Contemporânea

Fear might seem a counterproductive place from which to launch a project concerned with envisioning futures. And yet, all paths taken in preparing this text have led back to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's writings, in which fear (whether in its conception or its origins) prefigures a return to Amerindian perspectivism.2 This feeling, so deeply embedded in the human experience, would be the antithesis of reason, at least according to those whom the author calls “our immediate ancestors”: the moderns. The “serene fearlessness” evoked in his words would come as the by-product of a technological culture guided by knowledge—to fear nothing because everything is understood might well be one of the most enduring historical delusions of our collective imaginary. But as Viveiros de Castro already suggests, Reason, “as it spread, vastly increased the reasons to be afraid,” and, he goes on, “became something to fear in its own right.”3 The modern faith in Progress, shot through with its technocratic and monocultural belief systems, can be held responsible for having forged a world that fails to live up to its own promises—a world increasingly unfit to sustain life as we know it.

As Arctic glaciers collapse under rising temperatures, such is the world in which imperialist interests and military expansionism are legitimised rather than replaced with political alternatives to the capitalist development model; in which the loss of polar mass across the Earth’s crust does not ring out as a warning of the end (or at least of some kind of end) but instead fuels economic interest in extractivist ventures and new maritime trade routes. It is a world where climate collapse is formally debated in a language that strengthens the neoliberal push to individualise responsibility, thereby obscuring the power structures that underpin predatory systems; where, from Greenland (prefiguring a repeat of the US Virgin Islands)4 to the Suez Canal, colonial projects continuously reinvent themselves, perpetuating the logic of human domestication and, when needed, implying that those who stand in the way should be excluded or exterminated.5 It is a world without a past, seemingly doomed to repeat its own mistakes ad aeternum. 

In all these senses and likely many more, this world has transformed the present into a sort of modernity hangover. Technocratic, monocultural, supremacist, and hegemonic, it has left us fearing everything, for we (seemingly) understand nothing. We do not understand ourselves, nor what we call “nature,” nor the “other.” Otherness has once again become a threat, just as terrifying as it was during the heyday of pseudoscientific racism, fuelling the emotive appeal of resurgent fascisms. Faced with the riddle of the Sphinx, are we a society so afraid of itself that it seems destined to destroy the very conditions of its own existence?6 Or will we finally learn that fear need not be repulsion, but longing—a sign that we must learn how to become-other?7

If we understand otherness as a construction that has been progressively reinforced over the course of history, it becomes clear that it has long served as a principle to commodify both the more-than-human and the human—or rather, certain specific human identities: the migrant, the woman, the racialised, among others who at times seem scarcely acknowledged as belonging to humanity at all. As an ideological device, otherness reshapes the world and, by extension, the many “others” who inhabit it. Humans and more-than-humans come to be seen as ontologically separate; nature and culture are split into a hierarchical relationship that justifies a positivist logic of extractivist development; each species is assigned a strictly defined function within a harmful food chain. Within a system that subjugates all, we lose sight of ourselves as interdependent parts of a greater whole.

Among the most telling examples of this thesis is the relatively recent phenomenon that geographer Jamie Linton has termed “modern water,” as cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis recalls in Bodies of Water. In the book, Neimanis explores the links between the contemporary water crisis and this very phenomenon, whereby water is conceived of as something abstracted from bodies and environments, and divorced from its social and ecological entanglements.8 “Modern water” refers to an abstraction, a deterritorialisation that, through ideological repetition, normalises the view of water as a mere resource—hence the ease with which its appropriation is justified, especially as melting ice caps begin to open up new commercial shipping routes across the oceans. 

Resisting perspectives that seek to commodify, colonise, and subjugate, thereby turning every element of the cosmos into a monetisable resource, may well be one way to interrupt the reckless march that has led us to this futureless present of ours, where fear has become an intrinsic reaction of the human experience. But swimming against the current requires a willingness to heed and comprehend the voices that contest hegemonic discourse. We seek, then, the latent refuges found in Amerindian cosmological worldviews (now richly recorded) as well as in anticolonial and ecofeminist theory. We draw on their legacies and their contemporary production, even if such an enquiry into their principles often raises more questions than it answers—a reminder, perhaps, of the fundamental role that questions play in any process of liberation.9

It is at the crossroads of these radically imaginative perspectives that Oceanic Writings finds its footing. Using publishing as a way of sowing, nurturing, and circulating ideas, the project aims to bring together artistic and critical practices that, informed by or attuned to the aforementioned lines of thought, attempt to build alternative worlds, map out dissidence, and envision possible futures, even while remaining acutely aware of the limits of agency within our concrete reality. At times unconsciously, at times deliberately, these practices are grounded in fundamentally dialogical approaches that blur the boundaries of the human; that are rooted in encounter and exchange; that are forged in collectivity; or that suggest fluidity as a method. By intersecting disciplines and the idea of correspondence, Oceanic Writings calls upon water as metaphor, and the Atlantic as a symbolic territory, thereby evoking the multiple “others” that make up our cosmos and affirming a space of convergence that underscores the imperative of our interspecies dependence. 

Oceanic Writings opens with the translation of Sovereignties, Activisms, and Audiovisual Spiritualities, a conversation between filmmakers Olowaili Green, David Hernández Palmar, Laura Huertas Millán, Nelly Kuiru, Pablo Mora, Mileidy Orozco Domicó, and Amado Villafaña. Originally transcribed from an online conversation held in 2022, we have translated its first part into Portuguese, aiming to broaden the reach of this rich testimony on Indigenous filmmaking in Colombia. The decision to begin with this reflects our understanding of the conversation as a kind of preview of the many concerns that underpin the project’s editorial rationale: the challenge to the Western historical narrative, which casts Europe in a “civilising” role; audio-visual technology as an actual practice in Amerindian territories prior to colonisation; the spirituality inherent in artistic practice; and the porousness of the human in its interspecies relationships, among other vital questions that emerge from this vibrant exchange among the filmmakers’ perspectives.

Each piece commissioned for this edition is similarly grounded in the idea of conversation and exchange as a method. In the interviews, different territories are explored. Writer and researcher Maria Kruglyak talks with poet and visual artist Juliankxx, whose audio-visual work is rooted in his own biography and experience as part of the African diaspora, finding in other diasporic experiences ways to construct narratives that question notions of identity and belonging, often in literal or metaphorical crossings of the Atlantic. Then, as the editor of this project, Paula Ferreira writes in the wake of a gathering with activist and cultural critic Kitty Furtado, whose research has contributed to the discussion of racism, memory, and reparations within the realm of film production and theory. Her work also explores films produced during the processes of liberation of former colonies as a means of demonstrating the power of moving images as tools of resistance in the struggles for independence. Likewise, curators João Mourão and Luís Silva contribute to this edition with an interview with artist Minia Biabiany, evoking the Caribbean territory present in her work, as well as the relations between the colonial history of the islands, language, and narrative. Finally, curator and writer Ana Sophie Herrera engages in an exchange with artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz based on her audio-visual work, which challenges and suspends the boundaries between reality and fiction, examining notions of identity, popular culture, and the history of territories in the Global South.

The idea of correspondence is further developed in the commissioned essays for this edition. Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, author of As Telefones and Luanda, Lisboa, and Paraíso—books in which the Atlantic serves as a backdrop for lives marked by the crossing of this oceanic space—contributes with a newly created literary piece. A cartography of the political processes surrounding the Atlantic Ocean is also conjectured in researcher and curator Mattia Tosti's essay. The audio-visual essays presented are also grounded in exchange: in the interactions between human and non-human explored in the work of artist Vica Pacheco, who engages with pre-Hispanic technologies and mythologies through experimental music; and in the disciplinary fluidity of Adriana João’s visual and sonic investigations.

Oceanic Writings also extends beyond the digital realm with the publication of an artist’s book that places the works of artists Joana da Conceição and Tiago Baptista into dialogue. The book, featuring the experimental inclination of Sílvia Prudêncio's design, investigates the artists’ pictorial universes in three-dimensional fashion, creating discursive relationships. In its imagining of a hybrid nature, figures that seem to inhabit the depths of fictional oceans interact with the ruins of a past-present-future time, expressed through the symbiotic layering of organic and geometric fragments of a humanity in contact with the cosmos. The convergence of the artists’ distinct visual languages unfolds across the pages, in keeping with a practice deeply attuned to encounter with others—and with otherness itself.

This project, as such, proposes numerous crossings between different fields of contemporary art and both critical and theoretical production. By reckoning the creative freedom of each author and artist as a means to build up speculations and narratives, we traverse the Atlantic as a symbolic territory.

—Paula Ferreira, executive editor Oceanic Writings