What we see when we see the sea

The past month has seen an unprecedented rise in global expertise when it comes to maritime and oceanographic matters. Previously, when average Joes and Janes thought of shipping routes, we vaguely remembered maps and phrases such as “rounding the Cape” from high school textbooks. Sustainable fishing was about green symbols on menus and food labels.

Then the (not so) good ship Ever Given got stuck sideways in the Suez Canal and the Netflix documentary Seaspiracy was released. Suddenly, everyone became an expert. Bargaining between imperial powers in the 19th century and the triumph of consumer capitalism over national rivalries? Yup — I read about that in an explainer article on container vessels. The decimation of ocean biodiversity and the contribution of the fishing industry to plastic pollution? Oh yeah, I know, I heard someone said something in Seaspiracy.

The Ever Given saga messed with supply chains and, briefly, drew our collective attention to our dependence on seafaring cargo. Mostly, however, it provided great material for meme makers. Seaspiracy is a necessary reminder that humans are a rapacious, destructive species whose greed may result in our extinction in the foreseeable future. But it is also riddled with biases and inaccuracies.

Alfredo Jaar’s ‘Searching for Spain’, 2012, is a photograph taken in Algiers, looking across the Mediterranean. (Supplied)

So the best we can hope for as a consequence of these unexpectedly paired awareness-raising phenomena is a reminder of how little most of us know about the sea: its past and its future, what floats on its surface and what swims underneath. Ever Given and Seaspiracy piqued our curiosity, but that should only spur us to learn more. There are forgotten histories to recall and marginalised geographies to rediscover. Moreover, there are difficult questions about ethics and politics to ask (and, tentatively, to answer).

These are the tasks undertaken by a number of artists whose work is being exhibited as part of the international collaboration Galleries Curate: RHE. Twenty-one galleries from around the world have chosen Covid-era cooperation over competition, with an inaugural combined exhibition in physical spaces and online that is themed around water (rhe comes from Greek and refers to “flowing”).

The Goodman Gallery Cape Town’s contribution to RHE is titled Fathom and includes work by seven artists responding to the relationship between land and sea: the coastline serves as “the vantage point and the undertow of the exhibition”. Viewers engaging with this material from an SA position will find themselves gazing north, towards points on the African continent that serve or have served as places of departure.

Alfredo Jaar’s Searching for Spain is a photograph taken in Algiers, looking across the Mediterranean — that dangerous passage facing millions of migrants hoping to reach Europe. Dor Guez’s Letters from the Greater Maghreb recalls a Mediterranean journey undertaken by an earlier generation of migrants (specifically, his grandparents’ escape from Nazi-occupied Tunisia to Israel) through the sea-marked pages of documents written in Judeo-Tunisian Arabic.

Sue Williamson’s ‘Messages from the Atlantic Passage (No. 6)’, 2017–2021, is an installation of engraved glass bottles, water tanks, steel shackles and fishing net. (Supplied)

Kiluanji Kia Henda treats the Mediterranean as a site simultaneously of “solidarity between different cultures” and of “death and disappearance”. Her stark black and white prints depict the salt pans of Arles on the French coast as if they were dunes in a desert. Black birds cover this white landscape, invoking the racist discourse of black “intrusion” into Europe — also implicit in the Latin phrase the artist borrows for her title: Mare Nostrum (our sea).

'Messages from the Atlantic Passage' is a large installation based on accumulated records about the history of slavery from the 16th to 19th centuries. (Supplied)

Sue Williamson’s Messages from the Atlantic Passage series adopts a different historical perspective on migration from Africa. Her sculptural installation pays tribute to the two million souls who perished on the notorious slave route from West Africa to the Americas, as well as to the 10 million who survived, only to face the barbarism of enslavement. Williamson has carved the names of people who drowned during specific voyages onto glass bottles that hang from fish nets strung to the ceiling.

The effect of this arrangement, especially considering the fusion in Seaspiracy of the narrative of environmental degradation with that of human trafficking, is to suggest that the violence humans enact on one another cannot be separated from our assumption of dominion over nature.