The Wave

The Great Wave off Kanagawa is an iconic work by the 19th century Japanese artist Hokusai best known for his printmaking practice. The giant wave arches over, engulfing ships and towering over ice-capped views of Mount Fuji. Sea-spray fills the cloud-covered white sky as sailors brace for an inevitable shock. The work is a testament to survival as well as society’s deep interconnectedness to the sea. This dangerous and beautiful liquid planet is a source of sustenance, of travel, and of riches made by exploitation and trade. The sea is a space that proves nature’s ungovernability – its ability to give and take in instants. The work depicts the energy of great waves that tear across the sea, and has also made ripples since its production in the history of art. The Great Wave off Kanagawa was made with new pigments that had recently reached Japan from Europe, notably Prussian Blue. Hokusai’s new styles in the printing genre Ukiyo-e, depicted landscapes all over Japan and were inspired by the realistic depictions he had seen in Western Art. Hokusai’s work served as the cover to Claude Debussy’s ambient composition La Mer (1905) that marks this moment of French Japonisme. His works resonated in Europe and reached the shores of France as early as the 1860’s where impressionist artists such as Monet, Manet, Renoir, and Van Gogh referenced Hokusai as they developed the Impressionist movement that created the beginning of Modern Art.

Nature proves to us that it is alive through its tempestuous and irate manifestations. It is through these confrontations with catastrophes and other eventful phenomena that we recall that the existence of humanity, other living creatures, and the objects that surround us are conditioned by nature’s actions. From our own subjectivity these events are experienced through the confrontation between humanity and its surroundings, a relationship visually described in the huge wave off Kanagawa that threatens three fishing boats as well as its passengers. This terrifying scene is referenced by Ohan Breiding who explores this landscape as a witness of social relations, history, and politics through the reinterpretation of past events. In Blood Memories which forms part of the project Souvenir, the angered sea returns to tell the story of survival experienced by their stepmother in the great tsunami of the 26th of December 2004, who after becoming unconscious awoke to find herself floating in the middle of the sea, locking eyes with a cat who was also stranded on top of a wooden box. A series composed of 5 drawings, that refers to Hokusai, creates an abstract commentary accompanied by the stories of their relative. The relation of memory to landscape connects with Breiding’s interest in our relationship with other species and ecological conditions. From these stories, we can learn about future trials which will require interspecies collaborations and new understandings. These will influence our reactions not only to natural disasters, but also those catastrophes created by humanity that will come in the form of liminal and traumatic events.

If waves can determine the fate of a ship, a great many waves have affected the lives and identities of trans-Atlantic populations. Dedicated to the Windrush generation, Akomfrah’s Mnemosyne summons mythological passages that describe the epic sea journeys of Telemachus overlaid on rare footage of Black-British workers found in expanses of BBC archives. These images focus on what the archive ignores, the chronic invisibility of those immigrants who rebuilt the country in the post-war period. Mnemosyne is the ancient goddess of memory, also invoked by Aby Warburg in his famous bilderatlas (1925-29) in which he proposed that meshing images together, new narratives could be formed. In a similar way, Akomfrah’s expert combing of archives challenges the systematic erasure of  Black-British experience by contrasting images with frozen seas. This piece calls for a rebuttal to the systematic structural concealment of black Britain behind the veil of vast oceanic aporia.

Questioning the relationship between human beings and the world, as well as the way in which we deal with our memories and history is brought up in Ohan Breiding’s reinterpretation of the forces of water. This impulse once again crosses the narrative waves in Lauso la mare e tente’n terro by Enrique Ramírez. This film takes its title from a proverb in Provenzal meaning “Praise the sea and stay on land”, revived by the French historian Fernand Braudel in his celebrated book La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1949). Within these pages, he takes on the history of the Mediterranean sea from a new historiographic perspective and, for the first time, postulates the problem of climate change in this region. This starting point is linked in the film with the problem of rising sea levels, a phenomenon interlaced with various historical processes including the Industrial Revolution and the horror of indigenous genocides by European conquistadors. Ramírez constructs a narrative between the figure of ​​a man in the South and a woman in the North who both face the waters of the sea. Their voices speak of the past traumas which still remain hidden, the destruction of life that is occurring at much more rapid pace than the time which was necessary for it to emerge, about dark futures and the sentiment that the world we have created is incapable of solving (our) problems. Fear, pain, rage, frigidity and oblivion face oceanic waters that might one day purify these insecurities. Out of this sea emerges the understanding of our forgotten responsibility in the face of eternity.

If a wave can traverse oceanic distances that separate families, traditions, and cultures in Ohan Breiding’s Blood Memories – a wave can also be the impetus for the beginning of a journey. Moving from the Pacific to the Mediterranean brings us to a watery territory of recent grief and mass migration. In Pınar Ögrenci’s A Gentle Breeze Passed Over Us, the artist records the words of her friend Ahmed Obaid Shaqaqi, an Iraqi oud player who explains how he was forced to leave his instrument when he crossed the Mediterranean sea. The camera circles the instrument in calm waters as it dips up and down in mellow waves. It represents a past and a homeland that has been stripped away and the longing that always remains. The film confirms the widespread existence of migration and movement across the Mediterranean that has created the diverse shores of this sea through its history, and confirms that belonging in these waters is not only for those who were born here, but for all those who have passed through.

John Akomfrah’s recovery of historic archives that gives accounts of unjust conditions and oppression, is also a method used in María Dalberg’s Uncontainable Truth, where voices that have been silenced are recreated through new audiovisual and performative exercises. The film brings Dalberg‘s investigation of Dulsmál, an ancient Icelandic word used to describe the criminal code when women hid their pregnancies only to have a stillborn birth or who died immediately. This legality was active between the 16th and 19th centuries in Iceland which in many cases ended with the death penalty. The women were obliged to inform the authorities of their pregnancies but often suffered harsh punishments giving them a reason to cover it up. Married women who had sex outside of their marriage also experienced punishment. Based on different archives from those years that collect these cases, the artist reveals the situation of women who were forced to carry out hard work, such as washing clothes for the upper classes. They lived in precarious conditions in the inhospitable and frozen lands of the island, contexts fostering sexual violence even from their closest relatives. Taking the stories of 5 women who went to court and sentenced later, Dalberg combines contrasting shots of women wrapped in red clothing who perform exhausting journeys through cold snowy landscapes and the washing work in Icelandic waters, with the declamation of a poem by the artist herself that includes excerpts from the statements of the accused. It enacts a linguistic maneuver that amplifies the eternal separation between what is thought and what is spoken, this time it embodies the searching to restore those hidden voices and misunderstood lives that were extinguished by systems of (in)justice and the very writing of history. Through this poetic performance, these stories of suffering are materialized and raised, which exemplifies the continuing suffering that thousands of women experience today under new impositions and restrictions: implicit, camouflaged or declared, but certainly protected by a cultural and social system that ignores and forgets according to its convenience.

If the sea can serve as an outlet for mass migrations, it is precisely why, in some cases, it is intensely monitored and controlled. Moving from the Black Atlantic references of John Akomfrah’s Mnemosyne to the Baltic Sea, Ieva Epnere’s Sea of Living Memories is a video installation of stories collected from residents of towns on the Baltic sea nearby her hometown of Liepaja, an important Naval base and Baltic sea-port in Latvia. These shores have long been liminal boundaries between geopolitical orders and continue to be contested waters. In today’s context of renewed violence in the post-Soviet sphere, the role of these memories of seascapes serves as a chilling reminder of the long road travelled. Through the multi-screen installation, the narrative focuses on the individual stories that are often forgotten in the wake of mega-narratives and nation-building. In the clip presented here, Irina, a resident of the coastal village of Pavilosta, recounts her memories of the sea since childhood. Coming from a mixed family both Latvian and Russian, her relationship with the sea changes according to the laws of the Soviet Union. In one instance it was illegal to take pictures of the sea as it could serve as a means for or a fantasy of escape and cameras were immediately confiscated by guards; in another, young men use the sand to prank Soviet soldiers; at another point in time, a relative’s visit puts in stark contrast the sea-based Latvian culture with the landlocked Russian experience as her grandmother witnesses the waves for the first time.

Flows of cultural problematics and questions present in Enrique Ramírez’s Lauso la mare e tente’n terro cross the sea like a powerful character full of pain and contradictions. They travel vast maritime geographies and cross points of conflict before reaching David Horvitz’ somewhere in between the jurisdiction of time. These include arbitrary rules that dictate complex structures of relation and submit localities and societies to abstractions that distort spatial and temporal dimensions along with the perception of identity. One of these jurisdictions is the imaginary division of the globe into meridians. Longitudes run from the north pole to the south, and those that cross arbitrary locations both on sea and on land determine geographical distinctions in our perception of time. Horvitz questions this administration through 32 glass receptacles that gather Pacific waters. These samples were collected during a boat trip through one of these imaginary limits -the meandering time zone on the edge of the International Date Line and the latest time zone in the world- that runs between Alaska, the Gambier Islands, and French Polynesia. This fiction of time, drawn onto the waters of the Pacific Ocean was exhibited in a space divided by lines into North and South together with a letter sent to the US government requesting that the city of Los Angeles function on the Alaskan time zone rather than Pacific Standard Time for the duration of the exhibition. This ironic gesture towards the policies that administer the globe, show how time is essentially a flow, a single wave that washes over the earth each day.

The sea is a rich source for literature and poetry as seen in Enrique Ramírez’s Lauso la Mare e Tente’n Terra, from ancient texts to the present day, its rhythms have reached an abundance of printed pages. In Farrés Duran’s film, he recreates a journey described by the classic Catalan novelist Josep Pla in the short story “Un viatge frustrat” (A Frustrated Journey) – a journey which was only ever completed in writing. The author spent many hours at sea and may have completed parts, but never in the same timeline as the journey he described. The video contrasts narrative filled with emotion, tragedy, and adventure, with the often banal reality of the touristic northern Catalan coast. Made together with the collector Josep Inglada, the artist is content to be dragged along by a larger vessel as he shares his artistic process with his patron. The film is a humorous exercise full of metaphors about the role of the artist in contemporary society. Filmed on the quiet Mediterranean coast, the artist fills his day with lazy and bureaucratic tasks of artistic production.

An oud balancing on the sea, visually accompanies the story of an Iraqi musician who is forced to leave his wooden equipment during his emigration from Turkey to Austria in Pınar Öğrenci’s A Gentle Breeze Passed Over Us. This instrument similarly faces displacement in Naufrage (Shipwreck) by Mounir Gouri. In the Algerian artist’s video performance the oud differs in finding itself inside of a small boat, and through this it tells stories of migration, unpredictable and unpromising futures, and of strenuous social and political contexts. The camera shows us Ali, a musician in the bay of an unrecognizable city. He interprets touching tones that create a melody to which Hichem, a young dancer, joins. His neck shows a carbon-drawn crescent moon and star, symbols which many associate with Islam, but which has been used by many countries such as in the Algerian flag. Once on the boat, he removes the clothing from his upper body to reveal other barely legible illustrations, among them is the word “hope.” Hichem’s movements are strict but sinuous, he appears to seek harmony with Ali’s hypnotic music but also confrontation. We witness this meeting on the sea in which we can only infer more underlying information, such as what has drawn these characters together. What is visible is the poetry ascribed to the sea and to these shores through various layers of human expression. These landscapes seem to sharply whisper that this swaying of the ocean contains within it an infinite contradiction of hope and hopelessness. Circumstances often bring people to create unrealistic expectations in the face of inevitable destinies.

In Pınar Öğrenci’s A Gentle Breeze Passed Over Us the harsh divide and migratory routes towards the West from the non-West are pictured floating on fluid watery borders. Yet the waves that sometimes reach the borders of Europe are experienced more often through the circulation of material and capital that departs from wealthy nations to extract profit from invisibilized workers. Bertille Bak’s Boussa From the Netherlands is a portrait of the people behind the labour that supports luxurious European lifestyles from other continents. Following the route taken by Dutch shrimp, Bak’s scenery are the humble homes and villages of Moroccan working women. In contrast with the hot and earthy environment, the women dress in furs to work for hours in refrigerated environments where they peel the shells off of miniature shrimp to a repetitive soundtrack of a Dutch woman’s voice keeping the pace with a rapid and methodical “een, twee, drie.” The flesh of the shrimp are transported back to the Netherlands for fancy dinners and canapes while the shells are used for cosmetic products. The only material traces left in Morocco therefore are the round beads of the shrimp eyes. Bak’s materialization of this invisible labour is collected in souvenir bottles typically filled with colored sand and acquired in busy touristic markets. Lacquered in cosmetics, the eyes are prepared through tedious and labour-intensive processes. The bottles are an absurd exercise in abundance and overproduction where the baked and colored shrimp stare back at their European observers. 

The determined effort to repair and honor the hundreds of women whose lives and voices were silenced in María Dalberg’s audiovisual narrative weaves through water and textile as witnesses. The dark historic times referenced in the work brings forth an allegory that introduces water as a living archive informed by relations with the human body and other forms as they produce history. In Intersecting Mediterranean(s), Elizabeth Gallón Droste and Daniela Medina Poch Droste use long textiles submerged in waters that have been positioned by the eurocentric gaze as the focal point of a cultural identity that needs to restore its heterogeneity. The displacement of singularity for plurality evokes a multiplicity of identities and imaginaries, just like the many fresh and salty waters that feed into the Mediterranean. This work is composed of two parts, the first is Intersecting Mediterranean(s) from its Regional Rivers I which is an installation with 36 meters of fabric and a series of multichannel audio pieces. The second is Intersecting Mediterranean(s) from its Regional Rivers II, an installation of a video-performance that soaks events and choral discourses that reveal the complex and intricate encounters that reflect the particularities of vastly differing contexts translated into memory through water.

If María Dalberg’s Uncontainable Truth is an ode to historical injustices suffered by women – surrounded by the harshness of waves metaphorically crashing onto rough volcanic rock – Rosana Antolí’s I Will Give You the Sea investigates current theories of hydro-feminism and the liquid nature of the uncontainable sea. The body is a capsule that has evolved to contain the sea within its liquid arteries. All life on earth holds its origins in the chemical soup of primordial oceans that fluctuates in circadian rhythmic tides to the pull of the moon – like a woman’s fluctuations of the approximate length of the lunar cycle in a liquid tidal pull. In the film, the limits of the body as a container are broken through the ingestion and dribbling of water through oral orifices in a choreography of relation between the subject and its liquid insides. In sculptural forms such as A Tube Under the Sea, Antolí captures the visual motion of a spiraling wave through the reproduction of a watery “core sample.” Clasped in copper rings, it contains the textures, materials, and hues of the cerulean sea that formally challenges the ability to contain the oceans. These works question the hard boundaries of the individual and lead to a thesis on common origins and interconnectedness that tie the body to the planetary, a common future, and the shores of immortality.

The stories of individuals who moved to Liepaja due to its strategic location in Soviet Times show the traces of the Cold War and the socialist system that governed Latvia in Ieva Epnere’s Sea of Living Memories. From these voices of the Baltic Sea, the narrative moves into the molecular radioactive history of Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Julian Charrière dived into these waters together with the curator Nadim Samman in order to – paradoxically – give life to Iroojrilik, a contemplative and intriguing film that functions as a visual essay. It revisits the historic character, geology, and archeology investigating the actuality of the beaches and waters of the Atoll. As usual in this natural environment, there are paradisiacal moments in these landscapes. These panoramic shots made during the dive reveal the ruins – like footprints – left behind by the nuclear tests carried out by the United States between 1946 and 1958. The reefs and the sea floor as well as the air were contaminated during the Cold War during “Operation Crossroads” which created a monumental nuclear disaster and was followed by subsequent similarly destructive tests such as “Operation Castle.” Pans of impactful nature alternate with abandoned bunkers and sunken ships colonized by aquatic flora. The vegetation, the sea and the deepest layers of the beach that still retain traces of Caesium 137 remind us that historic threats continue to haunt us to the present and will remain in the future. This anthropologic examination shows the deserted island devoid of the indigenous communities who were displaced without any option to return, it speaks of the entangled problems of forced migration, power, and violence.

For Irina, one of the subjects of Ieva Epnere’s Sea of Living Memories, the Baltic shore is a boundary that contains memories of childhood dappled with the presence of uniformed officers who patrolled the border between the Soviet Union and the West. In a televised spectacle, the Cold War ended up taking centre stage outside of our planet. State-of-the-art Image technology pumped through the boom of television screens in the West that brought the moon closer to home than the opposite shore of the Baltic Sea. The possibility of humankind living in outer space has long been a fantasy of science fiction, the Soviet imaginary, and present day ambitions of the world’s wealthiest. Thomas Ruff’s series ma.r.s. uses publicly accessible images deployed by NASA of photographs of the surface of the red planet. In high-quality prints, Ruff’s poetic martian landscapes contain geological remnants of gushing water and ancient streams. Matter once moved over the now-dry surface of the planet. The uncertain scale of the photograph reads like the indented sand of a receding tide pool – pocked with high-impact asteroid craters. Each image in the series contains high levels of palette variation and enhancing techniques signaling Ruff’s interest in digital imaging. If the sea can be a receptacle for memories, on Mars it is the dry solid surface of the planet that contains memories of passing waves. Like an open archive, rocks contain stories that can be gleaned through analyses of scientists and rendered interpretable through photography to the human eye, revealing the mysteries uncovered through astrogeology.

If the cultural narratives transported over dislocated waters in Horvitz’s work comment on the fiction of time, The Column is filmed on these same waters but on the chimerical adaptations to labor through the Western system. This is at once the cause and driving force of globalization which blurs identities, forces migrations, and imposes harsh working conditions in its search for maximalizing profit and optimizing production. In this audiovisual production, Paci records a disquieting memetic adaptation of a marble block extracted from a quarry in China which takes on features akin to classical European architecture. This huge chunk of rock in the process of being transported in a cargo hull is simultaneously sculpted by Asiatic workers as it crosses the cresting ocean waves. It loses its natural geometric form into a rounded column as its cultural surroundings mix and disperse at sea. The column initiates debates about cultural hegemony and dominance where production systems amplify power relations embodied in market demand and human desire.

Seawater is a material in flux that moves in great belt currents throughout the world. But in works like David Horvitz’s somewhere in between the jurisdiction of time a set of glass containers with sea water represent specific localities of the Pacific Ocean. An ocean is at once a single mass as infinite multiplicity as it affects land and local conditions with varying salinities and chemical compositions. Across the world in the North Atlantic, Marie Farrington reflects on on the chemical and architectural capacities of sea water on Ireland’s channel coast. Commissioned by Fingal County Council Arts Office, the works in See, Level are composed of molds and sections of mobile homes common in the area. The coast is constantly battered by wind and sea spray, to reflect these conditions, Farrington adds sea water to the plaster casts. The crystalized salt chemically reacts to the sculptural process, migrating to the top of the settling material and creating efflorescent stains. In architecture, this process can signal weakness in the building material, yet it also points to the resilience of construction habits in landscapes that cohabit the land with saltwater waves and sea spray. Like Horvitz’ sculptural work, here sea waves represent cycles of time, but in this case those that break down and affect our lived environment. Homes, and the landscapes we inhabit, are pictured through natural material processes of decay and impermanence. The work, originally presented outdoors, reflects on landscape’s inevitable effects on culture, architecture, and local life defined by Farrington as a state of being “near-sea.” 

Stories of longing and objectives for things that oftentimes fail to occur mark the disjunction between what is manifested through dreams and narrative and we assume to be reality. This is depicted in the fictive journey on the sea captured by Enric Farrés Duran. In other instances -rather than naively desiring outcomes on any scale- reaching for something built on idealization can result in disaster. Decadence and suffocation accompany an existence that blocks catastrophes in order to focus on joy and illusion – this is the subject of the impossible search depicted in Ben Russell’s Atlantis. This video merges history and myth through the hunt for an ideal world. The first scenes include images of the ocean accompanied by spoken extracts of the dialogues in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias. These works relate diverse subjects but belong to a trilogy that evokes The Republic, the most famous text of the philosopher known for his theorization and structuring of a functioning utopian city-state. But the spoken texts in the film are probably best known for their account of the history of Atlantis, an island nation that would have existed 9,000 years before Plato’s time and whose legend has obsessed mankind through its disappearance below the ocean’s waters. Some believe that this story is true and have proposed that a possible location for this land is the island that is today called Malta. This is the location of the film that uses superimposed planes and objects as well as impossible perspectives and proportions of representation on the screen to create a chimerical reality that puts in doubt the materiality of the ideas, and even the precision of words. Another author who also imagined a fictional society based on the ideals of the classical world inspired by equality and justice is the philosopher Thomas More. In one scene, lines from his book Utopia are used as subtitles while a song plays interpreted by Għana musicians, a Maltese folk genre. Through this linguistic trick, a recollection of dreams is generated which humanity has always desired. Our failures might not have made us reach the complete darkness of Atlantis, but retelling these ancestral stories that have time and again imagined an unreachable perfect order implies that we are constantly on the brink of shipwreck in our inherent human condition. Atlantis is neither a documentary nor a fiction, it is an attempt to understand the concerns, thoughts, and emotions of an unreachable place that moves between these interstices of knowability, but that contains within it endless perseverance towards a more just and balanced cosmos.

The sea is a common backdrop for fictional settings in which unexpected turns, storms, and environmental factors can change at a moment’s notice. The banal experience of the Northern Catalan coast in Enric Farrés Duran’s Un Viatge Frustrat (A Frustrated Journey) is an honest exposition of everyday mundane encounters compared to sensationalized fictional voyages. In Case No 14. The Storm on the Baltic Sea by Karel Koplimets, reality and fiction converge once again in an uncanny image of a ship at sea. Here, tossed between towering pillars of water, the ship floats in precarious acts of balance that harken back to Hokusai’s heroic fishing boat beyond Mt. Fuji. No land is visible but the combination of Estonian and Latvian flags atop the mast indicate a short passage through the usually calm Baltic Sea. The endlessly looping video is an exaggerated fictional image that embellishes the experience of this landscape with references to romantic compositions of 17th-19th century marine landscape paintings and to the literary struggle of humankind against natural elements. As the viewer watches, the unlikely veracity of the film begins to reveal the digital construct of the situation. The image is entirely computer-generated but can easily be interpreted as real. In an age where truth and falsehood are increasingly difficult to distinguish, and where fear is used as a mechanism of control, manipulated images flood our screens and contribute to create a mass psychological perception of the reality around us. The waves that batter the sides of the ship function as a metaphor of the emotional swings to which populations are subject in instances of political paranoia and mass hysteria.

Mounir Gouri references the Algerian youth who dream of migration in Naufrage from the desperation of precarious conditions in his country accompanied by the uncertain possibilities of finding better conditions in another place. Philosopher Denise Ferreira Da Silva and filmmaker Arjuna Neuman accomplish an impactful conjunction between these two disciplines through a voyage in immeasurable deep time whose wisdom produces new connections and interpretations to reconfigure our connection with the world. Images, footage, and sound create context and space in 4Waters/Deep Implicancy that speak of displacement, colonialism, and ecological destruction that converge in historic synchronicity. Western thinking has made hierarchical systems the model for a system of ethics informed by concepts of value. Worth has always fascinated this culture of thought, and has sought to elevate it as a principle to compare all things in existence. This is where all the fractures of this world emerge which make it resemble an inferno. This ethical model cannot hold much longer, and the authors propose a new world whose reemergence needs to return to primordial state or what Ferreira Da Silva calls “deep implicancy.” This was a state-of-being where neither measurements of time nor comparisons of any sort existed. Air, water, earth, and fire are the chapters through which the Mediterranean and the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans incarnate narrations that speak of the transformation of water in relation to these elemental forces. From there to the Caribbean, where these invoke a transformation in the Haitian Revolution – triggered by an earthquake in 1748 of which little information exists today – beyond its historic traces this event takes on cosmic proportions, it bursts forth in a time without measurement and in a liquid atemporality. There is a supernatural power which modern thinking has amputated from us, in which there is no space for vertical hierarchies nor for domination among humans and more-than-humans. Lost memories reside in the glowing entrails of the earth, which, from time to time, erupts with fragments of this telluric archive. We are urged to forge new connections and relations in which difference is inseparable, for all living, non-living, organic, inorganic, human, and all that exceeds it. Without the burden of Western temporal measurements, we can free ourselves of its ethics and embrace the echoes of primordial states that will allow for an imperative transformation.

In Mounir Gouri’s Naufrage the title signals to something that is not directly visible in the work – the economically shipwrecked contemporary condition that Algerian youth must face when creating their own identities. The film pivots between traditional and contemporary dance motions on a ship which is still afloat, yet in a constant state of precarity. In a temporary gesture by Harun Morrison – a photographic print, Mattress Beneath a Tree, Wanstead Flats has been enlarged to a 2m by 2m fabric banner and installed on the lever of a canalside warehouse in Haarlem, next to the windmill Molen De Adriaan on the River Spaarne. This action was made in solidarity with a recent housing protest, organized by Woonoproer, which took place on the 27th February 2022, against the skyrocketing costs of housing and evictions in the Netherlands. The printed image shows a makeshift mattress and carpet beneath a tree that create an improvised resting spot. It avoids the representation of individuals but points to the evidence of increasing homelessness in the wealthy urban centers of the so-called West. Morrison himself lives on a canal boat in England called “Zoar” and has written about the increasing privatization of the waterways. The waving fabric ripples in the wind like a sail on a mast. We find ourselves in the ups and downs of a chaotic market whose crests and dips affect our interconnected lives – some are lost and others are discarded on unstable ground that is verging nearer to the possibility of shipwreck.

The incoherence of production chains in a system bound by law to the market are exposed by Bertille Bak in Boussa from the Netherlands through the women who work in repetitive and exhausting rhythms. Across the Atlantic, in South America, it resounds with the exploitative contradictions of the neoliberal system that searches only to maximize profits. In the film The Ballad of the Dry Mermaids Patricia Domínguez takes on ecofeminist activism to relate the harsh drought that Chile is passing through, specifically Petorca – an area located in the central part of the country. This place, like many other territories, has been named a “sacrificial zone.” This means that the area is placed at the disposal of economic interests that have brought entire communities to ecological and economic disaster, destroying their access to basic necessities and decent living conditions, and submerging them in a permanent state of survival. The traditional family farm agriculture has been devastated by the avocado monoculture in Chilean Spanish called “palta” which derives from the original pallta in Quechua meaning “lump that hangs.” These creamy lumps need large quantities of water to grow for which the industry has rerouted natural riverbeds. This canalization of the aquifers has been permitted by a Chilean regulation implemented by the “Code of Waters” in 1981. This was written to add an impulse to the market after the implementation of the 1980 Constitution written during the full-on military dictatorship behind closed doors, and which has been implemented particularly well: that water would be privatized and sold. This is how environmental activists became an important bastion to restore the dignity of the inhabitants. A group called MODATIMA (Defense Movement for the Right to Access Water, the Earth, and the Protection of the Environment) has many women among its ranks who have become leaders for the cause both now and during the military dictatorship. Domínguez invited the “Women of the Water” – a group where some of its members are part of MODATIMA – to be the protagonists of this piece. Through colorful sets and sceneries interspersed with drone footage of dry landscapes and 3D animated digital avocados, a fictional aesthetic relates the violent realities and precarity of people who often have access to water for less than 3 hours per day. Dances performed by girl “defenders” and women act as rituals of resistance that denounce their situation. LED lights accompany them in order to bring light to the abuses and exploitation that have been systematically obscured from the public. Accompanied by a hypnotic soundtrack, an imminent catastrophe is revealed which has the ability to be reversed with the upcoming magna carta written this time, through democracy. It is a call to restore natural waters and generate a new wave of coexistence, consciousness, and respect, with the hope that Juan López, who closes the film, won’t sing anymore surrounded by the cadavers of animals who died from dehydration, and hopefully, one day, he can be celebrate that water is a natural resource, available to all, and respected as a basic human right.

Video 4K, audio, 31:57 min, 2020

Commissioned by st_age, TBA 21

If the sea connects global economies and labor exploitation for the benefit of colonial nations in Bertille Bak’s Boussa From the Netherlands, the absence of navigable sea paths does not stop the current of material extraction towards the West. Ursula Biemann’s Black Sea Files exposes the aphotic construction of oil pipelines stemming from the landlocked Caspian Sea towards the accessible shipping routes of the Mediterranean. Crude oil flows unidirectionally through kilometric underground tubes, invisible to the naked eye and buried to prevent sabotage as they pass through zones of perpetual ethnic and political conflict. A newly opened refinery near the city of Ceyhan draws enormous volumes of oil far from its sites of origin despite the health risks to local populations and sea creatures that once swam in abundance in natural lagoons. Black Sea Files is a research project that brings to light not only the populations and networks created by the geologies of oil, but of the invisibility of information around its infrastructure, beneficiaries, and global political networks.

The allusion created by Elizabeth Gallón Droste and Daniela Medina Poch to the necessity of rethinking cultural heterogeneity and the connections between human and non-human bodies through submersion in crystalline waters reappears in Beatrice Alvestad Lopez’s performance Elemental Bodies. This ceremony is inspired by theories of hydrofeminism and possible posthuman manifestations through dynamic links between water and life. A still frame shows the artist on the shores of tranquil waters with its own sound. The listener is immersed in a state of calm meditation. This scene becomes a ceremony where long and thin tubes buried in the thick sand accompany the steps of Alvestad that come and go. Water is collected and served through vessels to the earth once again, recreating a cycle and exchange between natural elements that have been interrupted. This ritual exercise culminates – for now – with the artist’s immersion in these waters and the convocation of fire. The movements and elements in this action evoke the concept of Earth’s deep time, a creature formed through molten layers, that shelters everything found within.

A river is a living entity that constantly pours forth. In Elizabeth Gallón Droste & Daniela Medina Pochs’s Intersecting Mediterranean(s) I and II, the river is a vessel for memories of the bodies that have historically occupied these shores. Like arteries, the liquid aquifers that pour into the sea connect distant lands through material transfer. Nona Inescu’s Meander is a representation of fluvial motion caressing organic concretion stones. Forged out of minerals, pressure, and time, these rounded pebble-like forms have previously been used by Inescu to represent portions of the human body. They bulge and contract in uncanny semblances to limb-like shapes. These geological features usually emerge when deposits of sandstone, limestone, or shale accumulate around a nucleus – this is what gives these stones bizarre anatomies. Here, a stream made of chrome-plated steel passes over them, holding them in place, compressing and unravelling them. In the early 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci compared the structure of veins within human arms to the forms of earth’s rivers; the same simple physics explains the structure of distribution. Water is the planet’s pulsating life-blood.

Rosana Antolí’s work is a call to dilute the limits between our bodily volumes and everything that surrounds us. Evoking ecofeminist theory, she places the body and the feminine imaginary as a starting point for expansion and manifested impetus in the eternal movement of water. These ideas flow into the ceremony that Paige Emery relates in Fluid Relations for Endurance. This video work confronts an existing lake with the remains of one that has disappeared due to mercantile activities in California. The artist inscribes new memories into physical and spiritual dimensions through rites of communion that take place within these waters. These new rituals can serve to guide us in the construction and preparation of a new global vision which we both need and desire. Scars and traumas left behind by capitalism and expressed in the crudest forms of individualism clog and jam the latent potential contained within bodies and their connection to nature. Emery’s new rituals propose that memory can traverse those who live in the water, that we can repair what connects us, life and our place within it. Caring and healing the ties between communities and their members is a necessity should we seek permanence, resistance, and transformation through new models of collectivity. This imaginary unfolds through liquid emotion that is capable of opening and transgressing tangible psychological interstices.

In Rosana Antolí’s I Will Give You the Sea the body is connected with planetary materiality as a monic pulsating life form created through combinations of liquid and organic matter. Water rushing over the surface of skin materially enunciates the unutterable chemical connections that tie us to the history of this planet. A complex narration on collectivity and individuality represented by the material body in space is also constructed in the eerie and mesmerising tableau-vivant of Chen Wei’s In the Waves #4. The title introduces sound as matter that travels across air in sonic patterns and that traverses the body in subtle trembling variations. A crowd stands together in a conical light-stream traversing a club-night atmosphere thick with artificial fog. Limbs sway to the beat and although the image is still, it is throbbing with motion. Each singular body stands separately yet collectively, in the room bound by aural energies. Lit by a caravaggesque chiaroscuro, the alienation of contemporary society is found in cathartic moments of togetherness when identity is shed in the anonymity of night-life. A singular moving being floats on common beats and rhythms – transported by sound and light to the photographic surface, the image is a reminder that waves belong to all of cosmic matter and not just to liquid surfaces of water.

The consequences of the Cold War and the traces of radioactivity continue to threaten and pulsate towards beaches, underwater life, and ruins of constructions in Bikini Atoll. Captured by Julian Charrière in images obtained in dives and composed of an omnipresent (and human) gaze this gives way to a renewed discussion that touches on the ongoing conflict between East and West through underwater submersion. This time, from a narrative that revisits this divide through myth and non-human perspectives. In the film Sirenomelia by Emilija Škarnulyte, the artist herself incarnates a mermaid submerged in Nordic waters that surround Olavsvern – a Norwegian naval base. This complex structure is over 25 million square metres and was constructed (and dug) within a mountain near the city of Trømso. In order to reach it, a long strategic tunnel crosses the Barents Sea acting like a liquid portal between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans. This place which has stored submarines and other artefacts of the war was closed in 2009 due to its obsolescence. A mermaid swims around these waters and constructions which are witnesses to human antagonism and dislocates our experience towards what could be a supernatural being that highlights the possibility to see our problems which remain invisible and inaccessible to us. Our ability to see is limited by temporary perceptions, something that Škarnulyte transcends through incorporating the sound of quasars recorded by the Geodetic Earth Observatory of the Norwegian Mapping Authority. These archives give information as vast as the movements of terrestrial crust to the effects of climate change. Today, destiny and history have newly uncertain paths since the base was sold to private interests, who, together with the Norwegian state, are surveying for possible future uses for the site.

On the atomic shores of Bikini Atoll, Julian Charrière’s Iroojrilik shows the effects of a contaminated island on a Pacific periphery. In 1946, the inhabitants of this archipelago were forcibly moved for it to serve as a US nuclear test site for the following decade. Yet, this decay is not always found in the face of human abandonment. In Panos Aprahamian’s This Haunting Memory that is Not My Own, he speaks of new peripheries – ones that are not physically, but mentally and geopolitically written out of history. The film takes place on Lebanon’s Mediterranean shore where migrants from various forced migrations have settled over the years. These are not the crystalline waters of the Mediterranean attractive to tourism and industry, but the contaminated and plastic-filled waters of the old quarters of Burj Hammoud and Karantina – ancient sites of quarantine for historic epidemics which today are filled with the uncontrolled growth of shanty-towns that house uncared-for people. Slow pans over water show the small embarkations that are still used on these fetid waters and the rubbish-jammed shores that collect bags, containers, and other small debris against backdrops of massive container ships whose lights illuminate these cloudy waters with the constellations of global currents of goods. The waves of the sea represent mobility and immobility that apply differently to capital than to the undocumented and economically marginal. Here, the sea is the stopping point, a physical border that populations are thrown against and which opens an imaginary escape to worlds beyond. This landscape is not an atomic meltdown, but a social and humanitarian catastrophe that inscribes itself in the geological and chemical composition of the landscape. In this film, the wave is not a single instant but a steady flow of metaphoric rising waters.

The dry scenes of Mars that Thomas Ruff manipulates through the application of colors and distorted perspectives bring us to the human restless imagination that searches for life outside of Earth. This pursuit returns in the images created through subaquatic reveries of Letícia Ramos in Vostok, whose title comes from the largest subglacial lake in Antarctica. The footage glimmers through cinematographic techniques and tools that do not intend to reproduce that which science can tell us about this gigantic liquid mass, but rather to operate within the artist’s exercise of revealing our own assumed belief of reality which is often configured through visual fictions and sensoralities. The magical captures of this mysterious phenomena starts with the history of the lake itself – its existence was first reported by the Russian geographer Andréi Kapitsa in the 1950’s and 60’s. Later, it was confirmed in the 1990’s and a photograph was made of a submarine bobbing between light and obscurity in the waters that are located at almost 4,000 meters below the ice cap of the South Pole. Gleams of light that contrast with the profundity are emphasized by the texture and grain of the 16mm film. Microorganisms and bacterias have managed to survive in Vostok. They appear like illusions and as a possible response to whether life can emerge in outer space if it can survive in these specific and extreme conditions. For now, we cannot be sure that we will ever have another place to inhabit, but we can (and we should not forget) remember that not everything that is presented as real is so, something that Ramos affirms by demonstrating the aquarium set and scale models that we firstly believed to be monumental structures. Magic, phantasmagoria, and even belief itself can inform our senses, the very way we think we interact with and understand the world, the cosmos, and all of the elements that unequivocally create our repertoire of (supposed) reality.

In Thomas Ruff’s m.a.r.s 15, he uses the scientific limits of photography to show traces of ancient waves on the martian surface. In Su Yu Hsin’s frame of reference I & II (2020), she captures visual and scientific representations of landscape along the Liwu River in Taiwan. The river moves unceasingly over the surface of smoothed rock, showing the geological process of erosion that creates recognisable liquid undulations in stone over long time scales. Thick tropical foliage grows from the humid air surrounding brooks and streams which is cut to test bare marble among rhythmic audible mechanical signals. Filmed visuals of the terrain are contrasted with rendered and digitally-stitched landscapes. Su’s proximity to the terrain is an auto-critical investigation of human and scientific perception whose instruments are inherently limited by physical positionality. As the river meets the waves of the Philippine Sea, the sediments disperse into the world beyond the framework of these particular abstracted scientific measurements.