DRIFT - A POST NATIONAL DIGITAL PAVILION

(
Voiceover
)
DRIFT is an iniva project presented as part of the European Pavilion project, an initiative by the European Cultural Foundation which aims to support and promote artistic projects that imagine desirable and sustainable futures for Europe. DRIFT – A Post-National Digital Pavilion; is a series of radical re-imaginings of Europeanness which reflect on the entanglement between land and water, movement and m/otherlands, in the forging of new identities and subjectivities. DRIFT will consider Europe from three vantage points, THE RIVER, THE ISLAND and THE COASTLINE, creating three artistic outcomes: a publishing project, a podcast and a commissioned soundscape, linked by this microsite.

Drifting might be seen as directionless, as if lost, or without purpose, a state of being between here or there, or taking one form and then another, floating in an in-betweenness that never arrives at a destination, never committing to being fixed, situated within liminal space or time while enroute to belonging to somewhere else or becoming something else. This drifting derives from the Black Radical Imagination or perhaps more aptly Caribbean thought or African diasporic thinking. As if being carried by water, or without a gravitational pull and giving in to the ebbs and flow of the tide, the waning of the moon, and the force of the wind – drifting is the modus of this project. When drifting in thought, what possible worlding could drifting permit? Could we drift together – collectively and imagine beyond our lived reality? What kind of world would we imagine together? What kind of nation would we build? If nations would exist at all?

IF SEA IS HISTORY - WHAT IS NATION?


DRIFT – A Post-National Digital Pavilion draws from the etymology of the word pavilion or papillon, in the construction of the DRIFT pavilion: you can drift across this site from location to location, making stops to read, to listen, to watch and make notes of conversations. Our three locations will be THE RIVER – represented by iniva’s home Stuart Hall Library on the Millbank of the River Thames, THE ISLAND – the Giardini on the Island of Venice during the 2022 Art Biennale, THE COASTLINE – Turner Contemporary and Open School East’s Despacito Art School on the coastline of England.

This site was updated throughout the run of the project between June - December 2022. All content has now been uploaded. The site will stay live until April 2023. Stay up to date with iniva by following us on Instagram and by subscribing to the iniva newsletter.

THE RIVER

(
Voiceover
)
THE RIVER holds fragments of history like archives.Similar to the archive of iniva and the Stuart Hall Library.


For DRIFT, a special issue of STUART Papers was created thinking through the fluidity of nationhood with contributions from Adjoa Armah, Rohan Ayinde, Cario Clarke, Rahila Haque, Kaitlene Koranteng and Lola Olufemi. Designed by Rose Nordin.

READ
THE DRIFT STUART PAPER
HERE

1 of 25
Still taken from the video work 'Floating Coffins', 2009, Zineb Sidera. Courtsey of the artist


Fragments of lives, of lived experiences, of relations, of works, of thinking and of gathering. How has Caribbean thought influenced European thought? How has the experience of Europe influenced Caribbean thinkers? A river of writers, activists and poets such as CLR James, Una Marston, George Lamming, Sylvia Wynter, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Derek Walcot, Claudia Jones, Michael Smith, Olive Morris, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Stuart Hall shape our thinking of the black experience in Europe and in Britain in particular.

Here we share archives of the artistic research project, Archipelagos in Reverse through the publishing project STUART Papers from Adjoa Armah, Cairo Clarke, Rahila Haque, Lola Olufemi, Daniella Rose-King designed by Rose Nordin, who have been exploring ideas of archives understood as fragments that when meshed together form new subjectivities and bodies of thought. The archipelagic as a cartography of thought that finds commonalities and affinities in waves, movement, resistance, rhythm, migration, notions of return, anti-capitalism, spiritualism, post-colonial & ecological Black and Asian feminist practice, to map new encounters of meaning.

Tributaries converge so that rivers flow, the waters within them continually run to larger masses of water like the sea. The brown meander of the River Thames divides the city and its inhabitants, scattering them north and south, sutured by bridges. The Millbank once a marshy bank is where a large mill once stood and then later became Jeremy Betham’s famously designed panopticon prison, the largest in the country. Prisoners were often deported to the Antipodean; the Millbank was their last look at London before being transported down the Thames estuary to countries such as Australia and New Zealand to populate the colonies.

Further up THE RIVER you see the evidence of the vital role the river played in bringing in goods, the docks and shipbuilding. Cities are often developed in close proximity to rivers. In the industrial era they were the lifeblood of the city.

THE COASTLINE

LISTEN TO
"THE SOUND I SEA"

(
Voiceover
)
THE COASTLINE acts as a border between the sea and the land, a space of continual arrivals and departures. It holds the shape of the land while pushing back the sea. It’s the contested line that dances between being one state or another. It’s the place to retreat to as well as to one to look out from. Borders are contentious, crossing them is not always easy. And while the coastline can be framed as picturesque they can also be sites of trauma. While reaching the shore may be seen as a place of safety, we must recognise the precarity of this site for asylum. How we arrive subscribes a set of processes for identification. Margate experiences the ebbs and flows of visitation as well as the long history of its inhabitants. Margate can directly be translated as a sea gate. A gate to the sea. Who does it keep within its gates and whom is it keeping out?

T.S. Eliot wrote Waste Land while convalescing in Margate. The Royal Sea Bathing house was built on THE COASTLINE when the Victorians discovered that sea air was good for recovering good health. And the sea that was so feared and revered in the tempests created in Turner’s paintings centuries before they became the landscapes of leisure, pleasure beaches, funfairs, pleasance and promenades. Coastlines in the UK often tell the tale of faded grandeur and fluctuating communities that call THE COASTLINE home. Further around THE COASTLINE at Tilbury Dock in Essex is where many Caribbeans first glimpse of Britain’s shoreline before settling mostly in its cities. But for some it’s not a place of coming and going, it’s a fixed abode with shifting temporalities.

Hear the work of Open School East’s Despacito Art school and artist Shenece Oretha who wield a sonic scape that draws from Shenece’s practice Black oral and feminist traditions of call and response.

THE ISLAND

(
Voiceover
)
THE ISLAND is a global cosmology. Fragments of the world are held within them and its microclimate can create a mis-en-abyme - a world within worlds. The floating and yet also sinking city of Venice, an archipelago of islands connected by canals, was most likely founded by refugees fleeing the waves of invasion in Rome. A powerful maritime and merchant history with global significance, so from THE ISLAND we consider ideas of the imagination and borderlessness through conversations with artists. We gather here to ask the question, ‘What is nation?’ and ‘What does it mean to represent nation?’

Sonia Boyce (British Pavilion) asks, ‘who do we imagine constitutes nation?’ She is joined by Zineb Sedira (French Pavilion), photographer Stan Douglas who discusses how not to represent a nation by creating a global dialogue within his practice (Canadian Pavilion), while Yuki Kihara (New Zealand Pavilion) tells us that the Samoan Fa’afafines is also a community she is representing through collaborations in producing her work. The podcast brings voices of other artists representing nations from The Island.


Nations are constructed. They are built on ideologies that support a national identity. National identities are shaped by structures of governance and power relations but also through language and culture. The artists remind us of the role of tricksters in the construction of images and narratives. Every two years in the Gardens, the Arsenal and in Palaces across Venice, states gather to represent their nation through the presentation of an artist’s work. This is where the art world meets to survey global artistic production. It’s a competition for the Golden Lion, for recognition of a cultured nation. Over one hundred years of global cultivation - while not all nations are represented, the social and political significance of nations meeting on this European island continually reinforces the structures of nationhood.


The DRIFT podcast begins its journey in the Venetian lagoon, exploring themes of Imagination & Borderlessness, M/Otherlands, and Migration & Movement in three distinct episodes.

TO EPISODE 1 : IMAGINATION & BORDERLESSNESS

TO EPISODE 2 : M/OTHERLANDS

TO EPISODE 2 : MIGRATION & MOVEMENT

ABOUT

DRIFT - A Post-National Digital Pavilion is created and published by the Institute of International Visual Arts (iniva). iniva is an evolving visual arts organisation dedicated to nurturing and disseminating radical and emergent decolonising and unlearning practices centring Global Majority, Indigenous, African, Asian, Caribbean, Polynesian, Latinx & Diaspora perspectives that reflects on the social and political impact of globalisation.

DRIFT is part of the European Pavilion: a pan-European, multidisciplinary arts initiative by the European Cultural Foundation that aims to support and promote artistic and educational projects exploring ideas for a future Europe. Discover the other projects re-imagining and interrogating European identities on the European Pavilion website here.

This site was updated throughout the run of the project between June - December 2022. All content has now been uploaded. The site will stay live until April 2022.

Stay up to date by following iniva on Instagram and by subscribing to the iniva newsletter.

DRIFT PROJECT TEAM:

Website Design: Rodrigo Nava Ramírez
Artistic Director: Sepake Angiama
Producer: Anahí Saravia Herrera
Curator: Beatriz Lobo
Archivist and Engagement Producer: Kaitlene Koranteng
Curatorial Trainee: Tobi Alexandra Falade
Podcast Editor: Lucia Scazzocchio/Social Broadcasts
STUART Editor & Designer: Rose Nordin

• Contributors to the DRIFT film:

Stuart Hall Library Research Associates: Lola Olufemi, Rahila Haque, Adjoa Armah
Open School East Director: Polly Brannan
iniva Archivist and Engagement Producer: Kaitlene Koranteng
iniva Curatorial Trainee: Tobi Falade
iniva Communications Manager: Jemima Yong
iniva Curator: Beatriz Lobo
iniva Library and Archive Manager: Tavian Hunter

DRIFT Film credits:
Producer Director: Anthony Comber-Badu
Camera: Jack Barraclough
Editor: Jack Barraclough
Music: Jesse Gallagher, The Blue Pearl
Jesse Gallagher, The Annunaki Return
Jesse Gallagher, Spenta Mainyu

Website © iniva 2022.
Images © 2022, to the credited copyright holders & artists, unless otherwise stated.
Texts © 2022, the authors.

Great care has been taken to identify all image/video/audio copyright holders correctly. In case of errors please contact iniva so that we can make corrections.

logo for iniva logo for the european pavilion


The European Pavilion is an initiative by the European Cultural Foundation developed in partnership with the Camargo Foundation ,theKultura Nova Foundation, and Fondazione CRT.

THE SOURCE

All waters that flow have a source. For DRIFT the Source is the Stuart Hall Library and the iniva archive. Here we have collated some materials for you to sink deeper into some of the ideas and topics addressed in this project. We know that it’s not a conclusive list but we hope that it will begin you on your journey to reflect on some of the ideas shared here.