Moving Seas: Images of Continuous Flux

Text by Stefanie Hessler

Boy looking at his mother. Staten Island Ferry. New York harbor. February 1990 (left half of a diptych) from the series Fish Story (1989-1995) © Allan Sekula, courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio

Before the dream (or the terror) could weave Mythologies and cosmogonies, Before the time could mint itself into days, The sea, the always sea, it had been and it was. Who is the sea? Who is that violent Antique being that gnaws at the pillars Of the earth and is one and many of the seas And abyss and splendor and chance and wind?

— Jorge Luis Borges, The Sea

Panorama. Mid-Atlantic. November 1993 from the series Fish Story (1989-1995) © Allan Sekula, Courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio

Water is a transitory element, a flowing substance that gushes continuously in flux. The tide never moves the same particles, and it never returns to the same spot twice. It is shaped by forces that, themselves, constantly change: the moon, cosmic constellations, evolving ecological conditions, deep-sea currents, aquatic beings that migrate, birth and pass away. The closest language-based approach capturing, if not evoking, this liquid unpredictability I have encountered is Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry. The Barbadian writer and historian’s neologism Tidalectics crystallises our terrestrial fixation on stability, possession and control. His rhythmic, unpredictable syncopations mirror the fluctuating soundings of ocean swells and the breaking of the waves as they wash onto the shores. Evading the rigid structures of grammar, Brathwaite states, “[...] like the hurricane, our seas don’t usually speak in pentameters.” 1 His Tidalectics proposes deeper layers of readings that complicate chronological accounts of time, progressive developments and any plain dialectic view purported by Western philosophy.

While working on an exhibition² distilling these notions, titled eponymously Tidalectics, I was spurred by the idea of fixating the oceans in a static display. I felt that singular, final and, in particular, representational art works could hardly attend to the complexity of the sea and the role it has played for the history of human migration, for cultural, social and linguistic dimensions, for microbial origins of life, and as a source of food and a threat when sea levels rise. Considering the limitations of solely pictorial approaches, other sensory dimen sions became increasingly important for this experiment. I invited Sissel Tolaas to create Ocean Smellscapes (2017) with molecules collected at three coasts in Costa Rica, and Jana Winderen to compose her soundwork bára (2017), which wavered through the space at different times every day, corresponding with the lowest and the highest levels of the tide at the nearest coast. Notably, visual representations of these olfactory and auditory works are limited to their technological dissemination devices and don’t convincingly lend themselves to be shown in print.

My interest in how we (re)present and tend to the sea continues, in particular with a view to what we have come to call the Anthropocene. Portraying the ocean may be decisive at this point in time. However, as the gender and cultural studies researcher Astrida Neimanis has pointed out, capturing a moment with the aim to preserve it for speculative future generations may result in a reductionist response to the temporal unmooring effected by the threat of our immanent disappearance. Instead, water as an anti-chrononormative archive permitting both remembering and forgetting, preserving and dissolving, may provide a more fruitful path.

Nevertheless, an image can tell one of multiple histories, and in my research I have come across a number of practices that do not attempt to talk about, but — to borrow and transfer the filmmaker and cultural theorist Trinh-T. Minh-ha’s term — speak nearby. In undertaking to retrieve visual strategies, I have come across a number of works in the media of photography and video or film that I want to consider here.

Allan Sekula’s photographic and moving image work has famously documented how global trade networks unfold, most eminently as seen from aboard the deck of container ships. In the 1980s, at a time when postmodernism was the predominant cultural paradigm, Sekula’s ‘realism’ devoted to the cause of workers rendered visible worlds of late capitalism that are usually occluded from the public’s, or the consumer’s, perspective. Shooting for seven years in harbours, port cities and at sea, Sekula framed the ocean as the ‘forgotten space’ of globalisation, and succeeded in avoiding the pitfalls of both subjectivism and objective documentary claims. Fish Story (1989-95) is his sevenchapter magnum opus consisting of 105 photographs, 26 text panels, two slide projections of approximately 80 diapositives each, and an accompanying book. In this project, Sekula depicts capital, labour and production at the geopolitical margins, yet without reifying them. He captures the oceanic facet of what the architect and theorist Keller Easterling has called extrastatecraft, an infrastructural spatial matrix that generates undeclared forms of polity, which can bypass legal frameworks and prosecution. Into this web of govern - mental and corporate forces, Sekula inserts the cargo boat, calling to mind philosopher Michel Foucault’s notion of the ship. Foucault describes the ship as ultimate “heterotopia,” a fragment of space compensating for the spaces we usually live in, yet surrounded by and fundamentally part of the infra structural matrix.

Ships have been a decisive instrument for economic development as much as they have been a reservoir for human imagination. When I spoke to CAMP (Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran) about Sekula’s work in March 2017, they made an observation that stuck with me: He never opened the containers on board the ships. His camera remains fixed on the infrastructural nodes of global trade, mapping connections that transcend different layers of social, economic and political stakes, while remaining close to the surface of the water and outside the vessels brimming with goods. In their video Wharfage: Sharjah Creek (2008-2009), one of several parts of a comprehensive project that has been evolving since 2008, CAMP turn their attention towards the bay of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. From the port, sail ships with goods such as rice, sugar, dates, tyres and used vehicles depart for Somalia, a kind of free trade zone. A publication accompanying the project lists, among others, the M.S.V. Safina Al Goushe Sailani sailing under an Indian flag and destined for Bosaso, Puntland with 2,000 cartons of macaroni, 10 refrigerators and 50 office chairs, among other merchandise. The video starts on land, documenting how boxes with goods are loaded from trucks onto the boats. Harbour labourers, mostly from Pakistan, are scurrying, making fixes to the vehicles, unloading cranes, chatting to each other. The harbour area comprises a clearly visible hierarchy of spaces allotted to the smaller wooden boats and room occupied by the larger cargo ships. Whereas Sekula followed the spatially distributed networks at the base of megastructures, CAMP adopt a close-up perspective pointing to life beyond war and global capital. In Wharfage, the collective focuses on the contemporary usage of old trade routes, the redistribution of used things, and the lives of those working on the boats and in the docks, the pirates they will encounter on their crossings and the families they have left back home. The surface of the oceans has been the liquid subfloor for trade and migration for millennia, yet their depths have largely remained obscure. The Otolith Group’s video Hydra Decapita (2010) dives into the darker human histories that lie buried on the seafloor by honing in on the legacy of the Detroit electronic music duo Drexciya. Between 1992 and 2002, Drexciya released a series of influential albums centred around an Afrofuturist myth. The subaquatic musical worlds they created imagined the foetuses of pregnant women who had been thrown overboard during the Middle Passage to survive, still accustomed to a liquid environment. In the deep-sea, they continued to live and built a utopian world far removed from human monstrosity. The Otolith Group’s carefully crafted video intersects footage of high-contrasted waves with atmospheric electronic sounds, spoken word, song fragments and a blue script appearing as it is being typed onto a black background. Refraining from deploying any descriptive images, the work poetically imagines the whereabouts and lives of what the text envisages as “water breathing, aquatically mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed.”

While Hydra Decapita operates through a modus of invisibility, of not visualising the unrepresentable, but removing the atrocious past from the grip of those mechanisms who caused them, John Akomfrah’s three-channel video Vertigo Sea (2015) takes a different turn. The co-founder of the Black Audio Collective revisits archival footage by combining representations of the same history with shots of landscapes inhabited by characters in colonial attire, and breathtaking underwater scenes teeming with life. The interweaving narrative is spun to resemble the complex past and present of humans, including migration, slave trade, the current refugee crisis, environmental disaster, natural beauty, and deep horror. Quotes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Heathcote Williams’s poem Whale Nation (1988), a powerful call to for the end of whaling, are layered over stunning images of water and land to investigate collective history and memory, identity and mortality.

While many works approaching the oceans have focused on either a human perspective or on cetaceans and other large marine animals, Susanne M. Winterling’s installation Glistening Troubles (2016) zooms in on micro-critters and on our human relationships with miniscule species such as algae. During a residency at the Alligator Head Foundation in Jamaica, Winterling interviewed local fishermen and worked with the scientists in the labs to encounter bioluminescent organisms that light up when touched or moved. In an interview with a rock fisherman, he describes the dinoflagellates as signallers of the health of coastal waters by indicating potential toxins, and points to their medical properties, which have been known to local communities for centuries. Besides the interview, the installation resulting from Winterling’s research consisted of CGI animations displayed on four screens mounted on stands at heights suggestive of human scale. The monitors are positioned in the space and inter sect with mirrored columns that reflect the moving images. Glistening Troubles imagines our skin, our tactile and sensual connection with the world surrounding us, and touch screens, the interface with which we communicate with one another, in metaphorical proximity. The computer-generated imagery of enlarged individual algae transform scale and temporality, and blur the borders between nature and culture. The mirrors reflect and mask vision, similar to the overlapping information in analogue and virtual worlds. Deploying animation and mirroring visual means surpassing direct representation, Winterling’s research delves into interspecies solidarity and points to our vibrant entanglement with other bodies as ‘havingthe-other-in-one’s-skin.’ ³

Glistening Troubles, 2017, mixed media and CGI, installation shot (detail) © Susanne Winterling, courtesy the artist and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Visual approximations to realms we cannot access with out the aid of technology, be it boats to traverse the surface of the oceans, wetsuits and oxygen tanks to dive their depths, or remotely operated vehicles to explore the ocean floor, could enhance our understanding of that which we usually cannot see. As largely land-dwelling people, we tend to forget that cultures such as Melanesians, Micronesians or Polynesians have lived not only near but on the oceans for millennia and continue to do so today. In fact, imagining a Tidalectic, or oceanic, worldview, as I try to do in the exhibition and a book recently published by The MIT Press, resonates with the Fijian writer and anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa’s ‘sea of islands.’ Hau’ofa reverses the common notion of small islands isolated in a huge sea to a sea of islands, of water not as that which divides but that which connects.

Visibility can help us move closer to, even if they remain beyond grasping, these liquid masses and the decisive role they have played in our past and will continue to play in our futures. Practices of image making can show us that which is hidden and therefore lends itself to activities conveniently kept obscure. In 2015, Trevor Paglen took a group of divers down to a depth of 70 feet off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to look at and photograph the NSA-tapped fibre-optic cables. The project offered a timely reminder of the vulnerability of data and the geography, infrastructure and aesthetics of surveillance. Visibility, on the other hand, can also aid direct exploitation, as is the case of the seafloor mapping efforts to chart mineral deposits for future extractions.

A multitude of approaches, of visualising and obscuring, making heard and smelt, or allowing to be forgotten, may be the best option we have. And yet, the oceans remain in flux. Any attempt to move through them submits itself to what the political geographer Philip E. Steinberg has called mobilis in mobile. As such, the oceans will always elude being fully captured.

1 Kamau Brathwaite, ‘Calypso’ in The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy; Rights of Passage, Islands, Masks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994 [1973]), pp. 115–116.

2 The exhibition was on view at TBA21–Augarten, Vienna, Austria, June - November 2017, and shown in an extended version at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing, France from February - April 2018.

3 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and

Meaning (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 392.