CONFLUENCE
A programme curated by Alaya Ang, Francesca Masoero and Shayma NaderAll beginning in water, all ending in water.
Turquoise, aquamarine, deep green, deep blue, ink blue, navy, blue-black cerulean water……
Water is the first thing in my memory.
The sea sounded like a thousand secrets,
all whispered at the same time.”
Dionne Brand, A Map To The Door of No Return
Weaving together different territories, stories, and communities, Confluence seeks to reflect on the transformative and generative moments of breakdown; resistances in the water; pirate practices as care; and harbours as sites of both extractive economies and redistributive ecologies.
Our entry points are literatures of the sea; inland and fluvial mobility routes carving trades, conflicts and exchanges throughout the Mediterranean and the Sahara; intimate histories and current legacies of colonial administrations of the waters intertwining different territories across seas; as well as coastal and fluvial ecologies in Scotland, Morocco, and beyond. While taking into account contemporary material infrastructures of (im)mobility, the project also explores how thinking relationally through water affects our understanding of identities as shifting, various and in-flux.
Confluence articulates through three interrelated strands: a residency and a research programme, and a final exhibition. Each of these aims to create a framework for artists, researchers, curators, and scholars to engage in conversation and share knowledge around water as a matter and an architecture shaping times, spaces, our ways to relate to, and understand them.
Strand 1: The Residency Programme in Morocco & Scotland
Artists in Residence (CCA, Glasgow)
Bahaleen (Jordon)
Raymond Gemayel (Lebanon)
Youssef El Idrissi (Morocco_
Artists in Residence (LE18, Marrakech)
Maria Howard
Natasha Thembiso Ruwona
Saoirse Amira Anis
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Strand 2: The Research Programme
Through workshops, film screenings and conversations inviting artists, activists and researchers from around the Mediterranean, we investigated the notion of the barzakh; a liminal space, and one in-between where technologies, social formations, and practices of the otherwise keep existing and resisting in the backdrop of colonial and capitalistic erasures.
Moving from water as an elemental and infrastructural force, researching how, while dominant narratives crystallise, counternarratives keep being whispered and shared, carried by (space)ship, fog droplets and oceanic waves travelling times and spaces from the coast of Morocco across the Atlantic, or by the songs and tales of dispossessed populations along riverbanks – from Egypt to Portugal, all the way to South America.
In investigating the ecologies and economies of the sea, we learned about the many ways in which winds carry the potential of new water harvests. In questioning dominant academic infrastructures, engaging with the potential for winds to be vessels of knowledge and modes of unlearning and relearning. By unpacking colonial politics of territorial domination, we asked ourselves how the making of one’s harvest determines the dispossession of many others.
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Strand 3: Exhibition
All Islands Connect Under Water
An exhibition by Asha Athman, Islam Shabana, and Samra Mayanja that explores the sea and other bodies of water as contested cultural, political, legal, and socio-economic territories. The exhibition uses the idea of the barzakh, a state of "in-between," to map out submerged stories and fragmented world. Read more...
The programme is hosted by the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow and LE18 Morocco, initiated by Alaya Ang (CCA Glasgow), Francesca Masoero & Shayma Nader (QANAT) It is supported by the International Collaboration Grant from the British Council.