The multi-chapter project INDIGO WAVES AND OTHER STORIES: RE-NAVIGATING THE AFRASIAN SEA AND NOTIONS OF DIASPORA is an effort to unpack and shed light on the continual history of water-based exchanges that have generated cultural and social affinities between the African and Asian continents. It brings together works by over fifty artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers and thinkers. Combining new commissions with existing artistic works, the itinerary of exhibitions and gatherings trace oceanic links between the Asian and African regions, manifesting overlays and diasporic transfers between two areas of increased global political, economic and cultural importance in the 21st century. The waterscapes including islands, coastlines, ports, and continents which have come to be known as the Indian Ocean emerges as a communal horizon that reveals shades of Afrasian cultural, linguistic, political and historical passage from ancient times to the present.
The ocean that stretches between Asia, Oceania and Africa – from Africa’s Swahili coast, through the Arabian Peninsula, up to Western Oceania – is known by many names: Ziwa Kuu, the Swahili Sea, the Afrasian Sea, the Indian Ocean, Ratnakara, Eastern Ocean, Indic Ocean and Bahari Hindi. This body of water has been continuously marked by hybridity, displacement and diasporic passage. This project takes us from centuries old routes of transregional exploration, trade and seasonal migration, up through contemporary Afro-Asian geopolitical, economic and cultural exchanges, traversing languages, cuisines, soundscapes, windward flows, living philosophies and more. As a fluid web of knowledge-building this editorial platform assembles new non-fiction and fiction writing, artist videos and sonic broadcasts, as well as comprehensive exhibition documentation. The Indian Ocean World is read prismatically emphasizing pre-colonial historiographies, maritime cosmopolitanism, nautical memory-keeping, material syncretism and migratory passage as well as systems of captivity and indenture, sacred geographies, music heritage and the interdependence of human and non-human entities.
As we transmit the knowledge that is harboured within many of us as water beings, Indigo Waves and Other Stories: Re-Navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora seeks to set up reciprocal motions that unsettle established geopolitical assessments and the dominance in academia around the North Atlantic. Instead, we attend to open tides of acculturation, Afrasian imaginaries, an atmosphere of multiple tongues and monsoon cycles of the Afrasian Ocean system.
Initiated by Natasha Ginwala and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and curated with Michelangelo Corsaro and Hajra Haider Karrar
In partnership with Gropius Bau, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin; Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town; Vasl Artists’ Association, Karachi and BLAK C.O.R.E. (Care of Radical Energy), University of Melbourne
