Image: Santiago Mostyn, *Dream One*, Södertälje Konsthall. Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger

Commissioned by Primary, Santiago Mostyn, a Stockholm-based artist, will present his first solo project in the UK, Natural History (Radio Free Grenada).

He spent over a year researching across Europe, North America, and the Caribbean, and then spent three weeks in Studio A4 developing this digital commission. Before his research took a turn midway through the process, his project was previously titled The Final Letters of Jackie Creft. The hope was to bring forward the legacy of the Grenada Revolution (1979–1983) as a template for imagining how radical forms of pedagogy and political self-determination can manifest in present-day Britain. The research and output of this project will continue to engage with a process of ‘emotional memory’, revisiting the lives of underrepresented figures in the history of Black radicalism to plot a path forward.

Santiago is a British citizen who grew up in postcolonial contexts on both sides of the Black Atlantic—Africa and the Caribbean—and experienced the British school system from beginning to end. Even more importantly, his displacement from Grenada as a child during the US military invasion was a foundational trauma. During the US invasion of Grenada in October 1983, Santiago’s parents lived on the island, teaching in a primary school and working for Radio Free Grenada. His unique perspective, marked by both distance from and deep immersion in the discussion surrounding British identity in the visual arts, has informed his work. This commission represents the culmination of a lifetime spent developing an artistic language centred on themes of belonging and identity.

The Turn

The digital commission will now focus on the first aspect of the Natural History project: the auditory archives of Revolutionary Grenada. During the physical residency at Primary in the summer of 2025, audio material was collected from a wide range of sources and shared during a live listening session.

This unique archive of songs, interviews, and field recordings from the 1979–1983 period in Grenada is being developed into an interactive online repository, in collaboration with a web designer who focuses on postcolonial history in the digital sphere.

Photographs made by the US military during the invasion of Grenada (Operation Urgent Fury) will also be included in a recontextualised format. Generative image-to-video tools utilising AI will be applied to the still photographs of soldiers interacting with local Grenadians, and the soldiers, figures of power both in image and reality, will be made to collapse or be physically compromised in the artificially created videos.

Natural History (Radio Free Grenada) is supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

Santiago Mostyn received a BA from Yale University and an MA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. His recent exhibitions include After the Sun—Forecasts from the North at Buffalo AKG Art Museum (2024); The Threshold Is a Prism (2023) at Kulturhuset Stadsteatern, in Stockholm; Mare Amoris | Sea of Love (2023) at UQ Art Museum, in Meanjin/Brisbane; Dream One (2022) at Södertälje Konsthall, in Sweden; The Show Is Over (2022) at the South London Gallery; 08-18 (Past Perfect) (2022) at Gerðarsafn Art Museum, in Kópavogur, Iceland; and The Real Show (2022) at CAC Brétigny, in France. Mostyn cocurated The Moderna Exhibition 2018: With the Future Behind Us, a survey of contemporary Swedish art, and was a resident at Künstlerhaus Bethanien (2021) and a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude (2022, 2024).