Oceanic Imaginaries

Black Atlantis: The End of Eating Everything

Black Atlantis combines two conversations - afrofuturism and the anthropocene. It takes as point of departure Drexciya, the late 20th century electronic music duo from Detroit, and their creation of a sonic, fictional world. Through liner notes and track titles, Drexciya take the Black Atlantic below the water with their imaginary of an Atlantis comprised of former slaves who have adapted to living underwater. This wetness brings to the table a sense of the haptic, the sensory, the bodily, and the epidermal. What below-the-water and Atlantis brings back is the bottom of the sea, the volume of the water, the materiality of the space of the ocean, and other protagonists that inhabit the sea.

This third installment is the recording of a performance or audio-visual essay entitled The End of Eating Everything. It follows Bodies and Storms// Black Atlantis I and Agitations and Adaptations// Black Atlantis II. It takes its title from a work by Wangechi Mutu which shows a monstrous form of consumption underwater. The End of Eating Everything considers what Drexciyans might consume underwater, what things are consuming each other around them, and what boundaries might be eroded between the what’s and the who’s of what is being eaten.

Ayesha Hameed (London, UK) explores the heritage of Black diasporas through the figure of the Atlantic Ocean. Her Afrofuturist approach combines performance, sound essays, videos, and lectures. Hameed examines the mnemonic power of these media – their capacity to transform the body into a body that remembers. The motifs of water, borders, and displacement, recurrent in her work, offer a reflection on migration stories and materialities, and, more broadly, on the relations between human beings and what they imagine as nature. Recent exhibitions include Liverpool Biennale (2021), Gothenburg Biennale (2019), Lubumbashi Biennale (2019) and Dakar Biennale (2018). She is co-editor of Futures and Fictions (Repeater 2017) and co-author of Visual Cultures as Time Travel (Sternberg/MIT 2021). She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London.

Deep See Blue Surrounding You / Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre

Artist Laure Prouvost screens her films They Parlaient Idéale - currently on view at the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht - and Lick In The Past. She then discusses the liquidity in her practice, the interwoven representations of desire, oneirism and the fantasy descriptions of nature.

LAURE PROUVOST was born in Lille, France (1978) and is currently based in Brussels. She received her BFA from Central St Martins, London in 2002 and studied towards her MFA at Goldsmiths College, London. Playing with language as a tool for the imagination, Prouvost is interested in confounding linear narratives and expected associations among words, images and meaning. She combines existing and imagined personal memories with artistic and literary references to create complex film installations that muddy the distinction between fiction and reality. At once seductive and jarring, her approach to filmmaking employs layered storytelling, quick edits, montage and wordplay and is composed of a rich, tactile assortment of images, sounds, spoken and written phrases. The videos are often shown within immersive environments which comprise found objects, sculptures, painting and drawings, signs, furniture and architectural assemblages, that are rendered complicit within the overarching narrative of the installation.

The Tuning of our Hearing - Closed Eye Concert #1
Andreas Tegnander
This concert by Andreas Tegnander is curated by aux).

The Tuning of Our Hearing is an immersive 5-channel concert, an auditory experience based on the research from Music From Architecture and Sound as a Malleable Terrain, and dives deep into the essence and specific nature of auditory perception. Water is essential for survival, and we are connected to its sound in a way only the voice can match. The sound of the babbling brook tells us the story of the tuning of our senses. Our deep connection to the sound of water is a journey that starts in the oceans, and ends up on land, with massive pipe systems running within and throughout our life, sending liquids too and away from our bodies. The framework that is my body extends to a shared water reservoir on one end, and a communal kidney on the other.

(Original research for Sound as a Malleable Terrain in collaboration with Thessa Torsing en Nathan Marcus.)

ANDREAS TEGNANDER is a composer and sound artist with a degree in media and sono communication from Sonic College (DK). Through his study and later when working as a sound artist and engineer in STEIM and with other artists, he started developing works that questioned his ideas about perception of sound, using scientific and technological researches, attacking the question ‘what can be perceived’? Andreas is currently involved with a multitude of multimedia projects in this quest for a deeper sensory experience.Throughout his works we are able to experience what is out of reach by re-tuning our hearing through the use of technology.

aux) is an initiative funded by the Extra Intra Curricular Programme and run by students of Sandberg Institute and Rietveld Academie with the aim to collectively question the contemporary domination of image over sound and to intervene with vision-dependent frames of making and knowing. The platform offers a program that covers a spectrum of perspectives addressing sonic experiences and listening as everyday practices. During the academic year 2021/2022 aux) is hosting experiences at the intersection of sound art, experimental music and audio culture, supporting students to create and participate in concerts, listening sessions, workshops, and talks amongst other activities.

More info & full program visit Studium Generale Rietveld Academie