Oceanic Imaginaries

How can we liquefy our ways of being? How can we think from and with the ocean? 

Oceanic Imaginaries
Studium Generale & Rietveld Uncut present a four-day conference festival and exhibition of student works about thinking and making from and with the oceans.

Oceanic Imaginaries conceives the oceans as sensors that feel, create and connect. From an ecological point of view, the oceans are ‘critical zones’ that require radical changes in how we think and act. They are also troubling archives full of suppressed stories of transatlantic trade in enslaved people or boat people in the Mediterranean. But the oceans can also be experienced as immersive spaces of affect and liberation, in which new forms of being can emerge. 

March 23: Stefanie Hessler, “Undercurrents: A Journey Across Water, Soil, Bodies, Spirits, Technologies and Time”
This day dives into the Caribbean roots and routes across the Atlantic, considering the ocean as that which connects rather than that which divides. The contributing artists and scholars reflect on the unevenness of those connections against the abstract flows of global capital. They draw links between the urgent ecological present and colonial reverberations affecting human and nonhuman bodies.

With: Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Julien Creuzet, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Josèfa Ntjam / Hugo Mir-Valette.

March 24: Natasha Ginwala and Michelangelo Corsaro, “Invocation #2:  Markings and Moorings: Indigo Waves and Other Stories”
Taking a page from Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s literary odyssey Dragonfly Sea, this day journeys towards the many names the Indian Ocean is called by, its many hues, peoples and shores. Muddying ideas of nation-based sovereignty while reckoning with historic and contemporary civic struggles around port infrastructure and seascapes of destruction, through this convening, we immerse in the ritualistic and sonic legacies of seafaring communities as aural inheritances and ‘interconnected archives’ (Renisa Mawani). Further, the passage of epidemic and dispersal of human and beyond human lives through Afrasian waterways is observed as part of pre-imperial continuum, early globalisms and mercantile ambition. 

With: Brook Garru Andrew, Yasmine Attoumane, Clara Sukyoung Jo, Köken Ergun, Yvonne Adihambo Owuor, Francesca Savoldi and Zahra Malkani with Syma Tariq.

Through a series of invocations and exhibitions, Indigo Waves and Other Stories in partnership with institutions across Cape Town, Berlin, Haarlem, Karachi and Brisbane engages oceanic modes of analyses, resonance and convening foregrounding the Indian Ocean World as method (Isabel Hofmeyr). Partner Institutions: Vasl Artists’ Association, Karachi; Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; IMA, Brisbane

March 25: Erika Balsom, “Fluid Labours”
The films of Fluid Labours conceive of the sea not as an empty space but as an inhabited realm that is a site of work, contingency and relationality, as well as a place of fraught encounter between the human and other-than-human. Beginning in 1895, at the birth of cinema, and extending into the present, this selection explores how nonfiction filmmakers have mobilised diverse strategies to represent the myriad forms of labour that take place on the water. They bear many messages – messages of fantasy and necessity, exploit and exploitation, tradition and modernity, life and death. 

Films and/or introductions by:  Louis Lumière, Noriaki Tsuchimoto, Ricardo Matos Cabo, Rebecca Meyers, Francisco Rodriquez, Hira Nabi.

March 26: Charl Landvreugd, “Imagining Liquification”
In conversation with the artists Joy Mariama Smith and Tarek Lakhrissi, Charl Landvreugd took the invitation to curate a day for Studium Generale Rietveld Academie as an opportunity to collaboratively think through questions of Queerness as a form of Liquification happening in Oceanic Imaginaries. While all featuring performance works are autonomous pieces, the day should be understood as a collaborative form of Liquefaction.

Performances by: Charl Landvreugd, Joy Mariama Smith, Tarek Lakhrissi.

Framework
Studium Generale Rietveld Academie, an exploratory theory program aimed at all departments, open to the public. Head of program: Jorinde Seijdel. Coordinator: Jort van der Laan. 

Rietveld Uncut, Departments and individual students develop projects in relation to the theoretical frameworks of Studium Generale. Curators: Tarja Szaraniec and Tomas Adolfs.