WHATEVER YOU THROW AT THE SEA…

mixed media installation, 5.1 sound, video, vinyl
28:00min

Having critically engaged the collections of the Weltmuseum Wien and those of the Phonogrammarchiv at ÖAW (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Zara Julius’ debut solo exhibition considers the ways communities in Africa and the African diaspora have been at the literal frontlines of both ecological and cultural pillaging. Through sonic assemblage in the form of an immersive sound installation and a limited edition 12“ vinyl and use of material from the Weltmuseum’s photographic collection, the installation thinks through oceanic and rhythmic logics as bound up in loss, life, death, and possibility. It is at once a critique of ethnographic and ‘scientific’ collections in the global north with their impositions of time and history, and their co-presences of violence, extraction, and gatekeeping, as well as a critique on the current climate discourse that fails to implicate coloniality in the enduring climate crisis. The work proposes an oceanic worldview, and centres African epistemologies as it thinks through the survival guidelines and subversive strategies that are concealed within the material locked up in the aforementioned collections.