In the liner notes of their 1997 album, The Quest, the Detroit-based Afrofuturist electronic duo Drexciya (Gerald Donald and James Stinson) made known that their named referred to an underwater world populated by the descendants of the pregnant Africans thrown overboard by slavers during their transit across the Atlantic. According to legend, the unborn babies somehow developed the ability to breath liquid oxygen and thrive in the deep seas. This fictional survival, which inevitably takes a posthuman form, offers an allegory for the endurance of those who survived the horrors of the Middle Passage but are still burdened by centuries of abuse.
In their video essay Hydra Decapita, 2010, which is screened every Thursday as part of their presentation at Hangar, the Otolith Group (Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar) connect the Drexciya to the Zong massacre––the 1781 slaughter of more than 130 captive Africans by the ship’s crew, who proceeded to claim the insurance for their loss––in order to place the slave ships that the mythical underwater beings originate from at the heart of the capitalist enterprise. Within these conditions, enslaved bodies acquire a dual financial function both as producers of material value and as a form of value in and of themselves, to the point that they can be collateralized. Opposing the fluidity of the oceans to financial liquidity, Sagar and Eshun collaborated with sound designer Tyler Friedman to create a sound piece, A Sphere of Water Orbiting a Star, 2023, that includes a recorded conversation between Eshun and Remnant of a Hydrogen Element (a moniker for Drexciya’s Donald), in which the two muse about aquatic wormholes that would enable us to depart from linear space-time and escape the no-less-harrowing world of today.
