The Many Headed Hydra: presented by the Project Space Festival Berlin 2016

Magazine #01: Sea Body Infrastructure Image

This year District will again take part to the Project Space Festival with an exhibition by Ato Malinda, a performance Bryndís Björnsdóttir and printed 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, Nine Eglantine Yamamoto-Masson and participants of the workshops “Speaking As Fishes” in Leipzig and Reykjavik.

14 August 2016, 16 – 19 h

At the DDR-Grenzwachturm / GDR-Watchtower Schlesischer Busch

(In Collaboration with The Watch, Residencyprogram at the Watchtower Schlesischer Busch by Flutgraben e.V.)

The creole or plain text god can live anywhere in her amorphous simplicity, moving from Nigeria to Haiti to New Orleans to Berlin to wherever and back, a simple enough system (the terror and beauty of the ocean, what it takes and what it delivers) to be encoded and decoded in many variations: (…) She can appear as image, as flesh, as dream, as moving light, as sensation. Only the “legibility criteria” – when she appears, something of the ocean should appear with her – constrains her many forms.

Hannah Black, MOTHER WATER, a written dialogue with Ato Malinda’s video performance On Fait Ensemble (2010), in: Sea Body Infrastructure Image, The Many Headed Hydra Magazine #01, 2016

Welcomed by a creole spirit and a witch – Ato Malinda’s embodiment of Mami Wata (On Fait Ensemble, 2010) and Bryndís Björnsdóttir’s Quota Queen – THE MANY HEADED HYDRA surfaces from the waters of the Spree as they flow into Flutgraben. In and around the former GDR watchtower at Schlesischer Busch, we celebrate the first materialization of unruly hydra heads and contemporary seafarers tales in the magazine Sea Body Infrastructure Image. Herein the North Atlantic Ocean is discussed as a shifting geopolitical entity, a territory of passage undergoing social and ecological transformations. Its material and mythological meaning as infrastructure and resource resonates in the streams of technology and capital, the diasporic histories, the desires and discourses that cross its waters. Embodiments of the queer, eco-sexual, inter-species, spiritual and scientific that inhabit a different shoreline stimulate imaginaries of fluid forms of existence between archaic and futuristic realms.

THE MANY HEADED HYDRA is a performative and publishing creature by Emma Haugh and Suza Husse, nurtured and hosted at DISTRICT Berlin.