All Islands Connect Under Water

An evening of moving image on the politics and poetics of water with works by Jonathas de Andrade, Leila Gamaz, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Juanita Onzaga and Chris Welsby. The programme will open with a new performance by poet and activist-scholar Nat Raha who will share work from her evolving project, aquasomatics.

The films visit a range of aquatic and oceanic ecologies fragmented by legacies of colonial rupture, military expropriation and rapid shifts in industrialisation. The films each use relational tactics that resist the material abstraction of waterways and sources, drawing forth a radical politics of scale, memory, guardianship and interdependency. The programme tunes into a range of stories that animate the cultural, spiritual and geopolitical dimensions of specific bodies of water with attention to the communities and relationships they sustain. Water is recentred by these artists as a vital life force and elemental disruptor that exceeds ownership.

Curated by Alaya Ang, Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo and Aden Solway. This event is supported by the British Art Network Emerging Curators Group (ECG) and takes place under the aegis of Confluence, an ongoing collective research project on the multiple contextual understandings around water as a political, historical and economic substance.

Running order

Nat Raha, Aquasomatics, 2024, live performance
A poet and activist-scholar based in Edinburgh, Scotland, Raha’s work focuses on transfeminism, LGBTQ+ genders and sexualities, practices and collectives of care and social reproduction, racial capitalism, decolonization and critical theory, across poetry, print cultures, art, politics, liberation movements and hi(r)story.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Black Beach/Horse/Camp/The Dead/Forces [Playa negra/Caballo/Campamento/Los muertos/Fuerzas], 2016, silent 16mm B&W, 8’
Black Beach was shot in Vieques, Puerto Rico. an island that was used as a bombing range by the US Navy for 60 years, and that for the past 10 has been fighting for its decontamination. The film weaves together an array of images, demonstrating how land, toxicity, political work, celebration and death are deeply intertwined.

Juanita Onzaga, Tomorrow is a Water Palace [El Mañana es un Palacio de Agua],
2022, Super 8mm & 4k digital, 15’

A lucid dream, an inner space sci-fi about Sybille, the last person alive on a planet with no water left. She roams through arid lands, traveling through strange visions. Entities with more memory than humans communicate with her. How to persuade the spirit of the waters to come back to earth?

Break

Jonathas de Andrade, The Fish [O Peixe], 2016, 16mm transferred to 2k, 23’

Located on the Northeast coast of Brazil, a village of fishermen enact a ritual of embracing the fish that they have caught. Imbued with tenderness, violence and domination, the ritual marks an ambivalent relationship between species.

Leila Gamaz and Elodie Sacher & Younes El Hossaini (560Zoom), From the Shores of El Jadida, 2021, video, 6’

The perception of Agar Agar/E406 (vegan gelatine), which is extracted from the red algae species Gelidium sesquipedale (Red Gold) is framed by its popularity in the Global North as a sustainable resource and its subsequent high market value. As humans we often think of species in terms of our relationship to them and in economic terms, but what would happen if the algae could tell their own story?

Chris Welsby, Drift, 1994, 16mm film transferred to Bluray, 17’

Chris Welsby’s film offers a quiet vision of an ocean and its tenants that is also a metaphor for the act of looking at film.

Accessibility

• The space is wheelchair accessible

• There will be flashing lights in one of the films

• There will be English subtitles when the spoken language is not in English

• Comfy bean bags, snacks and refreshments are available

• This is a relaxed screening - you are free to move around, enter and exit at any time

• Please email boxoffice@cca-glasgow.com for arrangements you would like to discuss your access requirements.