Black Atlantis: The End of Eating Everything
Ayesha Hameed

Black Atlantis combines two conversations - afrofuturism and the anthropocene. It takes as point of departure Drexciya, the late 20th century electronic music duo from Detroit, and their creation of a sonic, fictional world. Through liner notes and track titles, Drexciya take the Black Atlantic below the water with their imaginary of an Atlantis comprised of former slaves who have adapted to living underwater. This wetness brings to the table a sense of the haptic, the sensory, the bodily, and the epidermal. What below-the-water and Atlantis brings back is the bottom of the sea, the volume of the water, the materiality of the space of the ocean, and other protagonists that inhabit the sea.

This third installment is the recording of a performance or audio-visual essay entitled The End of Eating Everything. It follows Bodies and Storms// Black Atlantis I and Agitations and Adaptations// Black Atlantis II. It takes its title from a work by Wangechi Mutu which shows a monstrous form of consumption underwater. The End of Eating Everything considers what Drexciyans might consume underwater, what things are consuming each other around them, and what boundaries might be eroded between the what’s and the who’s of what is being eaten.

(This event is a video lecture and an online Q&A with Ayesha Hameed)

Ayesha Hameed (London, UK) explores the heritage of Black diasporas through the figure of the Atlantic Ocean. Her Afrofuturist approach combines performance, sound essays, videos, and lectures. Hameed examines the mnemonic power of these media – their capacity to transform the body into a body that remembers. The motifs of water, borders, and displacement, recurrent in her work, offer a reflection on migration stories and materialities, and, more broadly, on the relations between human beings and what they imagine as nature. Recent exhibitions include Liverpool Biennale (2021), Gothenburg Biennale (2019), Lubumbashi Biennale (2019) and Dakar Biennale (2018). She is co-editor of Futures and Fictions (Repeater 2017) and co-author of Visual Cultures as Time Travel (Sternberg/MIT 2021). She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London.