Press play,
absorb live feed from the marine ecosystem located below the Frying Pan Tower, 34 miles off Cape Fear, North Carolina,
allow the underwater sounds to accompany your reading.
Unlike most other underwater webcams, this one does not show the animals in captivity but in their natural habitat. It connects us to the marine ecosystem that the artist Valerie Tameu interacted with in her work Metabolo (2023), where the unique textures and movements of the ocean world were translated through machine learning into data that modified the soundtrack on which the artist created the performance, in Europe, in real-time. In her work, the human-machine interaction evoked a more spiritual layer, represented by the myth of Mami Wata, an aquatic divinity worshipped in West, Central and Southern Africa and in the Afro-American diaspora, halfway between a human and a fish, a hybrid and alien being:
The cyanotype prints and drawings are edited into videos and accompanied by text from Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals* by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. A mutant documentation creating fictional underwater scans and seabeds, calling to imagine those adapted to living deep in the ocean as well as the lives lost there: evolving throughout centuries into hybrid creatures to re-surface with knowledge about breathing in unbreathable circumstances.
The above proposes a multi-media ritual of it’s own that, through the movement of colors and symbols, seeks to give body to the imagination of Mami Wata, the half-fish half-woman aquatic goddess, kindred with sea mammals and amazing at not drowning.
As one of the winners of the Residenze Digitali 2024, Tameu will continue her cyber-magical ritual of animating the legend of Mami Wata.
While remembering her residency in September 2023, the traces collected here are an archaeology of the future – a constellation of imaginations, technologies and memories that will possibly be re-awakened, studied and modified in November 2024, during Digital Residencies Week.
Kadri Sirel
*words from the preface: a guide to undrowning