Drawing on the vast global worlds encountered along east African coastal cities from Cape Town to Port Said, this project - Index of Edges - speaks to the deep historical knowledge of living with and along seas. In response to climate change resulting in increasing coastal erosion, rapid sea level rise, and high levels of coastal pollution, this exhibition gathers sites, stories, and approaches which collectively point to alternative coastal futures. An index is not a map—rather than delineating boundaries it gathers people, repositions histories and draws out significance. In the Index of Edges, sites, and stories of deep and near futures are drawn into adjacency. Tracing indexical points along the coast from the first century Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and eighteenth-century Dalrymple’s Nautical charts, to contemporary coastal data and continued ways of living with watery intimacies, is an attempt to recognize the ebb and flow of edge conditions, despite violence and catastrophe. This index traces the accumulation of embodied detritus of layered pasts through an excess of specificities which collates stories of site and temporality, archival and present. This is work towards a relational, situated, and material axis where precarity and possibility meet at the shore; where global empires coincide with fishing villages; and where beyond danger and precarity, the coast is a site of joy and sustenance.
Index of Edges consists of 3 key elements: Watery Stories, an eight-part anthology which gathers researchers, writers, and practitioners who share knowledge and narrations of what it means to live alongside coastal edges. Contributors include: Khadija Abdalla Bajaber; Andariya; Nada Atieg; Shiraz Bayjoo; Maria Gabriela Carrilho Aragão; Dhaqan Collective; Asmaa Jama; Aaniyah Martin with Sarah Martin, Traci Kwaai and Joanne Peers; Alia Mossallam with Mimi Al Ashry, Ibrahim al-Morsi and the Tanboura Band of Port Said; Caroline Ngorobi with Suleiman Bakari, Omar Said and Omar Ali; Dominique Somda; Toni Giselle Stuart; and Margarida Waco. Second, a re-drawing of archival maps along the coast. And third, Watery Archives, a two-screen curated and edited selection of archival films of coastal conditions and coastal cities from Cape Town to Port Said which provide a further archival and visual mapping of the terrains in Watery Stories and follow the silk, cotton and linen threads in Watery Drawing. These film excerpts are based on research at the BFI, and archives held by the North West Film Archive at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Index of Edges is exhibited at The Laboratory of the Future, 18th International Architecture Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, running from May 20, 2023 to Nov 26, 2023, with Watery Stories also available online at indexofedges.net