Video lecture with materials from CAMP's ongoing Wharfage project,
involving state records, seafarers and "free trade" between parts of the
Persian Gulf, South Asia, and Africa.
Unlike the explorer whose frontier is "where no one else has gone", the wooden-ship-captain who says he goes "where no one else goes" also whispers, "anymore", hinting that things change with time. In this story, Iraq was a destination fifteen years ago, as Somalia is today. Such horizons for "free trade" are produced by certain groups doing, openly, what others have deemed temporarily atleast, unprofitable. This takes skill and a capacity, a "power and resistance at sea".
At the same time, the orientation of ships and traders towards certain destinations has its "price". How to deal with unexpected intimacies? Remember, Sara Ahmed wrote, that the words contingency and contact have the same root (Latin: contigere = to touch). Goats crowd the insides of boats, charcoal catches fire. Ethiopian discotheques, sinkings off Oman, and boardings by the US navy are recorded on Gujarati sailors' cellphones. Even if the goods are all Chinese, one state "feels" another.
So there is one ship here, which could be described as brutal, bottom-feeding, capitalism as usual. And then there is another one, which has a range of peculiar and persistent properties. It is: made of Malaysian timber, brought home in the monsoons, classified as a "sailing vessel", a vigorous offspring of the traditional arab "dhow" and gujarati "vahan", fed on cheap diesel from Iran and break-bulk cargo re-exported from the Emirates. These two ships tell us about the balance of forces between nation-states, tax-regimes, labour-pools and ecosystems, for ex. in the diagram below... a matrix that is nevertheless perturbed, excited, by each passing ship.
s
"Free ports" run by a "Liberalisation via Revolutionary Guard",
ruling families since n cheap diesel
atleast the 1800's c s
s t
" p e i
i k r o
r r v n
a i s
m c c
y e
"Semi-states " " s
where most daily goods Seafaring "minority community",
come by sea and ship-builders since antiquity
At
Body Building
Ishara Art Foundation
At first, a project on the creek in Sharjah in 2009, from where a large number of ships leave for Somali ports.
as part of
Proposals for a Memorial to Partition
Curated by Murtaza Vali
CAMP draws a series of lines between this and that
exhibition.Not only between country A and country
B, or horizontally between peoples or on the plane
of "cultural exchanges" or "extra-national space",
but vertically, or diagonally, reaching out to an
actual place, to its actual power and presence.
at de(Coding) Mumbai
With Shaina, Ashok and Simpreet
and Adarsh, Alyque, Naezy, Nayak, Medha, Sandeep, Rajjo, Tiger.
For All Vahanvatti is designed to help a group think from the sea, rather than from the land. CAMP with Reliable Copy Propositions.
Ashok S participated in the School of Environment and Architecture annual conference, with a suggestion on the deployment of abstractions.
Ashok (remote) and Shaina (in-person) participated in the last panel of the March Meeting, New Forms of Surveillance and Extraction.
A reading by CAMP
Opening of Passages Through Passages
A survey exhibition of the spatial, technical and cultural imaginations cultivated by CAMP.
A performance by our collaborators on cctv.camp, Seoul Express. More details: https://njpart.ggcf.kr/when-the-cold-blows/.
EYEWITNESS
New Media Gallery
Watch and Chill
M+
West Kowloon Cultural District