Mataio Austin Dean is an artist, poet, musician, and activist from Portsmouth, Hampshire, who graduated from a BA in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art with First Class Honours in 2020. Born in 1996 to a Guyanese mother and an English father, Austin Dean’s practice is often centred around an interrogation of Marxism as a tool for emancipatory praxis. His work is concerned with the relationship between printmaking and orality, with works often consisting of etchings and other printed matter, along with singing, writing, reciting, and speaking. Austin Dean is interested in these forms as having actant potentialities for liberation which can be embodied and actualised. For Austin Dean, the points of intersection between these different forms represent a dialectical relationship between different labour temporalities, different modes of labour, and different residual and dominant cultures. 

Austin Dean's recent work is concerned with exploring Britain’s colonial and post-colonial exploitation of Guyana. This is achieved using images of events from Guyana’s largely overlooked anti-colonial and anti-slavery revolutionary history. In Austin Dean’s work, these symbols of burning, defeated imperialism, of anti-colonial rebellion, become a part of the southern English landscape. The supposedly distant memory of British colonialism is corporealised and thrown onto the idealised landscape of its birth and into the current epoch of its neo-colonial legacies. Austin Dean uses both Guyanese and English folksong to physically embody and re-enact these histories of rebellion, establishing, with recourse to his own family history, an intergenerational, cross-geographical, intertemporal class solidarity.       

Q&A with Mataio Austin Dean

Can you describe your practice?

My practice is largely concerned with the relationship between printmaking, or print culture, and orality, or oral culture, with my works often consisting of etchings and other printed matter along with singing, writing, reciting, and speaking. I'm interested in all these forms having a kind of actant potentialities for liberation, which can be embodied or actualised. For me the points of intersection between these different forms can represent the dialectical relationship between different labour temporalities, different modes of labour, and then different residual dominant or emerging cultures. My practice is also often centred around an interrogation of Marxism as a tool for emancipatory practices.
As for my recent work, it is often concerned with exploring Britain's colonial and postcolonial exploitation of Guyana, and this is achieved using images generated from events from Guyana’s largely overlooked anti-colonial anti-slavery Revolutionary history. A recurring image I use is one of burning sugarcane and this is something which was a common tactic in slave rebellions and also in workers rebellions and workers movements after slavery. It was a different way of attacking the sugar crop, it wasn’t always burning it was sometimes drowning and flooding the fields, therefore destroying the capital. Specifically this was used in great effect during the 1763 slave uprising. In my work these symbols of burning defeated imperialism, of anti-colonial rebellion, they became part of the Southern English landscape. 

What have you been doing during lockdown?

Lockdown has presented its own challenges, I have managed to make myself a studio of sorts, I have desk space and a computer which has enabled me to continue work. Although I have had to change the way I work I have also been lucky enough to have access to print facilities here in Portsmouth to keep making my dry-points. I have been able to keep working, just on a slightly smaller scale, just hopefully not in terms of the horizons of the thinking.

What is the role of the historical criticism and activism in your work?

Activism has always played a role in my practice, but it is a complicated role. I think it is always useful to know the practical limits of one's practice politically, thinking about when political practice is purely an activist practice and when political practice can be enhanced by an artistic practice. I think those limits shift depending on the political moment or where one is in one's art making. I think an art practice also provides an opportunity to make links that were unlikely to have been made elsewhere, to present information that is unlikely to be presented elsewhere, and to create possibilities for imagining the nature of liberation or imagining new realities. 
These diagrams I have made during the residency, and doing this as an artist, means that you can kind of make these links through space, geography, cartography, time, and economics, to try to actually talk about this issue of the legacy of colonialism and slavery. These places in Guyana have formed through the extraction of the wealth from these places, they have formed retail, investment, and commercial banks that we are very familiar with today like NatWest or the Royal Bank of Scotland group. An art practice is able to pull these things together that you might not have been able to do if you were coming at it from a purely political research point of view and it can be done visually to demonstrate the path of violence and exploitation through the fabric of British capitalism.

What is the role of research in your practice?

The translation of research into practice, or research into content or into art making, I think with my printmaking it is this process of sigilistic condensation of temporality or event into a symbol which can then be a focus for gnostic activational and a coordinate of revolutionary intent. I'm interested specifically in thinking about the Lakota winter Camps of pre-Colonial North America as an event based history and similarly I have become interested in John Latham’s theorisation of event based time and I think that this is central to any anti-theological, non-linear, anti-bourgeois historical methodology.
So often in my printmaking I research and then work with a revolutionary moment and try to transform that into a symbol which can point to the event but does not try to contain it or tell the whole story or attempt any kind of idealistic historical totality. I think that with the diagrams I have been making the research is the work. The whole process is one of making clear of elucidating, uncovering, and unravelling these tightly wound and carefully concealed narratives of state violence, financial and economic violence, and of historic origins of wealth in radicalised colonial violence and oppression. In that case it is less a process of translation and more a process of uncovering.

What artists have influenced you?

In my printmaking I relate to cultures of radical printmaking: like the 17th Century print-works of the Diggers and the Levellers, the British satirists of the late 18th Century, the small press counter cultural printmakers of the 20th Century, and the publications and dissemination of artwork in that way, and the early 19th Century radical printmakers like Thomas Buick and William Blake. The notions around William Blake's work of the small scale and mass production as well as the politics of small scale production and what that can mean. The idea of this small scale thing being something that can be a part of a conversation, a gift that can be passed on is something that is important to me. The gift of solidarity when I give out a print during a strike or this idea of a small scale communication which can be a kernel or seed of a new beginning in a revolutionary moment, created through this small scale print production interaction.
I am also interested in this notion of trade union banner making and that whole history which goes together with my interest in folk music or traditional English music. Thinking about it as music of the working class and the culture of the working class. Trade union banners were often made by someone from the mining or steel workers community. Later on in the late Victorian era they become farmed out to professional banner makers and I am interested in the relation between the two. I am also interested in the ornamentation of the banners and the politics of ornamentation in terms of class politics, claiming success of the working class and taking that away from the realms of bourgeois culture.
Other artists that have interested me are Joseph Beuys, he is hugely important to me. The ideas of social sculpture and his eclectic practice and the ways he conceives a performance and politics. People like Paul Nash as well, Cara Walker and how she deals with print and sculpture, Eric Ravilious, Diego Rivera, John T. Biggers and his muralism and his links with the civil rights and Black power movement.