| about | sea/myth/build looks at how distance gets encoded in the urban psyche with the advent of oceanic trade and travel in the 18th century. This relationship between distance, the city and the unconscious stems from both Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin. From Marx because commodity fetishism collapses distance as the role and presence of slave labour becomes erased by the fruits of trade like sugar: commodities that are produced and transported across the networked space of the middle passage. From Benjamin, because the economic life of the ocean, of the slave trade coalesces into dialectical images, metaphors and into the unconscious of language. These coalsecences seep into the unconscious of those living in the city who are physically reaping the fruits of these travels by consuming sugar, maps, poetry, paintings. They seep into dreams, into bricks and into breakfast. |
sea/myth/build was created at the Intranation Thematic Residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada, in 2004. The first version was launched later that year at the Digital Poetics and Politics Summer Institute held at Queen's University, Canada. Many, many thanks to: Rob Heynen, Yam Lau, Kate Kaul, David McNally, Janine Marchessault, the wicked participants of Digipopo and Intranation: especially Tamara Vukov, Danny Butt, Rinaldo Walcott and Chris Cozier.
Ayesha Hameed is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and academic who lives in Montreal. Her video and interactive works look at the relationship between migration, history, incarceration and colonialism. She has written for Public, Fuse Magazine and Topia as well as a few collections of essays like PLACE: Location and Belonging in New Media Contexts (2007). As a part of the No One is Illegal Collective in Montreal she co-produces a monthly radio show on CKUT looking at immigrant, refugee and indigenous issues. She’s almost finished her PhD in Social and Political Thought at York University where her dissertation explores the imagery of the sea in the discourse of modernity and the middle passage.