Excerpts of Sea Matter
Installation where images and texts stretch from exhibition walls to puddles of black ink that leak from the cracks of the building. Fragments of dark histories from captains' and voyagers' diaries inscribed in ink explore how colonial maritime history seeps through the fractures of western infrastructure.
The ink puddles replicate other cavities in the floor, mirroring the turbulences in the physical infrastructure. Inscribed in them are chronicles of shipwreck journalism and nautical history books, traces of information, matter, images, and technologies that composed the holds of the Portuguese, Spanish, British, Dutch, and Ottoman fleets. Muddying the legibility of these pieces of naval history through their slow deterioration in contact with ink, the installation incites one to think: How do these texts reconfigure the ways we see through history? And conversely, how do images blur our reading of it?