The Remix series began with a simple thought that kept looping back on itself: Where do we really come from? and what storeis do we keep telling ourselves which are outdated for the 21 century. I grew up Black and British. And through my dad i was Bajan (we don’t say Barbadian), and for most of my life that felt like the whole story. Like many Caribbean descendants, the idea of “origin” stopped at those islands lost in Caribbean sea. That was our world. That was the culture we lived, the food we ate, the accents we knew. Africa felt distant, not denied, but abstracted. It was (and still is somewhat) something you knew in theory but not in practice.

Through DNA testing, I learned that my father’s family line traces back to a small region in and around what is now Sierra Leone. And I say “what is now” very intentionally. When my ancestors were taken, Sierra Leone didn’t exist as a country. Borders came later, drawn by Europe, agreed by institutions like the League of Nations, and imposed onto millions of people who never needed those lines to understand where they belonged.

So my connection to Sierra Leone is not cultural or lived. It’s cellular. It’s in the blood and bones that make me up, but not in the life I’ve lived. That tension, that belonging and not belonging, knowing and not knowing is, what sits at the heart of Remix.

When I travelled to Sierra Leone, I didn’t go searching for home. I didn’t expect recognition or familiarity. What I carried was curiosity, and maybe a quiet sense of responsibility to look, to witness, to understand whatever was there. Or whatever wasn’t.

The people I photographed weren’t stand-ins for history or symbols of ancestry. They are everyday people living out their own lives, (as we do,) largely in the very part of the world where they happen to have been be born. Sonder . Individuals with their own lives, their own stories, their own faces that refused to be reduced to an “origin point.”

The Remix process takes those photographs and treats them the same way identity often feels: fragmented, pulled apart, reorganised, and reassembled into something new. I break the image into a grid, pull sections away from each other, distort them, shift them, then rebuild the face piece by piece. What emerges is recognisably human, but not quite whole, or maybe its whole in a different way. (John Agard) That feeling mirrors what it is to be part of a diaspora: to know your story in fragments, to inherit histories that don’t always line up neatly, to carry a past that is both yours and unreachable.

There are echoes here of the way people were selected, sorted, and transported during the transatlantic slave trade. What we have on one level is; a history rooted in categorisation and dehumanisation. But Remix isn’t a literal retelling. It’s about how identity moves across time: broken apart, flattened, reimagined, misunderstood, and then pieced back together again. It’s about the gap between being seen as part of a group “Africans,” “Caribbeans,” “Black” and also “British” in relation to the broader reality that every face holds its own universe.

Looking at these portraits now, I realise the past never stays still. Each time I return to the work, something shifts: My interpretation, my understanding, even my sense of myself. The past changes as you re-examine it, and in doing so, it reshapes the future you imagine.

The Remix series sits inside that movement. It doesn’t offer answers or resolve the tension between origin and identity. Instead, it makes room for complexity: for the stories we tell ourselves that are fragmented yet full, for histories that are incomplete but still powerful, and for the idea that where we come from is never a single place, but something layered, living, and continuously being remade.

Nathan Samuel

November 2025