4 Waters–Deep Implicancy

“4 Waters” is a film about four oceans or seas–the Mediterranean, the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean–and four islands–Lesvos, Marshall Islands, Haiti, Tiwi. Fragments, sounds, and stories convey the experiential moment of entanglement prior to separation, what Ferreira da Silva and Neuman call Deep Implicancy. Through a series of experimental migrations and elemental crossings “4 Waters” questions the form of the universal human, its calcified and exceptional origins, and in particular its ethical program. Wandering and wondering through a transformative figuring of justice, the film discusses migration and displacement in relation to the environmental crisis, questioning Western European knowledge and thinking. Structured around four chapters–air, water, earth, and fire–, it also comments upon Plato’s geometric cosmic solids–earth as a cube, air as an octahedron, fire as a tetrahedron, water as an icosahedron–asking what such an understanding of ‘nature’ brings.