Denise Ferreira da Silva is a Brazilian philosopher, ethicist and artist, tarot reader, reiki master, student of unreasonable knowledges, and a Gemini. Her book Toward a Global Idea of Race asks “why, after more than five hundred years of violence perpetrated by Europeans against people of colour, is there no ethical outrage?”, and presents a critique of modern thought that shows how racial knowledge and power produce global space.

Denise was present at Episode 6: Make a Way Out of No Way and participated in the programme for Episode 7: We Can’t Live Without Our Lives with Valentina Desideri.

Arjuna Neuman is an artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. He works with the essay form with a multi-perspectival and mobile approach where ‘essay’ is an inherently future-oriented and experimental mode, becoming the guiding principle for research and production, which shifts between the bodily, haptic and affective through to the geopolitical, planetary and cosmological.

Text about the Film by Denise Ferreria da Silva & Arjuna Neuman

“…an earthquake is coming…” – Jean-Jacques Dessalines/C. L. R. James (from Black Jacobins)

“What is often forgotten in the traditional retelling of the Haitian Revolution, is the earthquake of 1784. This earthquake not only razed Port-Au-Prince to the ground, but it also and importantly, shook down, if only temporarily, the entrenched social order of Colonial Hierarchy. Slaves, who had fled for safety to the mountains, began to collectively realise the power they held over their European masters. Amidst all the geo-chaos, liquefaction and tectonic-shifts, Port-Au-Prince and its plantations ground to a halt; 20 years later the very same would happen, this time, by the free-will of the slaves.

This earthquake marked an indigenous foretelling of Black Independence and the revolution to come (note: distinctly not of French or Enlightenment origination). At a cosmic level it brought knowledge from the unmeasurable moment prior to separation, prior to bacterial-life as the first metric of time – a moment or state we call Deep Implicancy.

4 Waters emerges from this deep-soft state, bringing with it a set of gathered and imagined knowledges that begin to image a pre-life cosmos. Towards this imaging we study with water, both as it phase-transitions with and into other matter including life and/as non-life, but also as it combines disparate geographies, bodies of/in water, and four historically and cosmically contentious islands within them – Lesvos, Marshall Islands, Haiti, Tiwi.

What we learn through water and its phasing, is the possibility of transformation – that thing that makes us universally human in its spiritual-ethical and labour-value sense (Hegel and Marx). But importantly, we also learn of the radical potential that comes from stripping transformation of time – an absence that makes us more-than-human in an elemental sense.” – Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman

This event was a film screening and does not have any documentation in the archive.

Image Description: From the top of a cliff, a grey seascape with the shore in the foreground. Many lines of rock, tilted by geological time and erosion, cut the image from bottom left to middle right. A foamy sea washes back and forth across the rocks.