REFRACTus is a creative reflection of human-fish intra-actions where decolonial and feminist poetics are utilised to explore the violence caused by capitalism, colonialism, and other White anthropogenic ways of engaging with the deep-water. The narrative and visualisation reflects on the inherent violence and disconnection of oneself with the human-inflicted planetary crisis: polluted waters, warming waters, rising waters, and melting waters. In this work, the artists seek a pathway through Zoe Todd’s theory of ‘fishy refraction’. The air-water interface is imagined as the lens of Indigenous knowing which allows for the bending and diffusing of human knowledge towards multispecies understanding and coexistence. Humans are inherently unstable on land but in the deep oceans, their fragility is apparent. Once dispelled from the fluid womb sac, they are deaf-mute, visually impaired and breathless in water. Their engagement with the underwater world largely depends on prosthetics and technological extensions. The artists evoke human fragility in these refracted intra-actions with underwater beings in two places: Brisbane, Australia (2020), and Hanimadhoo, Maldives (2017). Both places represent deep trauma of underwater life due to blooming algae or rising temperatures of water. This refraction between interfaces and coloured bodies modes of engagement creates conditions that ask for healing, reparation, care and justice towards non-humans, so that humans survive.
This work is a collaboration between Hira Sheikh and Kavita Gonsalves. It featured in the Art Global Gallery of Ars Electronica 2020.