Watery Archives

Index of Edges draws on the vast global worlds of encounter along east African coastal cities to draw deep historical knowledge of living with and along seas. This project gathers sites, stories and approaches which collectively point to coastal pasts and potential futures.

Watery Archives is a two-screen curated and edited selection of archival films of coastal conditions and coastal cities from Cape Town to Port Said which provide a further archival and visual mapping of the terrains in Watery Stories and the silk, cotton and linen threads in Watery Drawing. The film is curated into 8- parts which maps onto the stories, sites and histories within ‘The Mouth is the house of all words’ (Swahili coast/ Cape Town); ‘Everyone must have their share’ (Mombasa/ Red sea ports); ‘Don’t go to sea with a leaky heart’ (Swahili seas, Red Sea, South Atlantic); ‘The smell sweet, like sugarcane fields, stretching to the water’s edge’ (east Africa plantations, Kwazulu Natal coast, Indian Ocean Islands); ‘All the islands of the world wear ashes of illusion’ (Red Sea and East African ports); ‘In the water’s many tongues, the seams of the softest tissue have run’ (Suez canal, east African coast); That which is in the sea, will meet the shore’ (Mozambique coast, False Bay).The second screen (not shown in the preview below) is an index of watery footage and coral structures - a grainy and textured deliberation on the many watery bodies and coral landscapes recorded within the film.

These film excerpts are drawn from archives held by the North West Film Archive at Manchester Metropolitan University, and the British Film Institute. Film is means of transport across space and time, and here, a voyage through domesticity and infrastructural entanglements of coloniality. In these excerpts we see footage of watery sites and coastal port cities from 1897 - 1941, of places along the coast from Cape Town to Port Said. Some of the footage is filmed from the water, while others are from adjacent cities and towns or routes leading to the coast. Many of these are personal films which show scenes of domesticity, the everyday daily life of streets in coastal cities, and bustling ports, alongside the expanding infrastructures of empire. This violence of history is present in its absence, in what is not seen and spoken of in the footage, in cities and sites that have been disavowed as having a history and place - of the meeting place of beauty and violence at the shore of sites that have been irrevocably changed and in many cases, are no longer.