Heavy Water. of Coordinates, Containers and Containment
Heavy Water | of Coordinates, Containers and Containment is anticipated as a mutational encounter between the participating artists鈥� exhibited works, asking us to think anew, following the late E虂douard Glissant鈥檚 鈥榓quatic鈥� theories (1997) and Denise Ferreira da Silva鈥檚 conception of a 鈥榙eep or abyssal implicancy鈥� (2019), of how we might understand these works when reframed, recast, in a poethics of relation, in dialogue with each other. Taking as its indexical register the wet mechanics of both the historical and contemporary global movement of peoples 鈥� volitional or enforced 鈥� and commodities, of peoples transformed into commodities, Heavy Water | of Containers, Coordinates and Containment considers the entanglements and afterlives of maritime colonial history, racial capitalism, and contemporary hypermodernity: embarkations and disembarkations, promethean fantasies of an imposition of order, containment and mastery of uncharted 鈥榥ew worlds鈥�, paralleled with unimaginable dystopian lived nightmares of abduction, dispossession, and displacement; of contestation over borders, exclusion zones and proprietorship of space; dislocation wrought through war, scarcity, persecution, and the acceleration of extreme climate events. Commencing with the conceit of 鈥楬eavy Water鈥�, its ambivalence and excess of meaning informs the span and framing of the exhibition, interrogating both Real and speculative visual (and sonic) histories and futurities: 鈥楬eavy Water鈥�, the channel, the sea, the ocean as freighted, weighted with precarious crossings, unsafe passage and untold trauma, and of practices concealing the most egregious extractive processes of capital becomes hauntological, 鈥減regnant with as many dead as living鈥� (Glissant, 1997:6), and where the value of a life is differentially calculated. From the slave ship to the transmodal container and its super cargo container carrier ship, from the colonial plantation to the refugee camp, and from the spectral threat of nuclear ruination to the escape fantasies of the colonisation of outer space, today James Baldwin鈥檚 profound and prophetic reflection, 鈥淭omorrow you will all be negroes!鈥� resonates more starkly.
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Heavy Water | of Coordinates, Containers and Containment is anticipated as a mutational encounter between the participating artists鈥� exhibited works, asking us to think anew, following the late E虂douard Glissant鈥檚 鈥榓quatic鈥� theories (1997) and Denise Ferreira da Silva鈥檚 conception of a 鈥榙eep or abyssal implicancy鈥� (2019), of how we might understand these works when reframed, recast, in a poethics of relation, in dialogue with each other. Taking as its indexical register the wet mechanics of both the historical and contemporary global movement of peoples 鈥� volitional or enforced 鈥� and commodities, of peoples transformed into commodities, Heavy Water | of Containers, Coordinates and Containment considers the entanglements and afterlives of maritime colonial history, racial capitalism, and contemporary hypermodernity: embarkations and disembarkations, promethean fantasies of an imposition of order, containment and mastery of uncharted 鈥榥ew worlds鈥�, paralleled with unimaginable dystopian lived nightmares of abduction, dispossession, and displacement; of contestation over borders, exclusion zones and proprietorship of space; dislocation wrought through war, scarcity, persecution, and the acceleration of extreme climate events. Commencing with the conceit of 鈥楬eavy Water鈥�, its ambivalence and excess of meaning informs the span and framing of the exhibition, interrogating both Real and speculative visual (and sonic) histories and futurities: 鈥楬eavy Water鈥�, the channel, the sea, the ocean as freighted, weighted with precarious crossings, unsafe passage and untold trauma, and of practices concealing the most egregious extractive processes of capital becomes hauntological, 鈥減regnant with as many dead as living鈥� (Glissant, 1997:6), and where the value of a life is differentially calculated. From the slave ship to the transmodal container and its super cargo container carrier ship, from the colonial plantation to the refugee camp, and from the spectral threat of nuclear ruination to the escape fantasies of the colonisation of outer space, today James Baldwin鈥檚 profound and prophetic reflection, 鈥淭omorrow you will all be negroes!鈥� resonates more starkly.
