Edinburgh Art Festival: Sequoia Danielle Barnes' Everything Is Satisfactual

Sequoia Danielle Barnes presents her Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition Everything is Satisfactual at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop (ESW), tucked away in a quiet corner of Newhaven. The show, located in the workshop’s courtyard space, is the result of Barnes’ fellowship at ESW, marking a shift in her focus away from assemblage and performance, and towards materiality. This shift is immediately palpable upon entering the space, where Barnes has constructed a surreal environment, reminiscent of a playroom. Yet beneath the cutesy and kitsch exterior of her sculptural works lies a darker narrative of the cultural commodification of racist tropes and imagery. Barnes’ practice is heavily based in research, with her work often underscored by this intersection of cuteness and oppression, and the insidious weaving of racial stereotypes into the fabric of visual culture.

The scene is carefully constructed, with the sound of birdsong and the prickly sensation of astroturf underfoot, creating an atmosphere both playful and unsettling. The looping of bird sounds and clips from Disney’s controversial Song of the South create an artificial environment, uncanny in its characteristics. High windows offer glimpses of the outside world, reminding you that what you’re experiencing is all but fiction.

Everything is Satisfactual is an Afro-surrealist retelling of the Br’er Rabbit folk tale, a story originally told by enslaved Africans in America. The tale has its roots in a native Akan folklore about Anasi, the spider trickster. The story manifests in different forms across African diasporas in the American South and the Caribbean, especially the French speaking islands, with Compair Lapin being Br’er Rabbit's creole counterpart. Among these enslaved populations, the trickster rabbit served as a hopeful allegory of tricking and overcoming their masters, a way to ridicule them without their knowledge.

Here, Br’er Rabbit smirks knowingly; globules of tar and jelly-like slugs punctuate the space, both disquieting and sweet. The childlike atmosphere slowly gives way to a more sinister realisation as you notice each figure's double pupils, and their ambiguous impression. What's the difference between a grimace and a smile? White America often seems to not care. These 'tar babies' are shown in Barnes’ illustrations as much more obviously Black children. 

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“‘Skin me, Brer Fox,’ sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, ‘snatch out my eyeballs, t’ar out my years by de roots, en cut off my legs,’ sezee, ‘but do please, Brer Fox, don’t fling me in dat brier-patch,’ sezee.”

Uncle Remus, his songs and his sayings: the folk-lore of the old plantation, Joel Chandler Harris, 1880

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The tales of Br’er Rabbit were appropriated by Joel Chandler Harris, a white American writer who had grown up around the plantations, remembering these tales – and the plantations – fondly. Harris saw the potential in selling these stories to a white audience and created the persona of 'Uncle Remus', based in part on Harriet Beecher Stowe's 'Uncle Tom'; by removing any semblance of trauma from these plantation tales, it provides a palatable and lovable figure to foreground these stolen stories.

In attitudes towards Blackness, there has always been tension between nostalgia and reality, and specifically the anachronistic and pathological idealisation of racist tropes as representative of an innocent past – the good ol’ days. Disney bought the rights to Uncle Remus’ tales, with 1946’s now-banned Song of the South adapting this folklore further, nostalgically depicting the plantation era as a time of simplicity and joy, with the childlike vigour Disney was so adept at capturing.

In Barnes’ reinterpretation, Br’er Rabbit becomes a vehicle for exploring the complexities of visual representations of Black histories and the rose tinting that they are subject to. The exhibition title Everything is Satisfactual is a direct reference to the song Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah from Songs of the South. The phrase mocks African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and adds yet another layer to the bashing and commercialisation of Black culture, now fully cemented in the mainstream. Barnes critiques this original appropriation whilst highlighting the ongoing mockery and commodification of Black language and identity in popular culture.

She also explores the evolution of the Tar Baby, tracing its origin in the Akua doll from Akan folklore (which was covered in gum) to its diasporic retelling. The latter preserves the trauma of food insecurity experienced by enslaved people, as slave masters would cover fruit trees in tar to identify those who stole when they returned covered in the sticky substance. 'Tar baby' later became a racist term to describe Black people in Jim Crow-era America, becoming a kitsch icon that would adorn bars of soap and other products. Barnes addresses these portrayals of Blackness in media, from the fetishised to the grotesquely cute, drawing on the history of minstrel shows and the archetypes that have defined Blackness in the cultural imagination.

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“I always thought it was kind of disturbing whenever someone said, ‘You’re so cute I could eat you’… I remember, as a child, a white woman said this to me once in the grocery store before trying to pet the braids my mother so painstakingly plaited the night before … What did she see when she saw me that day? A sweet pickaninny? A chocolatey minstrel?”

Everything is Satisfactual, Artist’s Book, Sequoia Danielle Barnes, 2024

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I am reminded of Ralph Bakshi's 1973 film Coonskin, another retelling of the Br’er Rabbit story – this time stylistically, as a Blaxploitation film. Coonskin was seen as incredibly problematic at the time of its release, with its first screening at the MoMA causing walkouts due to its perceived racism. Seeing Barnes’ sculptures and their reference to golliwog imagery addresses the power of intent. She intends for you to feel discomfort seeing this imagery, yet the iconography in its original contexts has entirely different implications. White America frequently has the power to decide what is racist, and what is not. However, Barnes’ work, much like Bakshi's film, reclaims and reappropriates these emblems of anti-Black culture, inviting scrutiny of racist stereotyping and its regular proliferation into modern culture. 

Accompanying the exhibition is a series of limited-edition figures that further comment on the commodification of Black stories. These elements extend the conversation beyond the gallery, prompting reflection on the broader implications of the sanitisation of Black trauma in mainstream narratives. Barnes’ dissects the origins of these tropes and the true histories that have been wiped. Through her intensive research focus, Barnes ties together materiality with the realities of marginalisation and brutality. The spikiness of the astroturf, the globulous tar, the double-pupiled figures – they all emphasise the need to look again, to question the implications of cuteness in racialised contexts and to challenge the foundations of these aesthetics.

Black people have always been treated as resources and commodities past the outlawing of slavery, in music, cinema, and society at large. In Everything is Satisfactual, Sequoia Danielle Barnes not only considers the original roots of Br’er Rabbit and the theft of our cultural traditions, but also reconsiders the legacies of that theft and its greater cultural consequences. Through a blend of materiality, narrative and cultural critique, Barnes subverts white supremacy through her semiotic commentary, as a reminder of the uncomfortable truths that cuteness is not enough to mask.

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Sequoia Danielle Barnes: Everything Is Satisfactual ran at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop as part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2024

This article was commissioned as part of Edinburgh Art Festival's Emerging Writers programme