Agenda

"Learning With" Workshop Series:
Alluvial Invocations

Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar (The Otolith Group)

in dialogue with
Antonia Majaca Friedman
Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Ca’ Foscari Univeristy of Venice

Saturday, November 15, 2025 
10.00–13.00

Aula Biral, Malcanton Marcorà
Dorsoduro 3484/D, Calle Contarini, 30123 Venezia

Founded in 2002 by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, The Otolith Group has developed one of contemporary art's most sophisticated engagements with oceanic themes, theorizing water as simultaneously historical archive, site of colonial violence, and space of speculative futurity. Their major works—Hydra Decapita and A Sphere of Water Orbiting a Star—establish water as central methodology for understanding connections between colonial violence, contemporary capitalism, migration crises, and climate catastrophe. Drawing on Drexciya's underwater mythology, their practice transforms the Atlantic as a site of death into a site of subaquatic resistance, reimagining drowned histories through Afrofuturist speculation.

Their theoretical frameworks synthesize Black Atlantic theory, Caribbean philosophy, Afrofuturism, and political ecology into an aqueous epistemology centered on liquidity's duality: the unrepresentable violence of the historic trade in humans across oceans and the abstraction of contemporary financial capital. This duality reveals how the same marine insurance mechanisms that made the Zong massacre profitable now structure global financial systems, an insight that extends beyond metaphor to show how the Atlantic remains a working space of capital accumulation. By treating water as archive, capital, and speculative portal, The Otolith Group's practice demonstrates how decolonial futures must be hydropolitical futures, fundamentally reimagining our relationships to oceans as part of broader liberation projects.

In this workshop, we will engage with The Otolith Group's aqueous methodologies to explore how amphibious conditions might offer alternative frameworks for understanding the entangled histories of maritime capital, ecological crisis, and speculative resistance.

"Learning With" is an experimental workshop series investigating radical epistemological crossings and transversal intellectual practice. Operating within Venice's transient conditions, it cultivates epistemic commoning as successive waves of scholars, artists, and practitioners contribute to an evolving dialogue on affirmative political epistemology. Each session follows a recursive protocol: conceptual traces from previous gatherings transform into new inquiries, sedimenting into both a community of thought and an emergent body of text. Through this alluvial process, the series examines the historical metabolisms between water, land, mud, and inhabitants that constitute amphibious existence across human and more-than-human worlds, across scalar complexity from the microbial to the planetary. Drawing on archipelagic and sedimentary methodologies, "Learning With" prefigures an affirmative political ecology that emerges from Venice's lagoonary conditions while resonating with urgencies of earthlings navigating other unstable conditions.

Registration required
Contact: antonia.friedman@unive.it

Organized by HealthXCross ERC project led by Roberta Raffaetà, DFBC and by NICHE