Diogo da Cruz & Fallon Mayanja: through the looking sea

For the last five years, Diogo da Cruz and Fallon Mayanja have been creating a science fiction narrative through a series of films, alongside sculptures and sound performances, as a result of their dialogue on colonial structures and the unsustainable extraction of natural resources. Together, they explore the power of mythology and its potential to reactivate and reinvent histories and geographical spaces.

One of the project’s central ideas is the memory of water. Drawing upon philosophical hydro-feminist thought, the artists address the issue of empathy with other human and more-than-human beings, looking at the bodies as temporary containers for the water that constitutes us. Every day, this water leaks out and new water enters the system. Water carries memories of the bodies it has passed through, and each of us is made up of this complex multiplicity of stories. Da Cruz and Mayanja look at the Atlantic Ocean as this great body of water that brings together an enormous collective memory and also carries within itself all the enslaved bodies that were victims of colonial greed. These bodies now live on through other forms of life, in the depths of the sea and on the surface, and are the central characters of the project’s fiction.

The new iteration of the sci-fi series, to be developed within the context of Onassis AiR, will overlap with the focus on the Atlantic Ocean, present in former works, and dwell upon another relevant body of water. Since the beginning of the artists’ dialogue, they have been aiming for a connection to the actual context of the Mediterranean Sea. Through a series of site visits, interviews, and encounters with people in Athens, the project aims to draw attention to colonial mechanisms and structures that are still present, whether in the relationship between Western countries and the Global South or in the uncontrolled exploitation of natural resources.

"As my body becomes your body, we aim for a multiplicity of collective bodies. Queer bodies. Bodies that challenge what bodies should be, how bodies should move, how bodies should love. Our bodies are fluid, our bodies are leaking. When we dance, when we kiss, when we love, when we celebrate, when we welcome each other. When we share this space, through which we can be the fullest version of ourselves.

And when you are yourself to the fullest, you realize how full the water is in your body. You know how to celebrate it, you learn how to care for it, and you wish to care for fellow bodies. You welcome them to swim and dive into your waves.

In whatever we plan to change in our ways of behaving, in our ways of relating, we have to go beyond the superimposed borders, the nation states: the totalitarian principle of defining where something starts and where it ends, defining limits to the infinite complexities.

We would like to invite you to dive into a speculative exercise. Through an open dialogue, we will create a myth influenced and contaminated by a multitude of relations to the Mediterranean Sea, so that each of your experiences and memories can shape the protagonists of the story. Perhaps you can even embody them, rehearsing the path to an underwater existence.

Together, we will imagine and slowly shape the inhabitants of the depths. Their ways of moving, of communicating. Their ways of resting, of loving. Their ways of watching the surface, of listening to the cargo ships. Their ways of welcoming new members into their community, of observing the shores leading to land, of looking at the world through the looking sea.

It will be an exercise on expanding time and space, imagining a community in the dark abysses of the Mediterranean. Imagining how they got together in the far past, how they react to the human actions of the present, how they will encounter the exodus of the human species in the future.

When the land becomes too hot, the air too toxic to breathe, the harbor towns flooded by the rise of the sea level, maybe humans will have to readapt to the aquatic environment. Relearn how to breathe in oxygen from water and join the deep-sea community.

It will be an exercise in listening, sharing, and speculating. Reimagining the forecasted extinction of our species. Remembering the victims of the lack of empathy. In a story restoring deeper connections with water, with resistance, and with belief.

We, Fallon & Diogo, deeply believe that through imagination, through speculation and fiction, we could draw pathways to imagine an alternative. A path to experience together another world. Overcoming oppressive systems. Gaining a sensitivity for futurities. Weaving together an antidote.

During the research residency, we have started dialogues with several people in Athens on their relation to the Mediterranean Sea, and visited several natural and museological sites, while we were defining strategies and aims for a possible narrative around an underwater community. For the Open Days at Onassis AiR, we presented ‘OASES,’ a fanzine crystallizing several visual and textual drafts of the early stages of our research. These small publications were carried and supported by a series of small sculptures titled ‘breaching mammals,’ while the sound piece ‘humid harmonia’ served as an invitation to dive into a sonic realm of the fictional narrative. Towards the end of our residency, we conducted the workshop ‘rehearsal for a mediterranean underwater community,’ inviting participants into a collective exercise for a speculative mythology: imagining a deep-sea community dwelling in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea. This workshop opened a space for transformation. Through conversation, listening, and shared storytelling, we co-created a mythology shaped by our personal memories, experiences, and our relations to the sea. A myth infused and nourished by the multiple cultural, ecological, and political realities of the Mediterranean.”