I(s) Land
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I(s) Land. 2024
video-performance + text Metabolizing Human Wrongs- Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures arts and research collective (GTDF) Curated by: Dani d'Emilia SEE FULL VIDEO-PERFORMANCE HERE SEE FULL PUBLICATION at artseverywhere |
An invitation…
to float, to levitate, to become (devenir) a moving island
to dissolve into an archipelago, detaching from the fixity of the self
to dance to the rhythm of the waves, to the knowledge of the tide
o migrate life into death into life into death…
to honour the resistance, re-existence and rebellion of imagined and regained futures
to make love with the water spirit(s), inhabiting the erotic power in all
to savour the magnetic pull whilst feeling adrift (a la deriva), and finding pleasure in it
to perceive and journey through the spiral time of the oceans
to regain the wisdom of unseparability from a pluritemporal hydrospheric pluriverse
to tune into the whispering breath of oneself, we-self
to listen in(to) the deep, into the cosmic life flow
to sense beyond* sight, beyond* gaze
to reactivate magnetic sensibility and electric connectivity
to poeticise the memorial futures of the oceanscapes
to mix salt and blood in an oceanic ritual to our traumasphere
to float, to levitate, to become (devenir) a moving island
to dissolve into an archipelago, detaching from the fixity of the self
to dance to the rhythm of the waves, to the knowledge of the tide
o migrate life into death into life into death…
to honour the resistance, re-existence and rebellion of imagined and regained futures
to make love with the water spirit(s), inhabiting the erotic power in all
to savour the magnetic pull whilst feeling adrift (a la deriva), and finding pleasure in it
to perceive and journey through the spiral time of the oceans
to regain the wisdom of unseparability from a pluritemporal hydrospheric pluriverse
to tune into the whispering breath of oneself, we-self
to listen in(to) the deep, into the cosmic life flow
to sense beyond* sight, beyond* gaze
to reactivate magnetic sensibility and electric connectivity
to poeticise the memorial futures of the oceanscapes
to mix salt and blood in an oceanic ritual to our traumasphere
The Journey of Us, Waters
Feeling the tidalectics [1] in my corporeal-energetic being in the World: watery epistemology. A hydrosphere of fluid exchanges, a traumasphere of hierarchical separations. The oceanic waters “outside” in caressing recognition with my “inner” watery self. Uniting circulatory systems of an existential voyage. Salt and blood. Waves that trigger the dance of death, the dance of life: wave erotics. Movements in apparent stillness. The waving horizon, the porosity of the border—the fraction of void. Diffraction of the light, of the sight, blurring the colonial and patriarchal gaze. A cultural gazing that invented “nature” as external and observable.
Upon floating, which parts become submerged? Never outside, but never totally inside. A growing desire of the contact zones, liminal pulsations, transcorporeal engagement. Us, bodies of water, making love—between floating the surface and sinking the deep. Maritorios[2] of fluidity and juxtaposition. Sensuality of the submergence into the sea of stories beyond human sensibility. Dermochelys coriacea’s[3] tales from the Holocene. A sea of islands[4] against colonial insularism(o)[5] and isolation.
Magnetic sensibility and migratory traces: bees, turtles, sharks, humans, jellyfish, manta rays, algae… Sea-turtles tracing their nesting back to the same shore where they once hatched. Magnetised memory. Magnetite particles also present in the human brain, heart, liver and spleen. Magnetite: the universal memory molecule.[6] Sensorial memories held on the surface, shivering in the deep. Adrift, a la deriva, a de-centered, offshore search. One type of memory loss for an/other type of memory gain, linked to our magnetic capacities. Memory of the ocean imprinted in the stones, in the flesh. Waves are ultimately connecting spirals, channelling the forms of the macrocosmos into the waters. Channelling the spirit of the ocean, the ocean channelling the spirit held in us. Co-sensing, co-channelling, spirit-shifting. Trickster tales. H2O shape-shifting capacities, the triad transfiguration of states of being. The elasticity and density of the waters: the ocean’s and mine: ours. Opacity and clarity caressing our tense and soft border-curves, borderwaves. Becoming body-geography, within and beyond geopolitics. Becoming a floating land, I(s)land.
Sensorial activism.
I sense, therefore I become
They didn’t remember in pictures nor did they recall exact events, but they knew things in their bodies, bits of the
past absorbed into them and transformed into instincts.
– Rivers Salomon et al. The Deep, (2019)
Sharks drawn to the magnetic pull of Internet underwater cables, attack the imperial and capitalist connectivity of the individual “I” of modernity. Optic cables that trace the same paths as the transatlantic slave route. Data flowing below the ocean’s surface through epipelagic and mesopelagic zones. The unseen undersea backbone containing 95% of global data transference detached from ancestral sentient knowledge flowing through the pluritemporal pluriverse of watering beings that inhabit us. Sediments and currents, network hackers. Vaga-bonding into intimacies that move, vibrate, shape-shift. Citizen-ship, a member of the aquatic community. All those souls held by the sea. Current migratory assassinations, past massacre of the enslaved. Cyclical rhythm. Time travel(ers). Drexciya: underwater resistance of submerged mothers. A geopoetic model of history. Ser agua que vuelve.[7]
Mami-Wata, Yemayá, Atabey.From the river to the sea… How long is long enough? From the river to the sea…[8] Residence time: the duration of persistence of a mass or substance in a medium or place. Durational knowledge. Oceans have a water residence time of 3,000 to 3,230 years. The capacity of staying afloat. The privilege of not drowning in the Strait of Gibraltar or the Mona Passage. What colonial guilt floats? What colonial privilege drowns? A sea that became a human border; a death crossing. Holding oxygen as an indication of being alive. Surface breathers with gills? Breathing into the pulsation of the deep waters. Bubbles as survival mechanism; as carriers of remembrance.
(…) she liked to think about the dead, about the trace left by the choreographies of the living. That they left some
kind of trace. For that very reason she liked the sea, with its sunken ships, its infinity of drowned people, the
amalgam of dead and living creatures that crashed like iodine molecules in her throat.
– Rita Indiana. Asmodeo, (2024) (translation from Spanish)
The dance of time, the dance of decay, the dance of death and life altogether. Life-giver, life-taker. The origin of life on Earth. Debris of human modern “nature,” detached from the cosmic spider web. Plastic 21st-century ruins becoming movable islands such as our own aquatic matter. Oil spills running into our veins. The revenge of the waters seeking justice and re-calibration. Response-ability to/with the waters, their cycles, rhythms and spirits.
The waters’ surface has the medicine to distort our individual and ocular fixations. A looking into the oceanic gaze; the water-eye--ojo de agua, ojo de mar. Our surface s-kin waters co-sensing each other. Sentient sea. Touching, licking, leaking from our cracks. A trance state of pleasing discomfort of the ongoing devenir. Surrender into the unknown, savour the unseen, an offering of one-self into the stretching of the multitudes we are. Which parts of my inner multitudes are floating, and which are being held in the deep? Is floating another form of levitation? Floating with the ocean becomes deeply imprinted in my multitudes, in my being-in-the-World. An ancestral memory of floating in the womb. An ancestrality of the algae I have been and the plastic I will become. A sea of plastic islands; the worldliness of islands.
Seaweed encounters between Caribbean Sargassum and Mediterranean Posidonia oceanica. A prolongation of the ocean’s flesh. Salty properties of the sea offer crystalline structures. In its liquid aqueous state, salt gathers electrical conductivity. Connectivity. Here in the ocean, other capacities are revealed. Electric weaving, refractive vision, magnetic resilience, microscopic kinship. Waters emerge from invisible regions, from above and from below, offering and (re)creating spiral (in)formation. A portal into the memory of the waters; our shared memory.
Marina Barsy Janer ©2024
--
[1] Tidalectics engage with what Kamau Brathwaite calls an “alter/native” historiography and epistemology to western linear models of colonial progress, drawing from a cyclical model, invoking the continual movement and rhythm of the ocean.
[2] “The radical separation of land and sea is another reflection of a Western construction of the world, which is extraordinarily functional for the purposes of a centrally governed extractive exploitation.” Ricardo Álvarez et al. (2019), in “Reflexiones sobre el concepto de maritorio y su relevancia para los estudios de Chiloé contemporáneo” (Reflections on the concept of maritorium and its relevance for contemporary Chiloé studies).
[3] Scientific name for the Leatherback Sea Turtle, the largest of all living sea turtles. This turtle traces its evolutionary roots back to more than 100 million years ago and has the widest global distribution of all reptile species. Leatherbacks undertake the longest migrations of any sea turtle travelling approximately 6,000 km between breeding and feeding areas. Their eggs are left in a sand hole during a nighttime ritual and the temperature inside this nest determines the sex of the hatchlings.
[4] In the 1993 essay “Our Sea of Islands” Epeli Hau’ofa reconceptualises the sea as an ancestral home of connections between islands rather than a colonial separator, focusing in the (Pacific) Islanders’ historical relationships to each other.
[5] A reference to Antonio S. Pedreira’s emblematic essay “Insularismo: Ensayos de interpretación puertorriqueña” (1934).
[6] Fredrik C. Størmer (2014) “Is magnetite a universal memory molecule?”
[7] “Agua que vuelve” (2022), song by Lizbeth Román.
[8] From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
Feeling the tidalectics [1] in my corporeal-energetic being in the World: watery epistemology. A hydrosphere of fluid exchanges, a traumasphere of hierarchical separations. The oceanic waters “outside” in caressing recognition with my “inner” watery self. Uniting circulatory systems of an existential voyage. Salt and blood. Waves that trigger the dance of death, the dance of life: wave erotics. Movements in apparent stillness. The waving horizon, the porosity of the border—the fraction of void. Diffraction of the light, of the sight, blurring the colonial and patriarchal gaze. A cultural gazing that invented “nature” as external and observable.
Upon floating, which parts become submerged? Never outside, but never totally inside. A growing desire of the contact zones, liminal pulsations, transcorporeal engagement. Us, bodies of water, making love—between floating the surface and sinking the deep. Maritorios[2] of fluidity and juxtaposition. Sensuality of the submergence into the sea of stories beyond human sensibility. Dermochelys coriacea’s[3] tales from the Holocene. A sea of islands[4] against colonial insularism(o)[5] and isolation.
Magnetic sensibility and migratory traces: bees, turtles, sharks, humans, jellyfish, manta rays, algae… Sea-turtles tracing their nesting back to the same shore where they once hatched. Magnetised memory. Magnetite particles also present in the human brain, heart, liver and spleen. Magnetite: the universal memory molecule.[6] Sensorial memories held on the surface, shivering in the deep. Adrift, a la deriva, a de-centered, offshore search. One type of memory loss for an/other type of memory gain, linked to our magnetic capacities. Memory of the ocean imprinted in the stones, in the flesh. Waves are ultimately connecting spirals, channelling the forms of the macrocosmos into the waters. Channelling the spirit of the ocean, the ocean channelling the spirit held in us. Co-sensing, co-channelling, spirit-shifting. Trickster tales. H2O shape-shifting capacities, the triad transfiguration of states of being. The elasticity and density of the waters: the ocean’s and mine: ours. Opacity and clarity caressing our tense and soft border-curves, borderwaves. Becoming body-geography, within and beyond geopolitics. Becoming a floating land, I(s)land.
Sensorial activism.
I sense, therefore I become
They didn’t remember in pictures nor did they recall exact events, but they knew things in their bodies, bits of the
past absorbed into them and transformed into instincts.
– Rivers Salomon et al. The Deep, (2019)
Sharks drawn to the magnetic pull of Internet underwater cables, attack the imperial and capitalist connectivity of the individual “I” of modernity. Optic cables that trace the same paths as the transatlantic slave route. Data flowing below the ocean’s surface through epipelagic and mesopelagic zones. The unseen undersea backbone containing 95% of global data transference detached from ancestral sentient knowledge flowing through the pluritemporal pluriverse of watering beings that inhabit us. Sediments and currents, network hackers. Vaga-bonding into intimacies that move, vibrate, shape-shift. Citizen-ship, a member of the aquatic community. All those souls held by the sea. Current migratory assassinations, past massacre of the enslaved. Cyclical rhythm. Time travel(ers). Drexciya: underwater resistance of submerged mothers. A geopoetic model of history. Ser agua que vuelve.[7]
Mami-Wata, Yemayá, Atabey.From the river to the sea… How long is long enough? From the river to the sea…[8] Residence time: the duration of persistence of a mass or substance in a medium or place. Durational knowledge. Oceans have a water residence time of 3,000 to 3,230 years. The capacity of staying afloat. The privilege of not drowning in the Strait of Gibraltar or the Mona Passage. What colonial guilt floats? What colonial privilege drowns? A sea that became a human border; a death crossing. Holding oxygen as an indication of being alive. Surface breathers with gills? Breathing into the pulsation of the deep waters. Bubbles as survival mechanism; as carriers of remembrance.
(…) she liked to think about the dead, about the trace left by the choreographies of the living. That they left some
kind of trace. For that very reason she liked the sea, with its sunken ships, its infinity of drowned people, the
amalgam of dead and living creatures that crashed like iodine molecules in her throat.
– Rita Indiana. Asmodeo, (2024) (translation from Spanish)
The dance of time, the dance of decay, the dance of death and life altogether. Life-giver, life-taker. The origin of life on Earth. Debris of human modern “nature,” detached from the cosmic spider web. Plastic 21st-century ruins becoming movable islands such as our own aquatic matter. Oil spills running into our veins. The revenge of the waters seeking justice and re-calibration. Response-ability to/with the waters, their cycles, rhythms and spirits.
The waters’ surface has the medicine to distort our individual and ocular fixations. A looking into the oceanic gaze; the water-eye--ojo de agua, ojo de mar. Our surface s-kin waters co-sensing each other. Sentient sea. Touching, licking, leaking from our cracks. A trance state of pleasing discomfort of the ongoing devenir. Surrender into the unknown, savour the unseen, an offering of one-self into the stretching of the multitudes we are. Which parts of my inner multitudes are floating, and which are being held in the deep? Is floating another form of levitation? Floating with the ocean becomes deeply imprinted in my multitudes, in my being-in-the-World. An ancestral memory of floating in the womb. An ancestrality of the algae I have been and the plastic I will become. A sea of plastic islands; the worldliness of islands.
Seaweed encounters between Caribbean Sargassum and Mediterranean Posidonia oceanica. A prolongation of the ocean’s flesh. Salty properties of the sea offer crystalline structures. In its liquid aqueous state, salt gathers electrical conductivity. Connectivity. Here in the ocean, other capacities are revealed. Electric weaving, refractive vision, magnetic resilience, microscopic kinship. Waters emerge from invisible regions, from above and from below, offering and (re)creating spiral (in)formation. A portal into the memory of the waters; our shared memory.
Marina Barsy Janer ©2024
--
[1] Tidalectics engage with what Kamau Brathwaite calls an “alter/native” historiography and epistemology to western linear models of colonial progress, drawing from a cyclical model, invoking the continual movement and rhythm of the ocean.
[2] “The radical separation of land and sea is another reflection of a Western construction of the world, which is extraordinarily functional for the purposes of a centrally governed extractive exploitation.” Ricardo Álvarez et al. (2019), in “Reflexiones sobre el concepto de maritorio y su relevancia para los estudios de Chiloé contemporáneo” (Reflections on the concept of maritorium and its relevance for contemporary Chiloé studies).
[3] Scientific name for the Leatherback Sea Turtle, the largest of all living sea turtles. This turtle traces its evolutionary roots back to more than 100 million years ago and has the widest global distribution of all reptile species. Leatherbacks undertake the longest migrations of any sea turtle travelling approximately 6,000 km between breeding and feeding areas. Their eggs are left in a sand hole during a nighttime ritual and the temperature inside this nest determines the sex of the hatchlings.
[4] In the 1993 essay “Our Sea of Islands” Epeli Hau’ofa reconceptualises the sea as an ancestral home of connections between islands rather than a colonial separator, focusing in the (Pacific) Islanders’ historical relationships to each other.
[5] A reference to Antonio S. Pedreira’s emblematic essay “Insularismo: Ensayos de interpretación puertorriqueña” (1934).
[6] Fredrik C. Størmer (2014) “Is magnetite a universal memory molecule?”
[7] “Agua que vuelve” (2022), song by Lizbeth Román.
[8] From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.