WHATEVER YOU THROW AT THE SEA . . .

‘I do not believe in time, I do believe in water…’
— Dionne Brand

For me, vinyl has never really been about the collecting as much as it’s been about the selecting…the placing of sounds, rhythms and echoes in conversation with one another in new ways that magically generate brief portals to elsewhere according to logics completely unbeknown to me. Working with records, and sound, in this way has always provided me a kind of hall-pass: to both research with rigour, yet still play without the expectation of coherence or translation. Vinyl — selecting vinyl — presents an immediacy around what is at stake when we use words like “archive”, “communion” and “haptics”. It is an example of what Fred Moten means when he proposes “Black Study”; communal study that is at once an intellectual, social and aesthetic practice.

This particular record forms part of a larger project, Whatever You Throw At The Sea… that attempts to take seriously Moten and Harney’s (2013) call for ‘the undercommons’, where we — the colonised, queer, and otherwise marginal — make meaning with and alongside each other on our own terms, where we might imagine and live otherwise.

Whatever You Throw At The Sea… is a research-based installation that emerged after having critically engaged the collections of the Weltmuseum Wien and the Phonogrammarchiv at the Austrian Academy of Sciences while in residency at the Weltmuseum in the summer of 2022. Through the development of a sonic assemblage opera in the form of a limited edition 12” vinyl, the installation engages oceanic and rhythmic logics as bound up in loss, life, death and possibility. Broadly speaking, the project considers the ways communities in Africa and the African diaspora have been at the literal frontlines of ecological, cultural and epistemological pillaging and border-making, both within and outside the confines of ‘the museum archive’. Indeed, the internal logic of these remains the same: that of Civilisation with a capital ‘C’.

I was never ready for the co-presences of violence and haunting I would encounter upon working with and within the museum. The work is, in part a response to this, and perhaps also to my naiveté regarding just how affecting and embodied this experience would be; posted in an old Habsburg palace in the capital of Austria, a country that simultaneously negates its involvement in the colonial project and yet luxuriates in the bad breath of imperialism.

Museum storerooms are their own special kind of purgatory where time, geography and Eurocentric myths are signified and solidified through the rendering of the museum ‘object’ as fixed and thus conservable — subjected to the violence of ‘collection’ and confined from touch, light and breath.

My vision of anticolonial praxis is not solely teleological — moving from colonial oppression to siloed emancipation — but rather considers entanglements of ideas, rhythms, histories, landscapes, waters and narratives that can only be legible and emerge in relation to one another. The research in this project practices an associative journeying, co-identification and co-citation beyond the enduring object-ownership and dismemberment the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, enduring coloniality and the museum archive necessitate. This co-productive methodology allows for archival material to be engaged as having inherent agency on an affective basis, and not simply one of European edification as was initially intended in the establishment of ‘the colonial archive’ or the ethnological museum.

The process behind this exhibition insists on a collective listening and reckoning with the lifeworlds of those contained in ‘the archive’: the survival guidelines and subversive strategies that are concealed within the material in these aforementioned collections. It integrates the narratives, embodied experiences and oceanic networks of loss and life / death and living related to the colonial extraction and housing of cultural ‘objects’ and photographs of African persons on whose skin histories, myths and time have been projected.

Unsurprisingly, in my work in the photographic collection, I was reminded that the medium very rarely names those who stood in front of the cameras and were captured by individuals the museum generously identifies as “researchers”. Photographs are mostly titled with essentialist language, and very often with racial pejoratives and slurs. This work resonates with the sounds of voices and rhythms that have been stored in the Phonogrammarchiv, a sound archive that dates back to the beginnings of the invention of sound recording technologies. Some of these voices belong to Atale Djimade in Togo, Pangwasi Binagu, Josef Mpandanjile, and Kasia Ngasangu in Tanzania, Shadrack Muzumbakufwa and Panott Chisinze in Zambia, and Dady and Marcelline in Madagascar, each of whom, in some form or another, were participants in Austrian ethnographic or ethnomusicological research dating back to the 1960s. I have not met any of the persons to whom these voices belong.

Additionally, this project has been produced with the active participation of a number of cultural workers and individuals (based in Johannesburg and Vienna) whose personal histories are implicated in the project’s source materials from across the African continent and her diaspora. In this connection, audio and visual material is given an opportunity to sit in affective proximity with each other…suddenly, for example, material from Senegal is able to resonate with material from Tanzania. Working with archives in this way allows for the work to undo some of the carceral logic of colonial borders, shipping networks and the carving of the African continent and museum collections into imposed nation-states.

Whatever you throw at the sea . . . the exhibition, this vinyl and my residency was funded in part by the TAKING CARE EU project, that proposes “Ethnographic and World Cultures Museums as Spaces of Care”. To maintain the ethnographic museum is to continue to assert a particular lens of rational cognition that disavows epistemological frameworks from the majority world, or at best, renders them to the realm of belief and symbolism no matter the language of care and custodianship.

Indeed, care is a pathway through catastrophe. I also remain unconvinced by ethnographic and world cultures museums’ capacity and willingness to take this instruction of care seriously. To engage in this labour of healing without the guarantee of survival. Following from Tina Campt, “care is compassion even in the face of failure”. It is a refusal. A refusal to look past precarity. A refusal to be insensitive to the suffering of others.

Furthermore, the TAKING CARE project proposes an exploration of the connections between ethnographic collections, the climate crisis and the anthropocene. The presence of this exhibition within this environment and funding scheme presents a messy reality where the histories of extraction, colonial violence and the consequent obsessive techniques and apparatus of conservation (by way of surveillance, border-making, collections management, access control and the evasion of restitution of both land and material culture to indigenous peoples) only serves to sanitize the responsibilities imperial nations (and their citizens) ought to face.

Conservation (of both the environmental and ethnomuseological convention), as it is currently framed and executed, lies squarely in the paradigms of the imperial agenda that forcibly remove(d) indigenous people and their material cultures from their land. Conservation for conservation’s sake is not, by default, care. A decolonial approach to (climate) justice and the enduring life of the ethnological museum are inherently at odds with one another. No good intention can absolve the museum of its intended fate; breathless violence.

The spectacular landscapes in the photographic collections of the ethnographic museum demonstrate the sublime terror of land-surveying: in which humans are notably absent from the sweeping vistas of the oceanic expanse from which the imperial and carceral agenda sprung onto the shores of the majority world, and in this case, the African continent. Here, the romantic depictions of the Nile’s tributaries, Victoria Falls, and the Twelve Apostles demonstrate a persistent colonial fantasy of naive and unspoiled wilderness ripe for settlement and extraction. Unsurprisingly, indigenous land safeguarding, tenure and world-making practices, and, of course, resistances are omitted from the archive.

For those of us from the global south, archives are mostly sites of erasure and the production of difference as a consumable value through extreme visibility. But it is within the direct gaze of those captured and stored in the collection that we can feel the frictions and subversions of those subjected to the colonial and ethnographic encounter. A witness to counter-seeing: “I see you…I know your intention, and I see you.”

Seas, oceans and rivers — whilst spaces subjected to land surveying practices of conquest, and the carceral logics of settlement and trafficking (human, material and ecological) — also insist on possibility and imagining otherwise, still. The ocean is both a home for our ancestors and an ancestor herself. Water is, herself, an archive of knowledge, witnessing and time. Water is a way of knowing and being in the world that proposes memory and rhythm of a different kind. If dialectics is the dyadic organization that Western philosophy has assumed how we ought to live, then Tidalectics involves a range of different readings and interpretations—for water is a transitory element, and a “being dedicated to water is a being in flux.”. Water demonstrates a refusal of border-making, an insistence on interconnection and a tending to disavowed ontologies on our own terms and those of our living dead. This interconnection is exactly what the colonial logic of conservation ignores and posits as the impossibility of border porosity; of an expansive identity, ontology, migration; and of course Black spirituality.

Landscape, the waterfalls, oceans, seas, rivers, the groove, and the people in the archive drive narrative. Here, water is a simultaneous acknowledgement and refusal. It is care. Care is touch, feeling and porosity. Care is sound, interiority and breath; a collective sensing of both the inevitable and the possible.

 In considering the weaponisation of time and memory in the horrors of collection management, Whatever You Throw at the Sea… hopes to present a brief rearticulation of this matrix. It follows Glissant’s call for the right to exist in a difference that is not immediately inscribed by transparency. It centres water as a consciousness and places an emphasis on the ephemeral through sound. Voice, breath and the haptic gaze emerge as indices of Black interiority that takes seriously an oceanic worldview, the rhythmic fluidity of water and the incessant, feedback loop of the swelling and receding of the tides; tidalectics. A refusal to individuate. Whatever you throw at the sea, the ocean throws it back…

— Zara Julius, 2023

The work in this project follows from the many undisciplined scholars of anthropology who paved the way; Archie Mafeje, Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Trinh T. Minh-ha.

Whatever You Throw at the Sea… is an installation at the Weltmuseum Vienna, Austria. The exhibition runs until 2 April ‘24. More information here

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Harney, S. & Moten, F. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions.

The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 determined the partitioning of Africa and Africa’s natural and human resources among Western countries at the expense of African people, culture and their worldviews in pursuit of Western imperialism

Campt, T. (2022). Frequencies of Care. Loophole of Retreat: Venice, 8 October, Venice.

Brathwaite, K. (1999) ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey. New York: We Press.

Glissant, E. 1990 (1997). Poetics of Relation. Translated by B. Wing. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press.

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Project participants:
Tabea Briggs, Emily Joost Chychy, Faris Cuchi Gezahegn, Louis Deininger, Ava Binta Diallo, Masimba Hwati, Katia Ledoux & Vuyiswa Xekatwane

Special thanks:
Doris Prlić, Zoe Samudzi, Anesu Chigariro, Whitney Akpetsi, Denise Palmieri, Lazy Library Vienna, LEWITT, DISC_ARCHIVE, Princess Njoku, Susanna Gartmayer, Gabi Motuba, Leni Charles, Lisl Ponger, Luke Pallett, Zakara Raitt, Jumping Back Slash, Julia Neudorfer and all the project participants