4 Waters: Deep Implicancy (Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman, Turkey/Greece, Haiti, Australia, Marshall Islands, 2018, 29 minutes)
What would a world and an ethics look like free from the destructive consequences of the Western mind?
Enfolded within and structuring the collage of images, sounds and arguments in 4 Waters is the theoretical physicist David Bohm’s idea of implicancy. Bohm imagined the “unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence as an undivided flowing movement without borders”, in which there’s a constant folding and unfolding between the apparently intuitive way of understanding existence (the ‘explicate’ order of classical physics, dominated by space and time) and a more complex and seemingly counterintuitive reality (the ‘implicate’ order of quantum physics, where entanglement and nonlocality are possible). This back and forth between parts and the whole, between the virtual and the actual reveals how every consciousness and every particle contain detailed information about every other element in the universe.
Reading this technique through ideas of fluidity and phase-changes, 4 Waters poetically collages a constant folding and unfolding between simple and perhaps more fundamental worldviews or ways of reading reality. It asks why the Western mind considers the restricted, simplistic and colonial worldview to be ‘common sense’, as opposed to the radical, generative movement of blackness as a mode of existing in the world: an existence underneath or prior to the Western mind, and the ground that makes possible entirely different ethics and ways of living.
Denise and Arjuna’s exhibition Corpus Infinitum, featuring their follow up to 4 Waters was due to be at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow from 23 April to 7 June 2020 as part of Glasgow International but was postponed due to the coronavirus crisis.
