition, the sorrow of almost remembering, the frustration of seeing without knowing. In Perry’s world, memories do not offer closure. Instead, they evoke longing, presence tinged with absence.
Rather than attempting to restore lost memories or preserve ancestral narratives with clinical accuracy, Perry leans into the distortions, the dissonances, the contradictions that live in subjective experience. She crafts a dream she never had, a counterfactual memory that becomes more powerful precisely because it was never real. In this imagined space, she locates a deeper form of truth, one that resists empirical measurement but resonates on an intuitive, emotional, and sensory level. This act of dreaming backwards, of fabricating recollection, becomes a radical form of reclamation.
The phantom zone thus emerges as a site of possibility, where inherited trauma, fragmented identities, and disrupted genealogies can be reinterpreted through a lens of imaginative agency. It is not just about what happened, but about what could have been felt, what should have been known, what still echoes in the body. Perry’s work is less about answers and more about questions that linger in the silence between images, in the static between soundscapes, in the gaps between what we see and what we remember.
Sensory Disruption and the Embodied Language of Dreams
The accompanying book published in collaboration with A Vibe Called Tech and Fieldwork Facility is not a mere supplement to the installation but a parallel embodiment of Perry’s artistic ethos. It expands the conceptual framework of the phantom zone into a literary and tactile format that engages the reader on multiple levels. This is not just a visual narrative, but a somatic one. Every page asks the reader not just to look or read, but to feel, to experience, to lose and rediscover meaning in a visceral way.
Through the deliberate manipulation of typographic elementsflipped letters, disappearing glyphs, and mathematical symbols replacing the book simulates the mechanics of a dream. These textual distortions are not whimsical design choices but structural metaphors that communicate the instability of perception and the mutability of identity. When the letter 'A' is replaced with '≈', the reader is subtly nudged toward associations with water, instability, and approximation. This is not an arbitrary symbol. It functions as both a visual cue and a philosophical proposition, suggesting that identity itself might be fluid, approximate, and in flux.
In another passage, the letter 'E' seems to fall away from its position in the word, leaving a sensation of incompleteness, dislocation, and descent. This typographic collapse mimics the physical sensation of falling in a dream, that sudden jolt that wakes you but leaves you unsure of what is real. The body feels these shifts, not just the mind. The reader doesn’t just decode these textual mutations; they internalize them. The medium becomes the message in a deeply embodied sense.
This manipulation of the reading experience does more than reflect dream logic. It enacts it. The book becomes a kind of dream artifacta document not of what is, but of what is half-remembered, half-felt, almost understood. Fieldwork Facility’s design choices avoid the pitfalls of heavy-handed symbolism or didactic presentation. Instead, they create a symphonic interplay of sensation and thought, allowing cognition to loosen its grip and yield to more fluid forms of knowing.
Within this strange and evocative landscape, Perry's project opens a space for multiplicity and ambiguity. The textual artifacts become portals, each distorted letter a ripple in the psychic terrain she maps. It is not just about disrupting readability, but about proposing a new way of readingone that mirrors the nonlinear, uncertain, and emotional dimensions of memory and identity. The dream-like formatting becomes a mirror for the viewer’s own unconscious processes, subtly implicating them in the phantom zone as co-dreamers, co-narrators, and co-witnesses.
Collective Unraveling and the Politics of the Phantom Zone
Perry’s vision gains further depth through the inclusion of multiple voices within the book, transforming her solitary dream into a collective meditation. The contributions of filmmaker Isaac Julien, psychotherapist Bola Shonubi, and science fiction writer Tade Thompson are not peripheral. They are integral to the expansion of the phantom zone, each text adding another dimension, another interpretive layer to Perry’s unfolding inquiry.
Julien’s reflections intersect Perry’s visual language with the aesthetics of black futurism and visual poetics. His engagement underscores how speculative imaginaries can function as tools of liberation, where the dream space becomes a site for projecting alternative futures and deconstructing colonial timelines. Bola Shonubi’s psychoanalytic reading transforms the dream into a psychic text, rich with latent content and emotional residue. Her interpretation emphasizes the therapeutic potential of dream logic, its ability to reconcile fragmented aspects of the self and to recover lost or suppressed experiences.
Tade Thompson, known for his boundary-pushing science fiction, adds yet another facet. His writing dismantles the barrier between memory and mutation, showing how recollection is always an act of transformation. Memories mutate over time, acquiring new meanings, new emotions, new contexts. In Thompson’s framing, memory is not a relic of the past but a living organism, evolving in response to present needs and future desires.
Together, these voices weave a tapestry of intellectual and emotional resonance. They do not attempt to explain Perry’s work but to live within it, extending its reach, echoing its complexities. The phantom zone, in this context, becomes not just Perry’s psychic landscape but a shared terrain where others bring their interpretations, dreams, and traumas. It is a collective zone of inquiry, of experimentation, of imaginative reconfiguration.
The cumulative effect of this multi-voiced, multi-sensory, and multi-modal project is both immersive and unsettling. Perry compels her audience to reconsider the nature of memorynot as a passive recording device but as an active, political, and sensory process. In the phantom zone, facts lose their authority and truths are found in whispers, in shadows, in sensations. Memory becomes a landscape to traverse, not a timeline to follow.
Race, identity, and familial lineage are no longer fixed narratives but dynamic, evolving constructs. Through the destabilization of language, image, and form, Perry reveals the possibilities inherent in disaggregation. When identity breaks apart, when memory shatters, when language collapses, something new can emergesomething truer, perhaps, than the polished coherence of official histories.
Perry’s imagined dream, though fictional, carries an emotional truth that transcends factual accuracy. It resonates because it taps into something shared, something felt deeply yet rarely articulated. And in this shared dreamscape, the phantom zone becomes not a space of loss, but one of rediscovery. By inviting us to inhabit her dream, she opens the door for us to explore our own. The result is not a passive viewing experience but a profound internal reckoning. Through Perry’s lens, the act of dreaming becomes a form of knowing, a method of healing, and a gesture of defiant reimagination.
Dream Language and Typographic Disruption in Lineage for a Phantom Zone
To engage with Sondra Perry’s Lineage for a Phantom Zone is to step beyond conventional expectations of what a book should do. It’s not merely a document to be read but an experience to be entered, absorbed, and felt across multiple levels of perception. This is a text that refuses the boundaries of traditional language. It doesn’t just subvert narrative norms dissolves them. In this surreal and atmospheric terrain, language no longer obeys its expected syntax. Instead, it bends, flickers, and mutates in a way that mimics the subconscious itself.
The printed form of Perry’s installation, realized through the collaboration between A Vibe Called Tech and Fieldwork Facility, manipulates type and design in a way that feels uncannily surgical. Typography is not used simply as a visual element but as a psychological trigger. Its alterations serve as portals, inviting readers to abandon analytical reading in favor of intuitive absorption. Letters become unstable entities, hovering between symbol and code, gesture and echo. This is particularly evident in the treatment of individual characters like the letter ‘N’, which fades in and out of legibility across sections of the book. This is not an arbitrary aesthetic choice. It evokes the liminality of the unstable threshold between what can be known and what always slips just beyond articulation.
Each essay or dialogue acts not just as a text but as an invocation. The typographic interventions function as signals, communicating in a frequency that bypasses logic. Readers are invited to participate in this disorienting experience by decoding the visual language that overlays the written one. It's a participatory act, requiring not only attention but a surrender to intuition. Meaning emerges not linearly but spectrally, like following a whisper in the dark.
In Lineage for a Phantom Zone, the page becomes an uncharted psychic map. Reading is no longer about progress but presence. The experience becomes less about acquiring information and more about entering a state akin to ritual, to trance, to the ambiguous motion of dream logic. Each turn of the page presents a new landscape. Traditional guides like summaries, indexes, or headers are absent. This erasure of orientation tools is purposeful. It urges the reader to let go of control and instead drift through the text as one would drift through a dream or a meditation.
What emerges is not confusion but a new form of understanding born from surrender. This dreamlike framework challenges dominant expectations in publishing, which often rely on clarity, efficiency, and coherence. Perry’s work insists on something different: vulnerability, mystery, and openness. It does not domesticate experience. It conjures it.
Ritual Design and Oneiric Architecture
Within this deeply immersive book, the sequencing of essays, visual cues, and typographic mutations come together to form what might best be described as oneiric architecture. The layout does not follow a linear timeline or conventional thematic structure. Instead, images, symbols, and shifts in grammatical coherence appear and vanish like fragments from the subconscious. These interventions disrupt the flow in ways that initially feel jarring, but soon begin to replicate the dreamlike patterns of real memoryfragmented, associative, nonlinear.
The inversion of the letter ‘R’ in one section is a potent example. Its reversal is echoed by imagery of Cypress treestall, sentient presences often associated with mourning and memory. These arboreal sentinels, mirrored by the flipped glyphs, become visual guardians of the narrative. They resist ease of reading, much like dreams resist tidy interpretation. Their placement dares readers to confront the instability of meaning itself. Rather than yielding to frustration, one is called to engage more deeply. Comprehension is no longer a goal but a byproduct of affective participation.
In this context, typography becomes a metaphysical device. Its disruptions mirror the distortions experienced in dream statesmoments when gravity flickers, faces dissolve, or the rules of physics cease to apply. Perry’s deliberate choice to root the work not in a documented lineage but in a dreamed one is vital. It shifts memory from an archive to an apparition. This isn’t just about reclaiming the past. It’s about reanimating it through dream logic, giving shape to histories that resist archival containment.
The book resists the logic of closure at every turn. There is no tidy ending, no unifying thesis that attempts to tie everything together. Even the decision to leave blank pages for readers to record their own dreams speaks to a kind of generous refusal. This gesture transforms the reader from a passive recipient into a co-creator, allowing the book to remain perpetually in flux. Each person’s engagement adds to its evolving meaning. It is a living unfinished, unfinishable, and proudly so.
Through this refusal to resolve, Perry and her collaborators enact a form of publishing that feels more like ritual practice than literary output. The book does not exist to be understood in one reading or even ten. It invites re-entry. It transforms with each return. Just as in ritual or trance, repetition deepens experience rather than diminishing it. Design here is not decorative. It is incantatory. Every glyph shift, every image splice, every typographic anomaly speaks to something ancient and ineffable language of the subconscious whispered into form.
Psychic Immersion and the Power of Uncertainty
As the final essay in the book unfolds, marked by the sinuous presence of the letter ‘S’, the reader is left in a state of dreamy suspension. This letterlooping, curling, incomplete evokes a serpent winding its way through the psyche. It becomes emblematic of the phantom zone Perry constructs: a realm of partial truths, spectral memories, and emotional echoes. This is not the clarity of factual knowledge but the shimmering instability of inner life. Knowledge in this context flickers. It cannot be captured, only felt.
In a cultural moment dominated by metrics, certainty, and neatly packaged narratives, Lineage for a Phantom Zone dares to hold space for ambiguity. It champions a kind of radical openness embrace of the fragmentary and the unresolved. It does not smooth over confusion but instead honors it as a site of potential. In Perry’s world, misremembering is not a flaw but a form of reimagination. To dream inaccurately is to re-author reality.
This publishing approach is rare, almost defiant. It eschews the impulse to simplify or package experience for mainstream palatability. There is no attempt here to make the work more accessible by diluting its complexity. Instead, Perry and her collaborators double down on its opacity. They trust the reader to rise to meet it, to slow down, to feel their way through the fog. This is not elitism. It is faith. Faith in the depth of human perception, in the capacities of the subconscious, in the generative power of unknowing.
The book’s physicality reinforces this ethos. Every element, from paper texture to font irregularity, insists on the tactile, the sensual, the embodied. Reading becomes a multisensory act. The eyes scan not just for content but for gesture. The hands touch not just pages but portals. In this way, the work bridges the digital and the ancestral, the futuristic and the ancient. It is a timeless artifact housed in a contemporary shell.
Through these disruptions and openings, Lineage for a Phantom Zone becomes something more than art, more than literature. It becomes a psychic tool. Its instability does not alienate but invites vulnerability. It asks readers to surrender the need for mastery and to enter instead a space of feeling, of dreaming, of becoming. The reader is transformed from consumer into participant, from interpreter into medium.
In doing so, Perry redefines what it means to engage with memory, language, and art. She offers not answers but atmospheres. Not resolution but resonance. This is work that refuses to conclude. It opens, and opens again, echoing the infinite regress of dreams and the multiplicity of the self. The phantom zone is not a place we leave. It is a place we enter, again and again, each time altered, each time more awake within the dream.
Reimagining Lineage: Sondra Perry’s Dreamwork as Ancestral Technology
Sondra Perry’s artistic vision extends far beyond personal introspection. Her work vibrates with frequencies not solely her own, but with resonances passed down, imagined, and invoked across generations. In Lineage for a Phantom Zone, she deliberately shifts focus from autobiographical specificity to a broader spectrum of collective memory, cultural spirit, and speculative kinship. Rather than recalling a tangible, lived memory, she constructs a dreamone not anchored in realism, but floating in a surreal realm of ancestral presence. This choice is radical. It allows her to explore how identity is shaped not only by genetics or historical facts but by ephemeral elements like myth, scent, rhythm, and imagination.
In this framework, Perry treats dreams not as escapist detours but as vital entry points into the layered archive of Black ancestral memory. Her grandmother’s myth of oranges as spiritual symbols transcends familial anecdote and transforms into a metaphysical codea type of ancestral encryption encoded within the work. It becomes a living technology, transmitting meaning across generations, not through bloodlines, but through story, ritual, and perception. This symbolism repositions the body not as an isolated vessel but as a porous conduit. Within Perry’s dreamworld, the body is redefined as an antenna tuned to metaphysical vibrations. It receives and echoes psychic transmissions from an ancestry too frequently erased or rendered illegible by dominant historical narratives.
Rather than codifying legacy through traditional meansphotographs, heirlooms, deeds, or documented genealogiesPerry activates a less tangible, more intuitive lineage. This is a heritage that exists within the folds of dreams and the shimmer of recollection. Here, memory is not fixed in facts but exists as scent, sensation, and shadow. She draws from a deep, speculative well where remembering is not a singular act but a collective and even futuristic endeavor. The dream becomes a map, a territory in which loss, longing, and possibility coalesce into a spatial and emotional terrain where the past and future collapse into the now.
A Living Archive of Speculative Kinship
In both the immersive installation and the accompanying book, Perry builds a sensory-rich field of engagement. The dream she recreates becomes an interdimensional realm where personal and collective narratives intermingle. The text and visual elements extend an invitation to experience history as something felt, intuited, and co-authored. She constructs not a monument, but a living, breathing archive ever-evolving space of remembrance and invention. Dreams are no longer solitary experiences; they become communal rituals. The act of dreaming itself is reframed as a radical act of recovery, survival, and imagination.
This archive is amplified by the contributions of fellow artists and thinkers, who do not merely provide commentary but operate as spiritual collaborators. Figures like Bola Shonubi and Tade Thompson don’t function as traditional interpreters. Instead, their insights become frequencies in a larger acoustic field. Shonubi’s therapeutic reflections resonate like murmured mantras, guiding the viewer toward emotional excavation. Thompson’s speculative poetics introduce multidimensional timeframes, transforming memory into something non-linear and dynamic. These contributors shape the dreamscape not just as interpreters but as mediums channeling voices beyond the visible or the known.
In Lineage for a Phantom Zone, kinship is redefined through this collective resonance. It is no longer confined to the family tree or legal structure but unfolds as a rhizomatic network of affinities, resonances, and spectral proximities. The project does not seek to resolve identity but to explore its fluidity. Kinship here is imaginative, speculative, and deeply embodied. It lives in the subconscious and manifests through rituals both ancestral and futuristic. By refusing to limit lineage to conventional parameters, Perry invites viewers to question what it means to belong and to whom.
Fieldwork Facility’s graphic design work amplifies this vision. Their interventions function not as visual decor but as spiritual diagrams. These designs map out the invisible tributaries of memory and knowledge. They act as sigilscharged symbols that evoke unspoken lineages and unseen connections. The visual language is intuitive and abstract, designed to reflect the nonlinear qualities of ancestral knowledge. These elements don’t just support the artwork; they are integral to its metaphysical function. The installation becomes not just a visual experience but a ritualized space where forgotten or erased knowledge can emerge.
Dreaming as Resistance and Future-Making
Technology in Perry’s work is not a sterile tool but a spiritual conduit. She reclaims the digital as a space for Black futurism, where data and circuitry become portals for memory and imagination. Video, sound design, and digital collage are not simply methods of presentation; they are the mediums through which ancestral frequencies are broadcast. The screen becomes a mirror and a gateway. In her hands, the digital realm transforms into a site of techno-shamanism. Sound manipulation becomes incantation, and editing software becomes a ritual altar. By blending ancient symbols with digital artifacts, Perry illustrates how Black identity can transcend the colonial constraints of time, geography, and biology.
Through this lens, technology becomes sacred. It’s no longer seen as divorced from the spiritual or emotional, but deeply intertwined with both. Perry shows that pixels can carry memory, and code can embody prayer. In this sense, her work disrupts binary thinking: the division between past and future, material and spiritual, human and machine begins to blur. She invites us into a world where technology does not erase heritage but amplifies itwhere the digital archive becomes a sanctuary for voices long silenced.
The final pages of Perry’s book dissolve the notion of singular authorship altogether. By inviting readers to record and contribute their own dreams, she opens up the phantom zone as a participatory domain. It is no longer a place that belongs to the artist or the installationit belongs to anyone willing to enter it. This invitation democratizes the archive and decentralizes authority. It extends the project beyond its initial frame and into the lived realities of those who engage with it. The dream becomes a communal act of memory-making and world-building.
This participatory structure is not a passive gesture. It transforms the artwork into an evolving ecosystem. Each dream scribed by a reader becomes a new node in Perry’s speculative kinship network. What emerges is not a fixed narrative but a growing constellation of imagined futures and ancestral echoes. Viewers become witnesses, contributors, and co-creators. The line between audience and artist, memory and invention, dissolves. The phantom zone becomes inhabited, not just visited. It becomes a space of ongoing negotiation where memory is not recovered but reimagined.
Perry’s work reminds us that to dream is to resist. In a world that constantly seeks to define and contain Black identity, the dream becomes a radical space of freedom. It is a place where the impossible becomes necessary. In her schema, dreams are not retreats but weapons. They allow for the reanimation of lost narratives and the construction of new realities. This is a deeply political act. By privileging the dream, Perry challenges linear time and historical determinism. She positions imagination as a force of liberation, a tool for healing, and a method of remembering what history tried to erase.
Ultimately, Lineage for a Phantom Zone offers a powerful meditation on what it means to belongto a people, to a story, to a frequency beyond time. It guides us to a terrain where dreams serve as maps, where scent becomes scripture, and where ancestral knowledge travels not through biology but through the body’s memory, imagination, and intuition. In Perry’s dreamspace, we are not simply spectators. We are participants. We are invited to grieve, to drift, to remember, and to imagine. And in doing so, we become part of a lineage still being dreamt into existence.
Conclusion
Sondra Perry’s Lineage for a Phantom Zone offers a radical reconfiguration of memory as a multisensory, speculative, and collective act. Rather than anchoring identity in static facts, Perry invites us to navigate an archive built from scent, sound, sensation, and dream. Her work transforms personal mythology into communal technology, making space for fragmented lineage, reimagined kinship, and ancestral transmission beyond time. Through immersive installation and typographic ritual, Perry calls forth a living, breathing archiveone that resists finality, embraces ambiguity, and insists that the future is shaped by how bravely we allow ourselves to dream.
