2022 Ioan Davies Memorial Lecture: Of Sea Changes and Other Futurisms with Dr. Ayesha Hameed
- Date
- March 21, 2022
- Time
- 1:00 PM EDT - 3:00 PM EDT
- Location
- Online via Zoom
- Open To
- students, faculty, and the public
- Contact
- Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture
- Website
- http://www.yorku.ca/ioantalk/ (external link)
This year’s invited lecturer is Dr. Ayesha Hameed (external link) , a Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at Goldsmiths University of London. Her talk “Of Sea Changes and Other Futurisms” will expand on two of her recent long term research-creation projects: Black Atlantis and Brown Atlantis.
"Of Sea Changes and Other Futurisms" explores two long term projects. The first, Black Atlantis, is a speculative exploration of the relationship between the transatlantic slave trade, contemporary illegalised migration, and the watery environment of the ocean below. The second, Brown Atlantis, is a new project which extends the speculative methodology produced for Black Atlantis to look at the ecologies of the Indian Ocean world with histories of indenture and slavery.
Black Atlantis (2014-) is a multi-part sound, video, performance and scholarly project that combines two conversations - Afrofuturism and the anthropocene. Black Atlantis looks at afterlives of the Black Atlantic, manifest in contemporary illegalized migration at sea, oceanic environments, popular science narratives, Afrofuturistic soundsystems, and outer space. It examines a landmark event in the history of transatlantic slavery: the jettison of slaves overboard the slave ship Zong in 1781. Black Atlantis rereads this event through a speculation made by the Detroit electronic band Drexciya that the unborn children of these jettisoned slaves adapted to life underwater to form an Atlantis made up of former slaves. Using Walter Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image Black Atlantis examines how to think through sound, image, water, violence and history as elements of an active archive; and time travel as an historical method.
Brown Atlantis (2020-) extends the geography of Black Atlantis from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Brown Atlantis looks at the Indian and Atlantic Oceans together as a site of both indentured and slave labour. I am inspired by Chimurenga’s publication Festac ‘77, which considers the book as a form of technology, and imagine what it would look like if it was invented in Africa. Extending this, it ask: what would a book be if it was invented at sea in the context of indentured and enslaved labour, navigating mangroves, and the sound of the co-mingling of languages and ecosystems? Brown Atlantis builds on Black Atlantis to study marine ecology, Afrofuturist imageries of underwater adaptation, and technologies of navigation, in a different configuration of the weather that takes into account the uniqueness of the Indian Ocean’s trade winds, and south-south trade.
Ayesha Hameed (London, UK) explores the legacies of indentureship and slavery through the figure of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. 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, 21), 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).