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Black Aquatic Slideshow

AGW
February 08, 2014
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Black Aquatic Slideshow

AGW

February 08, 2014
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Transcript

  1. It generates the clamor of your protests; it also produces

    all the coming unanimity. This boat is your womb, a matrix, and yet it expels you. This boat: pregnant with as many dead as living under sentence of death…Whenever a fleet of ships gave chase to slave ships, it was easiest just to lighten the boat by throwing cargo overboard, weighing it down with balls and chains.
  2. The belly of this boat dissolves you, precipitates you into

    a nonworld from which you cry out. This boat is a womb, a womb abyss. The abyss is a tautology: the entire ocean, the entire sea gently collapsing in the end into the pleasures of sand,
  3. make one vast beginning, but a beginning whose time is

    marked by these balls and chains gone green. The absolute unknown, projected by the abyss and bearing into eternity the womb abyss and the infinite abyss, in the end became knowledge. ! Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation
  4. Slave Ship Mothership Black Star Line Pirate Ship Refugee Boat

    Canaan Atlantis Drexciya Oceanic Littoral Archipelagic Maritime Submarine Black Aquatic Black Atlantic Black Queer Atlantic
  5. In those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was

    an island situated in front of the straits; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean. This island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. Plato, Timaeus and Critias
  6. One of the extraordinary developments of civilization in Africa was

    on the West Coast around the great Gulf of Guinea. Frobenius has fancifully called this “Atlantis” and regards it as possibly a development of the culture of that fabled island in the Atlantic. Whatever its origin, there grew up on the West Coast of Africa a peculiarly African state. How far back its development extends, no man knows. We have a fairly authentic history from the seventeenth century on, creditable but discontinuous reports in the sixteenth and fifteenth, and before that only customs, tradition, and legend. W.E.B Du Bois, The World and Africa
  7. Elephant tusk on the bow of a sailing lady, docked

    on the Ivory Coast Mercedes in a row winding down the road I hope my black skin don't dirt this white tuxedo before the Basquiat show And if so, well fuck it, fuck it Because this water drown my family, this water mixed my blood This water tells my story, this water knows it all Go ahead and spill some champagne in the water Go ahead and watch the sun blaze on the waves of the ocean ! Jay Z & Frank Ocean Oceans
  8. Shuttles in the rocking loom of history, the dark ships

    move, the dark ships move, their bright ironical names like jests of kindness on a murderer’s mouth; plough through thrashing glister toward fata morgana’s lucent melting shore, weave toward New World littorals that are mirage and myth and actual shore. ! Voyage through death, voyage whose chartings are unlove. ! ! Robert Hayden, Middle Passage
  9. Could it be possible for humans to breathe underwater? A

    foetus in its mothers womb is certainly alive in an aquatic environment. During the greatest holocaust the world has ever known, pregnant America-bound African slaves were thrown overboard by the thousands during labour for being sick and disruptive cargo. Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air? ! Recent experiments have shown mice able to breathe liquid oxygen. Even more shocking and conclusive was a recent instance of a premature infant saved from certain death by breathing liquid oxygen through its undeveloped lungs. These facts combined with reported sightings of Gillmen and swamp monsters in the coastal swamps of the South-Eastern United States make the slave trade theory startlingly feasible.
  10. Are Drexciyans water breathing, aquatically mutated descendants of those unfortunate

    victims of human greed? Have they been spared by God to teach us or terrorise us? Did they migrate from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mississippi river basin and on to the great lakes of Michigan? ! Do they walk among us? Are they more advanced than us and why do they make their strange music? ! What is their Quest? ! These are many of the questions that you don’t know and never will. ! The end of one thing…and the beginning of another. ! Out - The Unknown Writer
  11. Map 1. The Slave Trade (1655 - 1867) ! !

    Map 2. Migration routes of rural blacks to Northern Cities (1930’s - 1940’s) ! ! Map 3. Techno leaves Detroit and spreads Worldwide (1988) ! ! Map 4. The Journey Home (Future)
  12. Arceneaux’s “Slave Ship Zong” series (2013) is a set of

    new, site- specific, large-scale drawings in which he explores the troubled past and dystopian future of Detroit. Incorporating images of oceanic waves set against various elements such as headlines from vintage Detroit newspapers, the drawings reference a literal and figurative “underground” Detroit, from the buried ruins of riots to the city’s alternative music scene. For example, in the techno sounds of Drexciya, an electronic music duo from Detroit, Arceneaux locates ghosts of the city’s past… The title of Arceneaux’s series, “Slave Ship Zong,” elaborates on Drexciya’s folklore by directly referencing the massacre of more than 140 enslaved Africans by the crew of the Liverpool slave-trading ship Zong in 1781—when the ship ran low on water following navigational mistakes, the crew threw a number of slaves into the sea to drown. Naima J. Keith — “Looking for the Invisible.” The Shadows Took Shape Catalog
  13. By seceding from the political category, the philosophical claim and

    ontological condition of the human, Drexciya retroacted received ideas of the post-human as a coming condition. The Drexciya myth was nothing less than a redreaming of the biopolitical atrocity of the Middle Passage; a revisionist electronic song-cycle in which the implications of financial speculation of a trade – whose promise to pay was insured by cargoes of bodies – were carried over into a fictional speculation on death, marine evolution, terracentricity and post-humanity. Otolith Group
  14. A portrait of an abandoned public swimming facility located in

    Accra, Ghana. The Riviera was once known as Ghana’s first pleasure beach. A one-time extravagant Ambassador Hotel of post- colonial – early Kwame Nkrumah era, the Riviera Beach Club thrived until the mid-1970s. The Olympic sized pool, now in a dilapidated state, is used for locals for things other than swimming. Inspired by the myth of a Detroit electronic bands, Drexciya & Underground Resistance.
  15. Simon Rittmeier — Drexciya (2012) Thomas is a smuggler, shipping

    European refugees who hope to find a better life in Africa. One day his boat sinks and he is washed up on the African coast as the only survivor. He then makes his way to the nearest city - Drexciya.
  16. Kapwani Kiwanga — Atlantide (2009) Video Installation, The work explores

    cultural mutation through Vodoun mythology in Benin, popular beliefs in Haiti, and the contemporary urban mythology of the Detroit techno group Drexciya.
  17. The African American slave’s intimate, intuitive, but no less strategic,…

    remappings are ongoing, and familiar to anyone with a radio or record player. Canaan continues in any number of black incarnations, whether as utopian “Ethiopia” in the early twentieth century, or its opposite—the slaves’ allegorical “Egypt,” later rendered as Rastafari’s “Babylon.”
  18. In this future, descendants of slaves and freedmen would envision

    Drexciya, a place where those thrown overboard in the Middle Passage actually survived and gave birth to those who could breathe underwater. Going beyond even P-Funk’s notion of dancing underwater and not getting wet, Drexciya is Dixie turned on its head—and as likely a place… Canaan and other such sites of black imagination offer a form of second sight, necessary for the slave— and for us—in order to see the full extent of the burgeoning black imagination. ! Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness
  19. These Mermaids are infused with the tails of the Carp,

    commonly known as Koi. This fish Originated in Persia, (now Iran). Koi swim against the current to gain strength. According to legend, a koi would transform into a flying dragon as it swam up the waterfalls at the Dragon Gate. Based on that legend, it became a symbol of aspiration and perseverance. Many other cultures have half fish legends which are said to have brought agriculture, taught civilization how to irrigate water and some go as far to say control the tides themselves. The Mami Wata in west Africa, Suvannamaccha from The Hindu / Thai folklore and Sirens of Greece are just a few examples of Mermaids swimming into the stuff of legend. Mermaids… never looked like REAL fish. No scales, no gils no crazy colors and unusual segments which comprise this elaborate animal. I was hoping to rectify both the unrealistic nature of the animal and human depictions of this mythical creature…. Some time around 2007 I started this series, spacing out each pin up every year or so. I hope to do an extended series one day into a book , of all shapes and sizes ethnicities and species. Afua Richardson
  20. Those African persons in “Middle Passage” were literally suspended in

    the “oceanic,” if we think of the latter in its Freudian orientation as an analogy for undifferentiated identity: removed from the indigenous land and culture, and not-yet “American” either, these captive person… were in movement across the Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all. Inasmuch as, on any given day, we might imagine, the captive personality did not know where s/he was, … they were the culturally “unmade,” thrown in the midst of a figurative darkness that “exposed” their destinies to an unknown course…
  21. The slave ship, its crew, and its human-as-cargo stand for

    a wild and unclaimed richness of possibility that is not interrupted, not “counted,” “accounted,” or differentiated, until its movement gains the land thousands of miles away from the point of departure. Under these conditions, one is neither female, nor male…This materialized scene of unprotected female flesh-of female flesh “ungendered”- offers a praxis and a theory, a text for living and for dying, and a method for reading both through their diverse mediations. Hortense Spillers, Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe
  22. And water, ocean water is the first thing in the

    unstable confluence of race, nationality, sexuality, and gender… This wateriness is metaphor, and history too. The brown-skinned, fluid-bodied experiences now called blackness and queerness surfaced in intercontinental, maritime contacts hundreds of years ago: in the seventeenth century, in the Atlantic Ocean. You see, the black Atlantic has always been the queer Atlantic. ! Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic