- Tidalectics
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with Olivia Webb
Performance Work
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Enjoy Contemporary Art Space
- Wellington
- March 2023
- Photos: Daniel Sanders
Video: Chris Watson at SOUNZ
“Blood, bile, intracellular fluid; a small ocean swallowed, a wild wetland in our gut; rivulets forsaken making their way from our insides to out, from watery womb to watery world: we are bodies of water.” Andrea Neimanis in Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology
A site-specific durational artwork, Resilience Training: Tidalectics explored the anxiety and joy of our relationship with water in the Anthropocene. A meditative performance, Tidalectics used water, sound, breath, and the body to explore our complex interactions with water as a bottled commodity, an oceanic connector, an inimical force in the climate crisis, and the bearer of all life on earth.
“All things are possessed of wai although water may not be present; all entities manifest as one-of-many, and therefore have their existence as an influx . . . by the world.” Carl Te Hira Mika (Tūhourangi) in “When ‘water’ meets its limits: A Māori speculation on the term wai”
Hydrological thinking challenges colonial thinking, challenges capitalist thinking, it seeps in and undermines individualist thought. It does this by disregarding barriers and borders, real and imagined, by overflowing and soaking into disparate worlds and connecting them osmotically.
“Just as the sea is an open and ever-flowing reality, so should our oceanic identity transcend all forms of insularity, to become one that is openly searching, inventive, and welcoming." Epeli Hau’ofa in “The Ocean in Us”
“It takes me back & drags me tidalectic into this tangled urgent meaning to & fro . like foam . saltless as from the bottom of the sea . dragging our meaning our moaning/song from Calabar along the sea-fl-oor sea-floor with pebble sound & conch & wound & sea-sound moon.” Kamau Brathwaite in Barabajan Poems 1492–1992