The many headed Hydra

Developed with people from different islands, continents and peninsulas, The Many Headed Hydra is a hydro-political art project that involves research, performance and publishing based on collaboration and modes of storytelling. Sea Body Infrastructure Image is the first head of The Many Headed Hydra surfacing from the waters of the Atlantic Ocean between the shores of the European peninsula, Iceland and West Africa.

Based on interactions and conversations with members of the Occupational Hazard Project and with participants of the workshop Speaking As Fishes in Reykjavík and Leipzig this year, the magazine discusses the North Atlantic Ocean as a territory of passage undergoing social and ecological transformations. The material and symbolic meanings of this shifting geopolitical entity flow in the streams of technology and capital, in the histories of diasporas and of the Cold War, in the desires and discourses that cross its waters. But the Atlantic waves also resonate the fluid embodiments from the archaic and futuristic realms of a different shoreline, of in-between landscapes inhabited by queer, inter-species forms of existence. Bodies of water are considered as hospitable public spaces for post-national as well as post-human imagination in order to rethink notions of rights, citizenship and belonging and to acknowledge natural beings and planetary earth forces as political subjects in their own right.

Surfacing in Reykjavík, Ásbrú and inbetween, within the Occupational Hazard project the magazine unfolds into a constellation of video works, performances, interventions and conversations to explore the waters as rhizomatic narrative space and  draw connections between different experiences, crossing temporalities and contested geographies.

The Many Headed Hydra:
Sea Body Infrastructure Image Magazine #01

A publication becoming installation, performance, screening, readings and conversation
By Emma Haugh and Suza Husse
With contributions by Anna Hallin & Olga Bergmann, Bryndís Björnsdóttir, Hannah Black, Natasha Ginwala, Tinna Grétarsdóttir, Emma Haugh, Suza Husse, Occupational Hazard Project, Tejal Shah, Elsa Westreicher, Ato Malinda, Nine Eglantine Yamamoto-Masson and participants of the workshops “Speaking As Fishes” in Leipzig and Reykjavík.

Installation as part of Kwitcherbellíakin exhibition
Ato Malinda, On Fait Ensemble, video, 2010
Sea Body Infrastructure Image Magazine #01
22 – 30 October 2016, Opening 22 October
Reykjavik Art Museum, Hafnarhús, Tryggvagata 17

Magazine launch at Kwitcherbellíakin
Responses to Ato Malinda’s On Fait Ensemble (2010) in form of a reading of Mother Water, a text by Hannah Black in the magazine Sea Body Infrastructure Image, and a talk by researcher Kristín Loftsdóttir with a focus postcolonialism, whiteness and gender in the Nordic region
23 October 2016, 4 pm
Reykjavik Art Museum, Hafnarhús, Tryggvagata 17

Ghosts from the Past in the Present:
Reflections on On Fait Ensemble by Alto Malinda
Kristín Loftsdóttir (Professor of Anthropology, University of Iceland)

The film, in my view, engages with colonialism as not only something that happened “out there,” that is the film disturbs the persistent notion that colonialism is something that took place outside what we refer to as the “west,” global north or Europe. European identities were deeply shaped by imperialism and colonialism, with ideas of race not only inscribing particular meanings on black bodies but also those identified as white. Imperialism and colonialism also shaped national and gendered identities. Importantly, what the film draws attention to is the existence of a world that has been interconnected for a long time.
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Mother Water
Hannah Black in response to On Fait Ensemble by Ato Malinda
The sea goddess; The bourgeois among the colonisers; (the perspective of the discovered) is mostly missing; Living is not a line but a spiraling pattern, crisscrossing years and ancestries; A new third image; Creole is post-media: a simple enough system (the terror and beauty of the ocean); She births herself on the shoreline between what is felt and what is known
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Performative bus tour from Reykjavík to Ásbrú as part of Self-Help-Academy
Bryndís Björnsdóttir, Domestic Attendance, performance, 2016
Readings with Reykjavík friends including Bryndís Hrönn Ragnarsdóttir, Halla Kristín Einarsdóttir, Jórunn Edda and others
23 October 2016, 5 pm  
Meeting point: Reykjavik Art Museum, Hafnarhús, Tryggvagata 17

Screening as part of the Self-Help-Academy
Tejal Shah, Between the Waves, five-channel video, 2013
Conversation with Emma Haugh and Suza Husse
23 October 2016, 6.30 pm
Former Movie Theater of the American NATO base at Ásbrú

No Man’s Land
Text as part of the performance Domestic Attendance
by Bryndis Björnsdóttir

The bell that rang in for breaks spoke the language for all of us, when sung, it broke off the usage of bodies into a very sudden movement of walking as fast you could with out running, with out slipping on the fish organs on the floor, without showing to much that the bell had set the terms of how you moved your body on your own free will.

Other language would be the occasional prank, or a small gesture, that would give the long wanting reason, to laugh. The laugh came with the same spontaneity as the fast walk ordered by the bell, it was contagious and free willing and one laugh always brought the whole group of women to laugh together, even if you had your headphones on, even if you did not hear what was being spoken of.

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For more information see:

http://district-berlin.com/detail_full.php?categorie_id=19&article_id=279
http://atomalinda.org/index.html
http://tejalshah.in/home/
http://bryndisbjorns.com/home.html
http://district-berlin.com/