afternoon
artistic program
followed by drinks
ARTISTIC PROGRAM
FILM
POETRY
PERFORMANCE
Monday, 4 July 2022
2:45 - 5:15 pm
Location: University Theater
Artists Presenting:
Laura Magnusson (film)
Gitanjali Pyndiah (poetry)
Simone Johnson (poetry)
Oupa Sibeko (performance)
blue
Laura Magnusson
Blue (dir. Laura Magnusson, 2019) is an autobiographical 12-minute film by Laura Magnusson, shot entirely underwater, 70 feet beneath the surface of Cozumel, Mexico. It is a visual, embodied testimony to the director’s felt experiences of trauma resulting from sexual violence. Alone on an ocean “tundra,” wearing a protective clamshell-like parka and winter boots, a woman (Magnusson) arduously moves, exhales, and burrows through the afterlife of sexual violence. The medium of water, with its destructive potential and capacity to heal, in addition to the weight of an air tank, with its promise of survival and threat of impending emptiness, hold the fullness of traumatic experience. In this silent, psychic landscape, she bears witness to the complex nature of trauma and the ongoing process of healing.
Laura Magnusson (1985) is a queer Canadian artist and filmmaker based in Montréal, where she is pursuing a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University. Her interdisciplinary practice––centered on underwater research-creation, video, sculpture, and performance––investigates art as a site for testimony and witnessing to felt experiences of trauma and violence in their many interconnected forms. Magnusson has exhibited work in Canada, the United States, and across Europe. Her research is currently funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts. She holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from the University of Michigan (2019).
Reading from
unrest.in.the.nebula
Gitanjali Pyndiah
unrest.in.the.nebula is my first collection of poems it locates the kreol oceanlands in Ziwa Kuu the deep waters, misnamed ‘indian’ ocean by coloniser-enslavers, that witnessed and remember 500 years of exploitative colonisation, ecocide, extinction, militarisation and deportation, slavery, indenture, negotiated nationhood and postcolonial plantation structures.
I would like to share and discuss the collection of poems through the lens of an oceanic historiography as a visual-sonic archive. unrest.in.the.nebula draws from Black study and anti-colonial writings, queer living, ancestral tongues and fluid thoughts. it lies with the atmosphere and the ocean as literary metaphors, to disrupt the vocabulary of war and economy that characterise narratives of postcolonial nationalist history writing still seeped in systemic violence. It draws from stories in tongues of ancestors from lands continents stories that do not discover voyage arrive and settle
(usulu: planet in emakhuwa, poem 6)
an ancient story circulates on the shores of moma that seapeople across times have followed the movements of the great salt lake and travelled to the islands twelve families sustained by the ocean retell how lost at sea currents returned them to the continent to the same coastline where captured emakhuwa ancestors rebelled on ships sang and danced tufu from which they composed sega
Gitanjali Pyndiah is a London-based Mauritian researcher (PhD in Cultural Studies) and creative writer. She is currently an affiliate Art History Fellow, Indian Ocean Exchanges Program, supported by Harpur College, Binghamton University and the Getty Foundation, as well as an Associate Researcher at the Centre for Research on Slavery and Indenture (CRSI), University of Mauritius. Her research interest lie in the visual-sonic history of the Creole archipelagoes of the Indian Ocean (Mauritius, Réunion, Rodrigues, Chagos, Agalega, Tromelin and Seychelles). She also publishes essays, fiction and poetry under her pen name Gitan Djeli.
Twitter: @gitandjeli
Naomi
Simone Johnson
Read about in articles and books, seen in numerous films, found in genealogy research and felt in lineages and bloodlines, the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade remains in living memory and in local to global conversations on various scales. What if you could dive underwater off the coast of Florida or in the Mobile River in Alabama and draw a map of a sunken slave ship? What if you found actual shackles from this slave ship and other materials in the hold? There is an international network of divers, researchers and institutions locating slave shipwrecks, literal submerged history, around the world. As an artist mostly making work about water and a descendant of enslaved Africans, this work has inspired "Naomi", an early-stage multi-year writing and film project I'm working on focused on slave shipwrecks, marine archeology and mermaids (as ancestors).
Goals for this conference include 1) researching the aforementioned topics through an interdisciplinary and interspecies lens 2) weaving connections between these topics through storytelling and an artist talk and 3) contributing to memory, dialogue and knowledge production around Ocean as Archives and the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade through underwater perspectives.
By working on "Naomi" I also want to simultaneously or polychronically explore how this research can support writing old-new and creative narratives about the relationship between people of African descent and the ocean.
Simone Johnson (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and cultural worker with roots in New York City. She mostly makes work about/with water and is currently developing Water School, a forming, fluid free school for water and other earth education. She started her water art practice as a 2018 PASS Resident at Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden and Works on Water resident the same year. She continues to work on solo and collaborative work about water, as well as explore other interests including traveling and singing.
Black is Blue
Oupa Sibeko
Black is Blue (2019-ongoing) is concerned with the widespread practice of using seawater for healing and spiritual purposes. Deriving from Nguni and other traditions, this practice is linked to the ‘people of water’, usually water-based diviners, for whom the sea is a realm of ancestors, a site for spiritual cleansing and grounding; the sea holds potential to heal and its curative powers live in the water. While in the past such practices occurred at the coast, with urbanization and industrialization, the practice has been adapted and now one can purchase bottles of sea water inland. The main purpose of this project is to describe and artistically explore beliefs and practices involving bottled seawater for spiritual, health and healing purposes. Furthermore, the main purpose of this research is to present a counterpoint to canonical, conventional modes of knowledge by offering indigenous oral history as passed down onto me by my late grandmother. By describing and artistically exploring beliefs and practices involving the practice of bottling seawater for spiritual, health and healing purposes and bringing it inland by Nguni and other people of South Africa, this project is grounded in oral, spoken history that is personal, lived and embodied. Southern Africa comprises two main ethnic or linguistic groups, namely the Nguni and the Sotho-Tswana. Among both groups, water occupies a central position in belief systems. The work inspires people to embrace the myth of an inland sea as a way to rethink the urban space, who belongs in it and how they occupy it.
Oupa Sibeko is an interdisciplinary performance artist whose work moves between performance installation, photography, film and community-based activism. Oupa’s playful, often humorous and at times satirical approach deals with the matter and politics of the body as a contested site of labour, and as an object that assimilates the spirit of the moment and adapts to its environment. Enabling opportunities for affective and relational encounters using ritualistic performance and play, he seeks to critically engage approaches to the body, particularly the black male body, the history of representation and the ways in which certain subjectivities have been (and are) figured, (black) pain, (black) spectacle, (black) negation, and the ethical implications of reimaging and re-enacting pain.