SEA(E)SCAPES
PANEL 4
SEA(E)SCAPES
Monday, 4 July 2022
11:45 am - 13:15 pm
Location: University Theater
Panel Speakers
Ifor Duncan
Ewa Macura-Nnandi
Zuzanna Dziuban
Moderated by: Leonie Stevens
The Shipwreck Starts Here
Ifor Duncan
This performance lecture explores Italy’s system of reception for asylum seekers during the COVID pandemic and the controversial embarkation of people onto quarantine boats. The performance is interwoven with excerpts — underwater footage, hydrophone and field recordings — from my recent film Il naufragio inizia da qui. Through the conceptual lens of a shipwreck society, the film starts from protests in the seaside town of Amantea, Calabria, where a group of people locked down in a “reception centre” contracted Covid. The protest had the intention of interning the group onto quarantine vessels — repurposed cruise ships. During a period in which solidarity at sea and on land is under assault, the film explores how a nationalist imaginary of detention aspires to return those who arrive to seek refuge by boat, under precarious conditions, back to the sea and to the risk of shipwreck once more. Under the auspices of a system of hospitality the sea becomes a space of floating detention and incarceration. Adapting the eco-pedagogical phrase “Il mare inizia da qui” (the sea starts here), the two-channel film uses disjunctures of sound and image to produce an immersion in the sea whilst on land and on the land from the position of the sea. With these disjunctures I will reflect on how different actors – asylum seekers and activists challenging detention practices – perceive their relationship with the sea. I ask whether it is also possible to say that from the land ‘il naufragio inizia da qui’? or does the shipwreck start here?
Ifor Duncan is a writer and inter-disciplinary researcher who focuses on political violence and watery ecosystems. He is Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities, specifically the “blue humanities” at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice. Ifor holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, entitled Hydrology of the Powerless and is developing a book project Necro-Hydrology, a concept which exists where the knowledge and corresponding management of water in all its forms is produced as adversarial to marginalised communities and positions human and environmental justice as always intrinsically connected. Ifor is a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art
“Drifting, not moving”: Refugees, Seawater & Buoyant Lives
Ewa Macura-Nnandi
Wolfgang Fischer’s 2018 film titled Styx, which premiered at the 68th Berlin International Film Festival, tells the story of Rieke, a German emergency doctor working in Cologne who sets out on a solo voyage from Gibraltar to the Ascension Island. Yet the narrative revolves around a drifting fish trawler brimming with desperate refugees which Rieke encounters on the high seas off Cape Verde. It is the helpless vessel adrift, itself an iconic image of the brutal realities of Europe’s border regimes, which becomes the focal point of the narrative registering the violence of the legal infrastructures imposed on maritime spaces but also resistance to this violence. While not an unproblematic representation of refugees in how it deploys a familiar repertoire of images and vocabularies (black victims/white saviours and a moral dilemma the latter must face), the film nevertheless allows to explore drift as a political archive which registers both the livingness of the sea and the persistent living of refugees in the face of death. A mode of inhabiting and claiming the sea by those excluded from its legalized realm, drifting as represented in Fischer’s film raises a number of significant political questions: how do maritime protocols define what is and what is not movement (i.e. the legal production of movement and its (mis)recognition); how does the buoyancy of water (increasingly deployed for the production of what has been called volumetric sovereignty [Ong]) get to be claimed by refugees against the sovereignty games states play in maritime contexts; how and to what effects do drifting refugees themselves become aqueous beings, sharing affinities with water’s materiality?
Ewa Macura-Nnamdi is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literary Studies (University of Silesia, Poland). Her main research interests include postcolonial Anglophone literatures of Africa and refugees and migration in cinema and literature. She is currently working on a grant project titled Fictions of Water: Refugees and the Sea. She is also guest-co-editing a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities on Water.
The Mediterranean as Forensic Archive
Zuzanna Dziuban
This paper draws from Ian Chambers’ framing of the Mediterranean as a ‘fluid archive’ (2014) harbouring an ‘excluded past and subjectivities’. It looks at the Mediterranean through the prism of the material reality of the European border deaths, casting the sea as fluid archive of an unfolding violence of the European border regime. This archive is considered here not only as fluid but also as forensic, as a landscape of crime committed against the migrant body. Adopting an extended meaning of forensics as a means to reshape the field of visibility and the politics of knowledge production and accountability, I will introduce and analyze several art projects. These projects work from different perspectives and positions against the ostensibly obfuscating (de-archiving) capacities of the sea, which render the violence invisible. First, the paper will look at projects that, resorting to sophisticated surveillance technologies, invert the gaze of the state(s) in order to see critically, collecting evidence recovered or extracted from the sea. Then the paper moves on to propose a new epistemological perspective developed from the position of vulnerability – one that penetrates into the water and adopting a “fish-eye episteme” transforms the Mediterranean into a forensically rich and complex epistemic resource: a fluid, dynamic and processual environment in which human remains undergo transformations but which is also transformed by the presence of human remains. Here, the epistemological vulnerability rests on the archiving/de-archiving capacities of water, rendering the former an ethical and political claim.
Zuzanna Dziuban holds a PhD in Cultural Studies. She is a senior Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History of the Austrian Academy of Sciences within the ERC project Globalized Memorial Museums. Her research focuses on the material, affective and political afterlives of the Holocaust and other instances of political violence, and the politics of dead bodies.