Watery Drawing

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 Drawings (2023 (16th - 19th C)), is a set re-drawing based on archival maps, which trace indexical points along the coast as drawn in the 18th - 19th century, from the 1st century Periplus of the Erythraean Sea to 18th and 19th Century admiralty charts, and contemporary satellite imagery. The silk, cotton and linen threads stitch together and map out the sites of the Watery Stories. The practice of redrawing is an engagement with the archival imaginary, a means of reorienting these historical drawings as translated from word to line, which constructed oceanic terrains as small and strategic, as available for dispossession, even as they annotate the presence of settlements, conflict and resistance. This drawing is the unmaking of a book and chart into a drawn tapestry of sites and geographies - a practice of pattern-making as recounting and imagining site, place and bodies. In the re-drawing and stitching, these fine-grained inscriptions ask us to confront deep histories and deep futures of coastal living. The drawings construct an oceanic terrain and oceanic body as an ‘aqueous time-space, a vast and undulating force’ as Edouard Glissant reminds us, always ‘holding traces of forgotten pasts’. If drawing is a method and practice of making space, how might the labour and act of re-drawing speak to alternative imaginaries and histories? What potential does the line, stitch and mark hold?