One drop

New, spectacular work signed Sonya Lindfors attempts the seemingly impossible: To kill the immortal. 

ONE DROP is a new, mindblowing work from Sonya Lindfors & Company that continues to interrogate questions around the spectacle of otherness, the intricate relationalities between modernity and coloniality and the myth of art as independent, apolitical and free.  

What kind of bodies, narratives and stories can our stages facilitate? And what kind of ghosts are we dancing with? We perceive the world largely through various social constructs, categories, divisions, representations, and narratives. We have been taught that there are “natural” categories such as man and woman or black and white, nature and culture. However, many of the categories that now determine our identities date back only a few hundred years.Categories have changed over time and can also be actively changed. Often, however, our memory is short and the power of the narratives enormous.The narratives about the world gain validity as we continue to retell them

Art has never been free in its history, Lindfors claims. We always dance with the ghosts of history, and now with polarization, the rise of the far right, the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo-movements, those ghosts have become even more prominent.  

The work's title is based on the "one-drop rule" - a widespread practice in the United States in the early 1900s that established that anyone who had a black ancestor should be considered black. Despite the fact that science has proven that there is only one human race, the racializing practices have wiped out whole cultures, killed millions of people and subjugated a large part of the human population to a subordinate position.

ONE DROP explores the potential of art to change the narratives of the surrounding reality – to make existing hierarchies of power visible as well as to shake them. It strives to dream of coexistences that we do not yet know how to dream of.  

Lindfors & company tries the impossible, which is to imagine the death of the immortal - the destruction of oppressive structures. After this there will be a new world. The work has its Norwegian premiere at Bærum Kulturhus during har CODA 2023.