Performance: Black Atlantis – ‘the end of eating everything’
Saturday 13 January, 3.00 – 4.00pm
Presented by artists Ayesha Hameed and Tom Hirst, Black Atlantis is a live audio-visual essay that looks at possible afterlives of the Black Atlantic: in contemporary illegalized migration at sea, in oceanic environments, through Afrofuturistic dancefloors and soundsystems, and in outer space.
Black Atlantis combines two conversations – afrofuturism and the anthropocene. It takes as point of departure Drexciya, the late 20th century electronic music duo from Detroit, and their creation of a sonic, fictional world. Through liner notes and track titles, Drexciya take the Black Atlantic below the water with their imaginary of an Atlantis comprised of former slaves who have adapted to living underwater. This wetness brings to the table a sense of the haptic, the sensory, the bodily, and the epidermal. What below-the-water, and Atlantis brings back is the bottom of the sea, the volume of the water, the materiality of the space of the ocean, and other protagonists that inhabit the sea.
This fourth instalment The End of Eating Everything // Black Atlantis III follows Bodies and Storms// Black Atlantis I; and Agitations and Adaptations// Black Atlantis II. It takes its title from a work by Wangechi Mutu which shows a monstrous form of consumption underwater. The End of Eating Everything considers what Drexciyans might consume underwater, what things are consuming each other around them and what boundaries might be eroded between the what’s and the who’s of what is being eaten.
Ayesha Hameed’s work explores contemporary borders and migration, critical race theory, Walter Benjamin, and visual cultures of the Black Atlantic. Her work has been performed or exhibited at ICA London (2015), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2014), at The Chimurenga Library at the Showroom, London (2015), Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities, Oxford (2015), Edinburgh College of Art (2015), Kunstraum Niederoesterreich Vienna (2015), Pavillion, Leeds in 2015, Homeworks Space Program, Beirut (2016), the Bartlett School of Architecture (2016), and Mosaic Rooms (2017).
Tom Hirst is a musician based in London. He is currently the sole practitioner behind the Design A Wave music project. He has performed music across much of Europe and has many releases on a variety of UK-based and international record labels. He also has taken part in collaborative art projects and performances.
