Santiago Mostyn: Natural History
Bernard
Natural History is the working title for an extended period of visual and auditory research by Stockholm-based artist Santiago Mostyn into the Grenada Revolution (1979-1983), in which photographic archives, personal correspondence, and audio recordings are presented and remixed in the digital sphere. The project creates an open-ended retelling of established narratives around the Revolution, and offers both a template and a lesson to those engaged in socio-political struggle today.
The written history of the Grenada Revolution is primarily confined to academic repositories. However, this commission aims to reanimate these cold facts via the three cornerstones of cinematic language: sound, image, and story.
The auditory element focuses on Radio Free Grenada, the national radio station and key source of both music and news under the People’s Revolutionary Government. During a residency at Primary in July 2025, a live listening session was created based on original tape recordings from RFG, field recordings from the island, and interview fragments with leaders past and present.
A 16mm film portrait of Bernard Coard, the Deputy Prime Minister of Revolutionary Grenada, constitutes the visual element of the commission. Coard, who is blamed in the official discourse for the collapse of the Revolution, is seen in the present day, quietly getting on with his life in Jamaica – the weight of the collapse of the Revolution, and his twenty-six years of incarceration, still haunting his present.
The narratives around the Revolution will be brought to life as a series of imagined letters, based on archival material, written between Jackie Creft, the Minister of Education in the PRG, and her compatriots in Grenada and abroad.
Jackie Creft was one of the leading figures in the drive to reshape education and women’s rights in Grenada. Alongside Maurice Bishop and several other central committee members, Creft was executed in October 1983, the killings proving to be the final act in the era of Black Power uprisings in the Caribbean.
Inspired by the correspondence between leading members of the revolutionary government, these letters will follow the lead of the archival material but leave space for speculative new strands of narrative informed by the creolised mythologies of the Caribbean.
Digital Commission: Natural History (Radio Free Grenada)
The digital commission will 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 post-colonial history in the digital sphere.
Photographs made by the U.S. military during the invasion of Grenada (Operation Urgent Fury) will also be included in a recontextualised format. Generative image-to-video tools will be applied to the still photographs of the soldiers interacting with local Grenadians, and the soldiers, figures of power both in image and reality, will be made to collapse or will be physically compromised in the artificially created videos.
The digital commission is supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
Exhibition
Primary will also present Santiago Mostyn’s first UK solo exhibition in Autumn 2026. The show will include the 16 mm film and an installation of archival material, and potentially past work. This is an opportunity to explore Mostyn's familial connection to the UK and what this relationship says about Black fugitivity and our postcolonial condition, within which we can simultaneously be implicated and resist. This project also expands on the curator’s life-long exploration of coloniality, Black feminism, Black internationalism, intellectual sovereignty, and Caribbean visual culture from the early modern period (c. 1600-1830) to our contemporary moment.
About Santiago Mostyn
Santiago Mostyn works with films, installations, and performances to reflect on the cultural exchange and interconnectedness between African diasporic communities across continents. By intertwining a wide range of imageries from the artist’s personal archives with footage of historical events, public figures, and racial injustice, Mostyn’s practice focuses on creating multilayered narratives that explore the new interpretations of a place culturally and psychologically. His works also explore how personal memories relate to broad histories.
Mostyn received his Bachelor’s degree from Yale University and his Master’s degree from the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. Mostyn’s recent solo exhibitions took place at Mariakirken (Copenhagen, 2023), Gerðarsafn Museum (Kópavogur, 2022), House of Sweden (Washington D.C., 2022), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin, 2021), Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge, 2020), and Institute Suédois (Paris, 2019). He co-curated The Moderna Exhibition 2018: With the Future Behind us at Moderna Museet (Stockholm, 2018) and exhibited at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe (Harare, 2025), The Living Art Museum (Reykjavik, 2025), Stellenbosch Triennale (2025), Blindspot Gallery (Hong Kong, 2025), Buffalo AKG Art Museum (Buffalo, 2024), Gyeongnam Art Museum & Space Heem (Busan, 2023), Queensland Art Museum (Brisbane, 2023), Kalmar Konstmuseum (Kalmar, 2023), Malmö Art Museum (Malmö, 2022), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin, 2021), Art Hub Copenhagen (Copenhagen, 2021), the Luleå Biennial (Arjeplog, 2020), Nida Art Center (Nida, 2020), and the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (Riga, 2019), among others. Mostyn was a resident at Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2022 and was the 2024-25 David and Roberta Logie Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
Mostyn, in collaboration with Susanna Marcus Jablonski, is currently creating Malmö’s official anti-racist monument, titled Master Narratives, which will be permanently installed in Jesusparken (Falsterboplan) in 2026. The project began as a citizens’ initiative in 2019 by local activists to honour victims of the racist serial killer Peter Mangs, who committed shootings in Malmö between 2003 and 2010.
Mostyn currently lives and works in Stockholm.