Ocean as Archive
Embodied Research and Movement Workshop
2022


Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine


Film still - Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine




I invite you to move around your space,
trace the floor with your feet,
How does the ground feel against your body,
How does the air move around you?
inhale,
exhale,
and find a place to settle.
When you are ready, I invite you to listen with your body.



Film still - Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine’

Framing the Workshop in Context

This workshop formed part of Ocean as Archive, a Goldsmiths MA module exploring interdisciplinary approaches to water through ecofeminism, postcolonial theory, political ecology, and artistic practice. My contribution invited students to engage breath and movement as critical tools for exploring water’s temporal, affective, and speculative dimensions. Rooted in my film Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine, the session introduced filmic breath as both method and metaphor—attuning students to the ocean as an embodied archive, and offering space to reflect on how bodies carry residues of migration and resistance. By working with water’s absence as well as presence, the practice encouraged students to trace relational memory through the tangible-invisible register of breath, and to reflect critically on their own embodied epistemologies in relation to the sea.




Facilitated by:
Marie Theresa Crick and Daphna Westerman
Invited by Dr Lenka Vráblíková for the MA in Contemporary Art Theory




Film still - Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine’

Opening with a departure from my film
Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine

Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine sought to weave amongst the rhythmics of shared breath, feeling with selected reading materials inspired and navigated through the modality of the Ocean as Archive module.

The filmic body cultivates Irigarayan air, drawing from Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche and The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, to question the ‘tangible invisible’ breath and its potential to open autonomous feminine subjectivity and woman-to-woman sociality.

Film still - Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine’

Textual anchors of the filmic body include the feminine breath of:

  • Anyanwu in Wild Seed by Octavia Butler (1980)

  • Sila in Unconfessed by Yvette Christianse (2007)

  • Piya in The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh (2004)

  • Adaora in Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor (2014)

  • Manoka in Intruders by Mohale Mashigo (2018)

Film still - Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine’

The film mirrors breath through a filmic language that connects editing ‘cuts’ to the rhythms and pulsations of the selected texts. These bodies and voices may not be visually represented, but they are sensed in the movement of water, the materiality of the image, and the trace of breath.

Using both a Canon 5D Mark IV and iPhone, I filmed textual and bodily fragments to evoke presence beyond the frame—allowing breath to guide the camera, letting light tangle with particles on screen.

The film’s editing process was led by poetic mapping: the syllables, punctuation, and flow of the texts influenced shot duration, colour rhythm, and transitions between above and underwater sequences. Even the ocean snake’s flicker emerged through breath-led intuition.

Film still - Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine’

Film still - Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine’

Inspired by Han Ok-hee’s Untitled 77-A and the writings in Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, I treated each cut as a site of relational force—where creation and destruction blur.

The sound was composed to shift with intensities of breath: quickened pace sharpened image and tone, while slow breath softened grain and rhythm.

The film invites viewers to enter and exit its currents, just as Achille Mbembe imagines reading as drifting through the conceptual tides of Necropolitics.

Film still - Indeterminate Transmissions – Hydro-Feminine’

This filmic body began my search for a
reorientation of the Irish Catholic maternal
through filmic breath and Irigarayan shared air.

The repetition is intentional, as we hold the shared breath.

These stills are part of the wider embodied practice. Join future workshops to move, breathe, pause, and listen with the filmic bodies of my practice.