Aquaesthetics
PANEL 17
Aquaesthetics
Wednesday, 6 July 2022
11:45 am - 1:15 pm
Location ROOM 101A
Panel Speakers:
Sarah McCarry
Sarah Wade & Pandora Syperek
Rosanna Carver, Elisia Nghidishange, Gina Figueira, Helen Harris, JuliART Hango, Libita Sibungu, Mei Mwevi, Natache Lilonga, Ndeenda Shivute
Moderated by: Marrigje Paijmans
The Monster Book
Sarah McCarry
The Netherlands is home to the largest historical sailing fleet in the world, comprising around 400 ships. Many of them are over a century old. Once whalers or fishing boats or cargo ships, essential cells in the vast organism of capital, they now ferry tourists and students through the world’s oceans, returning every winter like migrating birds to their home ports. The Monster Book is a hybrid creative nonfiction/fiction project, bringing together the complex economic and environmental histories of these much-mythologized vessels with my own experience sailing around Spitsbergen as a resident artist with the Arctic Circle project and later crewing a traditional Dutch tall ship on the Baltic and North Seas. The same ships that once carried whalers to slaughter now bring tourists to photograph the whales that are left; whales that are only still living because these days their bodies are worth more alive. Traditional Dutch charter sailing is a complex mycorrhizal network of booking agents, captain-owners, captains, owners, sailors, service workers, dreamers, geniuses, fools, and drunks. But sailors themselves have a long history of utopian practices and resistance to hierarchical order and the demands of capital. What kinds of stories do these ships hold in their hulls? What does it mean to participate in booming industry of climate-collapse tourism in the Arctic and Antarctic? Why do so many human beings feel drawn to the sea across so many different centuries? Do whales have ghosts? These are the kinds of questions I am exploring with this project.
Sarah McCarry (@sarahmccarry / sarahmccarry.net) is the author of the novels All Our Pretty Songs, Dirty Wings, and About A Girl, , the editor and publisher of the chapbook series guillotine, and the Executive Director of the Eve Kososfky Sedgwick Foundation. Her work has been shortlisted for the Lambda Award, the Norton Award, and the Tiptree Award, and she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Joint Quantum Institute, the Launchpad Writers' Workshop, and The Arctic Circle.
Artists Collecting the Oceanic Archive
Sarah Wade & Pandora Syperek
In recent years, artists have addressed mounting ecological threats to the oceans, Indigenous perspectives on the sea in the face of colonial histories, the legacies and imaginaries of the transatlantic slave trade, migration routes as sites of cultural memory and technological surveillance, and the urgent interrelations therein. In this work, the sea has often catalysed an ‘archival impulse’ (Foster 2004) in artists who strive to recover lost, erased and overlooked histories and species using collected artefacts, both informatic and material. As such, they have moved away from earlier exhibitionary conceptions of the sea as a heterogeneous repository and towards directed archival processes into its violent histories and calamitous present moment. These include Tau Lewis’s gathering of discarded textiles to reconfigure and re-materialise the myths emerging out of the Middle Passage; Isuma’s cumulation (Asinnajaq 2019) of Inuit voices to form a variegated mass response to the mining of Baffin Island; AK Dolven’s search for the sounds of endangered marine species; and the collecting practices of sea creatures themselves in Shimabuku’s Octopus Stone (2013). We examine how discarded waste, overlooked marine creatures, silenced voices and the submerged sounds of the deep have been uncovered by artists and incorporated into works that challenge dominant anthropocentric, Eurocentric and ocularcentric perspectives and hierarchies to pluralise and politicise the oceanic archive. Within these diverse practices of collecting, we argue, these artists confront intergenerational, ecological and more-than-human trauma by mobilising an oceanic archival impulse.
Pandora Syperek is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Loughborough University London and Visiting Fellow at the V&A Research Institute. Her research examines the intersections of science, gender and the nonhuman within modern and contemporary art and cultures of display. Oceans-related publications include texts on the ecological aesthetics of ‘Hope’, the Natural History Museum’s blue whale skeleton, and on queering the Blaschka glass models of marine invertebrates. She is co-editor of Oceans (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press, forthcoming) and a special issue of the Journal of Curatorial Studies on ‘Curating the Sea’ (2020), both with Sarah Wade.
Sarah Wade is an Art Historian and Lecturer in Museum Studies at University of East Anglia where she teaches on modules spanning art history, museum studies, curatorial studies and cultural heritage. Her research focuses on human-animal relations in contemporary art, curatorial practice and exhibitions, with a focus on ecological concerns. She has published on the sea in the work of Marcus Coates, Mark Dion, Isabella Rossellini and in curatorial practice more broadly. She is co-editor of Oceans (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press, forthcoming) and a special issue of the Journal of Curatorial Studies on ‘Curating the Sea’ (2020), with Pandora Syperek.
The sea, my other land
Rosanna Carver, Elisia Nghidishange, Gina Figueira, Helen Harris, JuliART Hango, Libita Sibungu, Mei Mwevi, Natache Lilonga, Ndeenda Shivute
This presentation will share the work of the project "The sea, my other land." This ongoing project brings together a transdisciplinary and non-hierarchical collaborative of artists, activists and academics. During colonial rule, Namibia’s ocean was characterised by exploitation: its coasts were enclaved for diamond mining and its waters were overfished, echoing the colonial dispossession experienced on land. The ocean was also a site of offshore incarceration when, during the Herero and Nama genocide, ships and islands were used as prisons. This has led to disenfranchisement, with the ocean often framed as a wild place that is no longer the domain of Namibians. Individuals remain marginalised from the coast and ocean, an exclusion that stems from colonial and apartheid histories. Despite ongoing negotiations over land reform and decolonial engagement onshore, the ocean has remained overlooked. The adjacent coasts also retain a spatial legacy and a racialized dominance. This is enabling new and continued industrial exploitation in this so-called “neglected space.” “The sea, my other land” functions as a way of beginning to reclaim this space, addressing what Namibia’s ocean scape means across temporalities. It is a space of representation and resistance. Artists involved in this project have been reflecting on relations with/in the ocean with the aim of creating an exhibition that surfaces the knowledges and histories that coalesce in its depths, amplifying voices and relationships that have been previously excluded from this space.
Biography
“The sea, my other land” is a project that is co-created by a non-hierarchical (as far as possible, recognising power dynamics) collaborative of female-identifying artists, activists, and academics. The project is co-facilitated by StartArt Art Gallery in Namibia, and it is hoped that an exhibition will be held in Namibia at the end of 2022. Alongside the development of artistic outputs, the collective has met every two weeks since the summer of 2021 for an online workshop. Each artist has taken it in turns to prepare, present, and facilitate an internal workshop however they wish. This has involved exploring themes through the sharing of ideas and works in progress, sound pieces, film screenings and stories, to guided ‘oceanic’ meditation. We intend that these recorded workshops will be adapted into a publicly available speaker series.
The members of this collaborative are (in alphabetical order):
Elisia Nghidishange a printmaker, sculptor and mixed media artist. Elisia’s work explores relationships between the pursuit of wealth and the place of tradition in a contemporary and cosmopolitan society, and between gender and tradition in this context. Gina Figueira a curator and co-founder of StartArt Art Gallery. Her interests lie in the nexus of contemporary culture and heritage. Thinking with the ocean Gina is exploring what this means to work as a curator and as a participant in such a project.
Helen Harris an artist, curator and co-founder of StartArt Art Gallery whose practice centres on local knowledge creation and preservation.
JuliART Hango a feminist performer and photographer. Julia (JuliART) is an intersectional visual artivist whose artworks explore three-dimensional space, and she uses her body and that of anyone else who she photographs as a weapon against patriarchy.
Libita Sibungu a British-Namibian artist who works across sound and performance. Libita is the 2022 winner of the UK’s Visual Arts Fellowship. Libita’s previous work includes Quantum Ghost (2019), a series of large-scale photograms, sound installations and live performances. Mapping a journey through archives related her heritage, it connects the mining regions of Namibia and Cornwall, revealing how the echoes of colonialism and diasporic migration reverberate through the deep-time of geology.
Mel Mwevi a Namibian musician, poet and performance artist currently based in LA. Mel is particularly interested in exploring soundscapes for this project.
Natache Iilonga a practicing architect and member of the Decolonsing Space Group, a fluid collective of academics, artists and architects who work on projects related to de-colonial aims.
Ndeenda Shivute a cultural practitioner who works as a curator and artist. Ndeenda currently works at the National Art Gallery of Namibia.
Rosanna Carver an Ocean Leaders Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on seabed mining and varying sovereignties in the marine scape (in Namibia, South Africa and Canada).
Vitjitua Ndjiharine a multi-media conceptual artist who produces creative work about the reclamation and transcendence of history. Vitjitua’s approach draws inspiration from history, anthropology, ethnography and visual culture to link the past and present, through storytelling.