Discussant and Respondent “The Free Sea” GV Art, London

The Free Sea - screening and discussion 28 November 2014, 6:30pm start Hanna Husberg & Laura McLean Discussion panel: Ayesha Hameed, Ele Carpenter On Friday 28th November at GV Art, the London premiere screening of The Free Sea, was followed by a discussion with the artists and invited panelists. The Free Sea explores the Maldives as a state constituted and unbound by the cultural, political, economic, and material flows of late capitalism and anthropogenic climate change. Considering the impacts of sea level rise on the low-lying island nation, the film reflects on these islands as geo-bodies of identity, sovereignty, and prosperity threatened by the breaching of coastal and climatic thresholds. The forecast dissolution of these islands represents an ontological loss of definition, and crisis of representation for objects and subjects, registering across local and global scales and systems of knowledge. As plans are proposed for the future resettlement of a diaspora without homeland, The Free Sea traces consequences of this crisis, considering potential positions for new human beings subject to a complex of technological and legal systems, but afforded rights by none. The film emerges from the Contingent Movements Archive, a research project by Hanna Husberg & Laura McLean initiated for the inaugural Maldives Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, and further developed for ‘Adapting in the Anthropocene’ at UNESCO, Paris