In the experimental film 4 Waters: Deep Implicancy (2018) Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman explore a web of global relations that manifests in the movement of bodies, trajectories of ideas, structures of (neo)colonialism, and ecological devastation mediated and set into action by phase transitions of water.
Understanding water not simply as chemical bonds, the film follows it as a medium of passage and transition, an intimate relation between the organic and inorganic. The four waters of the Mediterranean, the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean evoke histories of enforced passages, logistics of goods and ideas that connect via their medium to geological processes and technological infrastructures. Holding space for different forms of navigation—from gut feeling to satellite positioning—water is depicted as indeterminate yet omnipresent matter rendering “all land masses [… as] islands in an ongoing chain of atolls“ (Ferreira da Silva and Neuman 2019, 9). As one might swim or dive, ship or drown, the film traces the manifold possibilities of narration,
118 histories and perspectives water bears and thus renders visible genealogies and modes of knowledge production. Portraying an interwoven narration of different layers, 4 Waters negotiates geological sub-structures and social histories, thereby touching on descriptive statements and cosmologies that are (in-)formed as much by geological processes as by technologies. Liquefaction appears as the effect of a “rumble from beyond measurable time, from before the start of the organic mapping,” the narrator’s voice states (Ferreira da Silva and Neuman 2018, timecode:
00:15:33). Forgotten layers resurge and corrode the soil for the water to pass up- or downwards. It enforces its various pasts upon the present and proposes a submerged analysis that helps to interpret the magnitude of hypocenters.
[Fig. 2] A tumbling and submerged take following a selfie stick to the ocean’s floor.
(Still from 4 Waters: Deep Implicancy, Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva, 2018, courtesy of the artists)
So contrary to the Apollonian gaze’s claim to universality, which Ferreira da Silva and Neuman deliberately integrate visually as well as conceptually, the filmmakers situate it as only one among many forms of knowledge production. With the sub-merged and partial narrative of the film they suggest that epis-temological shifts imply the task of thoroughly working through the unthought and buried, as well as the surfacing, historical
conditions. These tend to unfold their effect from a historical dis- 119 tance, yet in denaturalizing and unsettling the solid open spaces for orientation on liquid ground.
The “impure” genealogy of ecology and ecologization here served as an indicator in order to lay out changing modes of thinking and knowledge. It thus exposes how power/knowledge structures and modes of government as well as control are ever related to media-technological evolutions. A “biopolitics of surrounding”
(Sprenger 2019) and apparatus of capture aiming at behavior and governing environmental parameters are but two manifestations of ecological modes of subjectivation that are contrasted by “a radically relational and procedural conception of environment”
(Hörl 2018, 160). Conceived of as a speculative mode, general ecology suggests a possibility of re-thinking the becoming-environmental not as the sole phenomenon of globality but as a “neocritical project” (Hörl 2017, 5) of an epistemological shift.
Albeit this concept touches only partially on what has been argued in regard to Yusoff as reappearing patterns of origin-stories, it manifests as one of various current signatures of the fault line. These patterns then would need to be questioned and shown to be founded on historical constructions and self-referential narratives. Therefore, the political aspect of Wynter’s insistence on the importance of a decolonial and processual conception of emergences focuses on the conditions of pos-sible “answers.” As Ferreira da Silva suggests: “[I]nstead of the question of who and what we are, we need to go deeper into the investigation of how we come up with answers to the questions”
(Ferreira da Silva 2015, 104). What a liquefied order of knowledge thus offers is the possibility of mapping the Anthropocene’s fault line in its permanent actualization as a practice of navigation, which asks how epistemic hypocenters are formed in the first place.
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Echolocation
Anna Zilahi
We echo each other’s words, this way we become reverberations ourselves. We don’t know why a new bearing can be born from the constant loss of oneself. We consume what we need, we discharge what we don’t.
A different chaos nests in our footsteps, but it doesn’t empathize. The fog-horn cries out, the fleet of cargo vessels slip their anchors to its sound. Its high price-margin cargo is fixed amidst the swell, the durable material travels towards a slow half-life. The prow cuts through the water, the indifference of solid steel slits the holding ocean into two liquid strands. Our siblings in the water cannot avoid craze, they are moving objects on our radars, we are programme errors on theirs.
Their awaited messengers are dissolved in the oil-dense cacophony. We echo each other’s words, but we are not each other’s points of reference. Deadening solitude.
Noise in logic.
Translated by Owen Good