Diogo da Cruz & Fallon Mayanja: AXECIDYR

“AXECIDYR” is a sci-fi film series that intertwines fragments of an Afrofuturist legend of an underwater civilization with concerns around the consequences of deep-sea mining. For the last four years, Diogo da Cruz and Fallon Mayanja have been developing this narrative together, alongside a series of sculptures and sound performances, as a result of their dialogue on the memory of colonial crimes and the unsustainable extraction of natural resources. The work aims to present a decolonized ecological point of view that questions the adequacy of western science in tackling climate change.

One of the project’s central ideas is the memory of water. Drawing upon philosophical hydro-feminist thought, the artists address the issue of empathy with other human and more-than-human beings, looking at our bodies as temporary containers for the water that constitutes us. Every day, this water leaks out and new water enters the system. Water carries memories of the bodies it has passed through, and each of us is made up of this complex multiplicity of stories. Da Cruz and Mayanja look at the Atlantic Ocean as this great body of water that brings together an enormous collective memory and also carries within itself all the enslaved bodies that were victims of colonial greed. These bodies now live on through other forms of life, in the depths of the sea and on the surface, and are the central characters of the project’s fiction.

The new iteration of the sci-fi series, to be developed within the context Onassis AiR, will overlap with the focus on the Atlantic Ocean, present in former works, and dwell upon another relevant body of water. Since the beginning of the artists’ dialogue, they were aiming for a connection to the actual context of the Mediterranean Sea, as a contemporary site of a very tragic journey for so many people. Through a series of site visits, interviews, and encounters with people in Athens, the project aims not only to re-imagine the memory of the transatlantic slave trade, but also draw attention to colonial mechanisms and structures that are still present, whether in the relationship between the western countries and the global south, or in the uncontrolled exploitation of natural resources.