Tabita Rezaire
Deep Down Tidal
about
Tabita Rezaire is infinity incarnated into an agent of healing. Her cross-dimensional practices envision network sciences—organic, electronic and spiritual—as healing technologies to serve the shift towards heart consciousness. Navigating architectures of power, she digs into scientific imaginaries to tackle the pervasive matrix of coloniality and the protocols of energetic misalignments that affect the songs of our body-mind-spirits. Tabita’s work is rooted in time-spaces where technology and spirituality intersect as fertile ground to nourish visions for connection and emancipation. The screen interfaces of her decolonial digital healing offer substitute readings to dominant narratives, while her collective offerings remind us to nurture our soul.Tabita is based in Cayenne, French Guyana. She has a Bachelor in Economics (Fr) and a Master of Research in Artist Moving Image from Central Saint Martins (UK). Tabita is a founding member of the artist group NTU, half of the duo Malaxa, and the mother of the energy house SENEB. In 2017, she presented her first solo show Exotic Trade at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg. Tabita has shown her work internationally—New Museum, NY; Gropius Bau, Berlin; MMOMA Moscow, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hek, Basel; ICA London; Performa 17; V&A London; National Gallery Denmark; The Broad LA; Berlin Biennale 09; MoCADA NY; Tate Modern London; Museum of Modern Art Paris.
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Deep Down Tidal explores transoceanic networks examining the political and technological affects of water as a conductive interface for communication. From fibre optic cables to sunken cities, drowned bodies, hidden histories of navigation and sacred signal transmissions, the ocean is home to a complex set of communication networks. As modern information and communication technologies (ICT) become omnipresent in Western lifestyles—rebranded global to further implement Western domination—we urgently need to understand the cultural, political and environmental forces that have shaped them.
Looking at the infrastructure of submarine fibre optic cables that carries and transfers our digital data, it is striking to realize that the cables are layered onto colonial shipping routes. Once again, the bottom of the sea becomes the interface of painful yet celebrated advancements masking the violent deeds of modernity.
Deep Down Tidal navigates the ocean as a graveyard for Black knowledge and technologies. From Atlantis, to the “Middle passage”, or refuge seekers presently drowning in the Mediterranean, the ocean abyss carries pains, lost histories and memories while simultaneously providing the global infrastructure for our current telecommunications. Could the violence of the Internet—inflicted upon Africa and more generally Black people lie in its physical architecture?
Research suggests that water has the ability to memorize and copy information, disseminating it through its streams. What data is our world’s water holding? Beyond trauma, water keeps myriads of deep secrets, from its debated origin, its mysterious sea life of mermaids, water deities, and serpent gods, to the aquatic ape theory. Deep Down Tidal enquires the complex cosmological, spiritual, political and technological entangled narratives sprung from water as an interface to understand the legacies of colonialism.