Water/Log (extracts)

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Water/Log (extracts)

BY ADRIENNE VAN EEDEN-WHARTON

Water/Log is an ongoing body of work that follows material and geopolitical flows in the enduring aftermaths of colonialism, extractivism and military-industrial expansion. From the mainland shores and islands along the southern African coast, to the South Atlantic, South Indian and Southern oceans, the sub-Antarctic islands and, finally, to the frozen ‘end/s of the earth’: Antarctica. With the histories of the ‘harvesting’ of whales, seals, seabirds and guano as entry points, Water/Log – alongside the earlier project Salt-Water-Bodies: From an Atlas of Loss – grapples with complicity and heightened precarity, the unfinished labours of postmortem mourning-as-witnessing, and a yearning towards more wake-full and just planetary futures.

Afterimages and aftersounds. Stories told in pieces, in parts.

Adrienne van Eeden-Wharton: As an artist-re/searcher, Adrienne is passionate about finding ways of re/storying fraught and entangled terraqueous, multispecies relatings. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, on the Antarctica, Africa and the Arts project which is funded by the National Research Foundation as part of the South African National Antarctic Programme; it is a nested project of the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South initiative at Wits University.