in-conversation

It matters what thoughts think thoughts.
It matters what knowledges know knowledges.
It matters what relations relate relations.
It matters what worlds world worlds.
It matters what stories tell stories.

–Donna Haraway, Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene

“Mr Palomar is standing on the shore, looking at a wave. Not that he is lost in contemplation of the waves. <…> it is not the ‘waves’ that he means to look at, but just one individual wave <…> Mr Palomar sees a wave rise in the distance, grow, approach, change form and colour, fold over itself, break, vanish, and flow again. At this point, he could convince himself that he has concluded the operation he had set out to achieve, and he could go away.

But it is very difficult to isolate one wave, separating it from the wave immediately following it, which seems to push it and at times overtakes it and sweeps it away; just as it is difficult to separate that one wave from the wave that precedes it and seems to drag it towards the shore, unless it turns against its follower as if to arrest it.

Then if you consider the breadth of the wave parallel to the shore, it is hard to decide where the advancing front extends regularly and where it is separated and segmented into independent waves, distinguished by their speed, shape, force, direction.

In other words, you cannot observe a wave without bearing in mind the complex features that concur in shaping it and the other, equally complex ones that the wave itself originates.”

Calvino, Italo. "Reading a Wave". In Mr Palomar. (London: Random House), 1999.

“The word gaze only applies to water. To look into this water was to look into the world, or what I thought was the world, because the sea gave one an immediate sense of how large the world was, how magnificent and how terrifying”.

Brand, Dionne. “Water”. In A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001.

“The word gaze only applies to water. To look into this water was to look into the world, or what I thought was the world, because the sea gave one an immediate sense of how large the world was, how magnificent and how terrifying”.

“Water extends embodiment in time – body, to body, to body. Water in this sense is facilitative and directed towards the becoming of other bodies”.

Neimanis, Astrida. “Introduction: Figuring Bodies of Water”. In Bodies of Water. Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.

“ process of transformation never ceases: water is always undergoing change, movement and progress. Captured in a cup or pond or lake, it evaporates or escapes and runs away: it is always physically flowing from one place to another in streams, torrents, waves and currents”.

Strang, Victoria. “Common Sense: Water, Sensory Experience and Generation of Meaning”. Jornal of Material Culture, 10:92, (2005).

“as an abstract, isomorphic, measurable quantity that may be reduced to its fundamental unit – a molecule of H2O – and represented as the substance that flows in the hydrologic cycle”.

Linton, Jamie. "Fixing the Flow: The Things We Make of Water". In What Is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction. Vancouver, Toronto: UBC Press, 2010.

"human encounters with the sea (and I add with water) are, of necessity, distanced and partial”

Steinberg, Philip E. “Of Other Seas: Metaphors and Materialities in Maritime Regions”. Atlantic Studies. Vol. 10, no. 2 (2013).

“instead of seeing the ocean as a decodable structure that determines thought, think of it as a dynamic milieu whose characteristics manifest by actively moving within it (as a human, octopus, plankton, or other) and through mediated forms of contact”.

Jue, Melody. "Thinking Through Seawater". In Wild Blue Media. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020.

Images:
John Constable RA, Rainstorm over the Sea, ca. 1824-1828, at Royal Academy, London.
Gustave Courbet, The Wave, ca. 1869, at National Galleries, Edinburgh.
Théodore Géricault, Sailboat on a Raging Sea, ca. 1818–1819, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los-Angeles.
Claude Monet, Impression, Soleil Levant, 1872, Musée Marmottan Monet.
Katsushika Hokusai, Under the Wave off Kanagawa, ca. 1830–32, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

‘Sound comes to the rescue of thought (…) forcing it to vibrate, loosening up its organized or petrified body.’

Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare, p. 82

‘By sound I mean sounds, voices and aurality– all that might fall within or touch on auditive phenomena, whether this involves actual sonic and auditive events, or ideas about sound and listening; sounds actually heard or heard in myth; sounds heard by everyone or imagined by one person alone; or sounds as they fuse with the sensorium as a whole.’

Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, p. 3, quoted in Eleni Ikoniadou “A Sonic Theory Unsuitable for Human Consumption”, (Parallax, 23:3, 2017), p. 253

‘By reimagining the Transatlantic Slave Trade as a fiction of enforced mutation, the Drexciya mythos opened, and continues to open, a speculative space for the reimagining of the post-human condition, and for questions of becoming, origin and mutation in relation to capitalism, finance and futurity.’

Kodwo Eshun, ‘Drexciya as Spectre’, AQUATOPIA, p.138

‘Hearing is concerned with interiors, vision is concerned with surfaces. . . . hearing tends toward subjectivity, vision tends toward objectivity. . . . hearing is a sense that immerses us in the world, vision is a sense that removes us from it.’

Johnathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, (2003), p. 15 quoted in Stefan Helmreich, "Submarine Cyborgs” p. 218

I, too, become a memory of the future
–UMBILIC

Daniel Kojo Schrade SoundBridge (2018)
oil, acrylic & charcoal on canvas

Daniel Kojo Schrade Afronaut-7LO5 (2005)
oil, acrylic & charcoal on canvas

Atlantic is a Sea of Bones, Tourmaline (2018)

all images are screenshots taken from the film available here https://visualaids.org/blog/aerb-tourmaline-statement

the tides are never the same, but the fact of their repetion is. They turn and return, not perfectly cyclical, but with an accumulation of time, of material, of water.

"The Water Is Waiting": Water Tidalectics, and Materiality, T. Mars McDougall, in liquid blackness, volume III, issue 6 (2016)

Accessing Water

in coversation with Natasha Ruwona

For this event we discuss our individual and collective practices of/with water, and offer readings of the films UMBILIC and Look Then Below.

Our responses oscillate around themes of: locatedness, sonic/listening, narratives, and temporality.

This event has been programmed by Natasha Ruwona as part of their online screening programme on David Dale Gallery’s website during June 2021. This series of monthly online screenings has been co-programmed by LUX Scotland and David Dale Gallery.

Natasha Ruwona UMBILIC (2021)
film stills

DREXCIYA
logo

'The formal structures of time collapse, regress to mud, and space is pushed back and forth until it bends to be trampled by the pulsations of alien music, while the thinking space becomes seasick'

Kodwo Eshun quoted in Holger Schulze Sonic Fiction p. 128

'My Afronauts are dislocated characters who create and control their image spaces themselves. They claim the power to renegotiate ascriptions of identity. The roots of my painting lie in gestural abstraction, and the presence of Afronauts in these otherwise homogenous paintings has an unsettling effect. It transforms my work into painting that comes from the “spaces in-between.”'

Daniel Kojo Schrade in conversation with Henriette Gunkel (Goldsmiths University), Futures and Fictions public programme 2015

Ben Rivers Look Then Below (2019)
film still

the loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them. So it is tempting to fill in the gaps and to provide closure where there is none. To create a space for mourning where it is prohibited. To fabricate a witness to a death not much noticed.

'Venus in Two Acts', Saidiya Hartman, in Small Axe 26, June 2008, p.8

Drexciya returned to the eighteenth century to envision the Black Atlantic as a liquid graveyard. The effect was not to deny the veracity of the Transatlantic Slave Trade but to produce a speculation capable of generating degrees of temporal anomaly in the present.

Kodwo Eshun, ‘Drexciya as Spectre’, in AQUATOPIA, p.144

Lee Scratch Perry in a shiny hat
photographed by Pit Buehler

‘They’re tapping into survival strategies that were, and still are, existential in the depths of the (Black) Atlantic, in outer space, or in social spaces that aren’t clearly defined – in spaces in-between. The Afronaut expands the technology by cultural and spiritual means in order to navigate the countless terrestrial and extraterrestrial in-between spaces.’

Daniel Kojo Schrade in conversation with Henriette Gunkel (2015)

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