Becoming the Archive: A Dialogue with Euridice Kala

Abstract

Dialogue between Euridice Kala and Lucy Cotter, exploring the potential of artistic research to form other archives. Lucy Cotter: You are currently working on a long-term research-based project called Sea (E) scapes (2015-18), which you make manifest in an ongoing series of videos, performances, photographs and installations. One of your departure points was the São José Paquete-d'África, a slave ship that was travelling from Mozambique to Brazil in 1794 but crashed en route. I know that you are retracing this journey physically and both researching and creating work as part of that process. Can you say how you started with this way of working and why you took this particular departure point? Euridice Kala: The São José Paquete-d'África was coming out of Mozambique en route to Brazil and I wanted to reclaim the particular East Oriental slave history it relates to, which is quite lost in contemporary culture. I was partly prompted to start the project because the ship's wreck had just been recovered in Cape Town and had been taken directly to the Smithsonian in Washington for the new Smithsonian African American experience, bypassing any kind of communication with cultural institutions in Mozambique. What I wanted to make visible with this project was not necessary this specific slave history, but the ongoing rerouting of history and discourse that doesn't include certain spaces. Among other things, I find that there's a narrative of slave history focusing on the Atlantic Ocean that feeds into particular countries and places-South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana and other Anglophone African countries-which is being made visible, but often at the cost of the visibility of a much larger history. Around the same time I was also setting up Pan!c, an experimental platform that interconnected spaces across Africa, creating a sharing of ideas and people across the continent. 1 It had a mainframe based in Africa so that people could share resources and create knowledge without a second or third party element. This included not using Europe's resources, hence we had a mission of being low budget or no-budget because cultural creation on the continent has very little allocated budget. So the idea was to work within the means and the social structure of the continent. Pan!c has since been taken over and run by two organisations, but it influenced my methodologies in Sea (E) scapes and it continues to inform the way that I move along with certain ideas.