a metonymy for repair


a metonymy for repair
two channel video (adapted for single screen)
color hd
1 minute 12 seconds


“The theft and trade of captive flesh across the Atlantic was an injury of the body and mind. A split that occurred at the level of the wrists and ankles, of neck and waist, in the navel: at the level of kinship between the African continent and its diaspora. The institution of slavery targeted the relations between family and community, contact between a body and its appendages. In our search backwards and forwards, we encounter parts without counterparts. A field of unfinished, scattered bits and pieces, a world of afters still aftering [...]

Since the 1950s the mechanism of this traffic, what is called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning
Circulation (AMOC), which conveys heat and salt and moderates our climate, has become quite compromised. This is what might be called an inflammation-in--process: surface and sub-surface
Atlantic temperatures rising, salinity patterns disturbed and deep-water formation slowed, giving the North Atlantic a faint but real fever. Researchers have argued that the system has “weakened by about 15 % since 1950” according to earlier reconstructions. At the same time, scientists note rising sea-surface warmth and increased heat-storage in the Atlantic basin, hints at an imminent collapse in the oceanic conveyer belt.

If one reads the oceanic rise in heat and the slackening of the thermohaline belt alongside the diasporic crisscrossing currents of the Black Atlantic — those human flows, return-movements and intellectual circulations between Africa and the African diaspora, that tension and sag — then the heating and imminent collapse of the AMOC becomes parallel to the ambivalence that characterizes continental & diasporic kinship. Of frustration and longing.”



Read the full essay here, published in PARSE journal and co-created with Yaw Atuobi.