How to Make and Unmake a Monster is a new body of work and video installation which examines the relationship between conceptual and physical “thresholds”, the “physics of Blackness” and the creation of monsters.
Underpinning this new work is Anderson’s position that “thresholds” birth “monsters”. The contested monster in this instance is the Black African diasporic body. Readings of Lightness and Darkness, Black and White, the savage and civilised, have had the distinct effect of casting one thing as moral antagonist to another, amoral thing, or perhaps, one as “being”; the antagonist to a “thing” or “non-being”. Paradoxically, once through a threshold of becoming that “thing”, it becomes a quantum physics, a speculative or science-fictional equation to unmake one’s non-being and return “home” through the threshold of origin.
Thus, African diasporic people are, as Dionne Brand suggests “consigned in that tyranny, to the status of, “non-being”” for infinity, and our ‘being’, a frozen silhouette, in a door frame, or over a ledge, peering into or out of some reality, illusion or abyss, illegible, nondescript, unknowable – a myth.