Index of edges
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 futures through joyful, dangerous, abundant and difficult encounters.
An index is not a map - rather than delineating boundaries it gathers people, repositions histories and draws out significance. In the Index of Edges, sites and stories of deep and near futures are drawn into adjacency. Tracing indexical points along the coast from the 1st C Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and 18th C Dalrymple’s Nautical charts, to contemporary coastal data and continued ways of living with watery intimacies, is an attempt to recognise the ebb and flow of edge conditions, despite violence and catastrophe. This index traces the accumulation of embodied detritus of layered pasts through an excess of specificities which collates stories of site and temporality, archival and present. This is work towards a relational, situated, and material axis where precarity and possibility meet at the shore; where global empires coincide with fishing villages; and where beyond danger, the coast is a site of joy and sustenance. Index of Edges is curated and designed by Huda Tayob for the Biennale Architettura 2023, within Dangerous Liaisons - curated by Lesley Naa Norle Lokko, The Laboratory of the Future.
Watery Stories
(9th/ 13th C, 1991, 2011, 2014, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2023)
Curated, edited and directed by Huda Tayob, with production and editorial support from Andri Burnett and contributions by Aaniyah Martin with Sarah Martin, Traci Kwaai and Joanne Peers; Alia Mossallam with Mimi Al Ashry, Ibrahim al-Morsi and the Tanboura Band of Port Said; Andariya; Asmaa Jama; Caroline Ngorobi with Suleiman Bakari, Omar Said and Omar Ali; Dhaqan Collective; Dominique Somda; Halima Ali; Khadija Abdalla Bajaber; Maria Gabriela Carrilho Aragão; Margarida Waco; Muhammad Taariq Husain Abdullatif; Nada Atieg; Nothando Nolwazi Lunga; Shiraz Bayjoo; Toni Giselle Stuart.
Watery Stories is an anthology of 8- parts which gathers researchers, writers, and practitioners who share knowledge and narrations of what it means to live alongside coastal edges. The stories and readings shared speak to embodied and leaky archives which weave through narrative and infrastructure, text and word. They weave an oral map of coastal conditions from Cape Town to Port Said, which speak of a myriad of watery bodies and beings.
1: Watery Stories (7’)
2: ‘The Mouth is the house of all words’ (36’)
3: ‘Everyone must have their share’ (28’)
4: ‘Don’t go to sea with a leaky heart’ (24’)
5: ‘The smell sweet, like sugarcane fields, stretching to the water’s edge’ (24’)
6: ‘All the islands of the world wear ashes of illusion’ (21’)
7: ‘In the water’s many tongues, the seams of the softest tissue have run’ (32’)
8: ‘That which is in the sea, will meet the shore’ (19’)
Watery Drawings
(2023 (16th - 19th C)),
Pen on cotton paper with cotton, linen, silk threads.
Drawn by Huda Tayob
Watery Drawings 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?
Watery Archives
(2023 (1897, 1927 - 1928, 1932- 1937, 1933 - 1937, 1934, 1934 - 1937, 1941)
Edited and curated by Huda Tayob.
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 follow the silk, cotton and linen threads in Watery Drawing. The film is curated into 8 parts which speak to 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 african plantations, 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 is an index of watery footage and coral structures - a grainy and textured deliberation on these watery and coral landscapes.
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 domestic and infrastructural entanglements of coloniality. In these excerpts we see footage of watery sites and coastal port cities from 1897 - 1941. Many of these are personal films which show scenes of everyday domestic life, the daily life of streets in coastal cities, and bustling ports, alongside the expanding infrastructures of empire. The 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 were irrevocably changed and are no longer.