Exploring Africa's Sacred Relationship With the Ocean.
“But what good, I ask you, ever comes from rushing? No…the sea is telling us the opposite. It’s telling us to slow down.”
The waves crash and roll from one ear to the other as Lalela uLwandle, an illustrated short film that stories the histories and contemporary concerns of South African coastal communities, plays from my headphones at the back of the gallery.
Nestled in the corner of Cape Town’s Church and Berg streets, Zero Gallery by Eitz hosts Our Ocean is Sacred, You Can’t Mine Heaven, a public story-telling project and a radical “un-archive”. Curated by Dr Dylan McGarry, the exhibition unearths a multitude of artforms, stories, histories.
In the middle of the room, Keiskamma Art Project’s Ulwandle lwethu olungcwele (Our Sacred Ocean) sits, big and buoyantly moving upon touch. With shells threaded to its frame, the tapestry stitches together a map of ancestral, environmental and spiritual interconnection. Soft, blue-splashed pages hang from the second-floor railing. In the corner and across the window grows a coral reef, bursts of colour and shapes, with one of its artists from the Woodstock Art Reef Project crocheting another piece at its end. Here lives one of the many soft-bodied marine ecosystems.
“slavery and colonialism have a deep impact on world ecology”
Cleo Droomer's (Life)jackets are strung from the ceiling; photographs from the Intangible Heritage collection crowd the wall; Purification's glass containers holding sand and water sit atop pillars; Aaniyah Martin’s Hydro-rug rests on a couch.
In conversation with McGarry about art, he references their social sculpture teacher, Shelley Sacks, in understanding art as “instruments of consciousness”– art that lives in dialogue with the world whilst “honouring and respecting the many sacred relationships South Africans have with the ocean”. Presenting art to rectify the spiritual dissonance in the wake of all this disconnect, Michaela Howse, the project manager at Keiskamma Art Project, says that “textiles are intimate, immediate, human – far beyond the super-reality of modernity, with things like social media where nothing is exposed to time or dust.”
"We are in mournful communion with everything and coming to terms with the losses of our collective future."
Unlike the representation of the colonial iteration of the archive (primarily material and monetarily-based), the exhibition archives the intangible, sacred relationships that McGarry describes as “embodied artifacts.”
The archive, as a means of remembering, speaks to a future. For those afflicted with eco-grief, this archive could articulate how we are in mournful communion with everything and coming to terms with the losses of our collective future. Our conversations about the sacredness of water are nothing new nor endemic to South Africa. From the polluted pipelines in Flint, USA to the droughts across Syria, water-as-life remains central. The spiritual-ecological violence rages on, which is why McGarry says we are “watching our oceans die.”
Unlike the ‘Anthropocene’-which names all of humanity as equally responsible for ecological destruction and humanity as the cause of the sixth mass extinction- Françoise Vergès’ understanding of the ‘racial Capitolocene’ seems to be much more in line with the exhibition’s intentions. Drawing on Jason Moore’s ‘Capitolocene’ which traces our ecological crisis to the colonisation of the “New World,” the slave trade, and imperialism, Vergès adds racial to acknowledge the victims of an uneven climate change and racialized environmental politics - “minorities and peoples of the South.” According to Vergès, “[s]lavery and colonialism have a deep impact on world ecology.” Colonialism may be dead, but it resurrects coloniality and racialised capitalism in its place.
“The exhibition critiques the ocean economy plans for South Africa and the trends globally to mine the ocean for oil and gas, and reminds us that the ocean is heaven, where life begins, and where all the rivers run to,” says McGarry. “It is the beginning and end of our water cycle and, as some Zulu and Xhosa mythology reveals, it is the same water cycle that our souls travel between life and death. The exhibition shows why we can’t mine the ocean because, for so many, it is heaven, and it is deeply sacred.”
"Our ecological justice is deeply tied to racial justice"
And yet, despite the fears for our future, this anarchist archive fights for ours and protects it. Against the undead racial Capitolocene, the ocean itself becomes a living archive. To exist in South Africa means to be intimately connected to this archive; our ancestors have travelled along its shore. Much is written and spoken about the reclaiming of land, but little about the need to reclaim our waters. South Africa’s ecological history, and Africa as a continent, is tethered to those that roam the tides; our ecological justice is deeply tied to racial justice.
In using the exhibition to heal through decolonised learning and to call back holders of indigenous knowledge, McGarry says, “I think I am learning daily through this work that one way that it heals us, it sets the record straight, it surfaces the violently silenced and muted histories, and it tends to the haunted corners of our country and the ways we make meaning and shape identity.”
This “un-archive” of Our Oceans Are Sacred, You Can’t Mine Heaven contains a life of its own, growing with the world. It is a means to open up to potentiality. For Howse, this project is an antidote through its ability to “preserve sacred memories, to keep in contact with memory that is ancient” as much as it is a place of imagination. Our ocean heritages and hopes all find home here. “Sometimes, we must let our imagination guide us,” she chuckles. “Doing is better than worrying”.
In fact, the art space and its process is a radical space of becoming and many of the artworks featured in the exhibition served as evidence in the recent Shell court case about seismic surveys on the coastline. For McGarry, the exhibition acts as a “refuge”, “sanctuary” and “a safer, more careful space” through its ongoing conversations with various communities through ecological grief circles, vigils, workshops and public storytelling processes.
The exhibition, though dealing with the grief of living on a dying planet, remains life-affirming. Our Ocean is Sacred, You Can’t Mine Heaven looks towards the climate crisis head-on with a gentle but unflinching gaze. It believes in the meaning of life, and it makes a space for itself in the world to generate wonder, nurture community, and to be in service of something greater than us. Our entangled bodies, our entangled ecologies, all springing from the ocean.
