Freedom and adventure, the boundless oceans connote. Such indulgent notions are breached by the archives captive in the waters’ depths, thalassic histories of colonialism, enslavement, and displacement. In this collection, Karishma D’Souza brings together the tides of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, wading through histories of inter-oceanic relations, especially as they relate to the Lusophonic world – Portugal, its colonies in Asia and Africa, their shared heritage.
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| Ocean Words (2018) |
A portrait of the metropole, Rooting-1 (2018) colours postcolonial Lisbon (denoted by its quintessential steps) with Saharan sands that sweep into the city from across the Atlantic. Blown in by winds that billowed the sails of early modern vessels of conquest, the sand is a gritty reminder of Portugal’s colonial entanglement with Africa. Also visible is the verdant presence of flora that travelled with people on the Indian Oceanic trade routes, symbolic of contemporary cultural influence from Portugal’s “elsewheres.” Memory holder (2018) sets an unblinking bluest eye against a backdrop of watery cloudscape and the wavy woodgrain of a ship’s floorboards, surfaces that cloak a conspiracy betwixt the environment and mercantilist ambition. Aqueous humour(lessness) flecked with foreign objects, infinite rows of unnamed captives in unseen seas, seedlings that will take root in and forever change alien landscapes across two oceans. Yet, what is made invisible is not unforgotten. Journeys (2018) renders a forlorn island with human contour, making memories of body and land a contiguous geography against which the ocean ebbs as a constant reminder of the unsaid. The past is malleable, however, swimming between the blood trees of ancestry, deeply rooted in the multilayered fathoms of Ocean Words (2018) and what lies concealed in Origin-Mythology propaganda (2018).
History cannot be washed away, the oceans whisper. Its waters are never only its own, each ocean a holder of the heritage of another.
From the Oceans as Archives conference website.
| Detail from Rooting-1 (2018) |
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