From the maritime origins of the "quarantine," to undersea fiber optic cables that mediate the Netflix Party and Zoom classroom, to the ship Evergiven's blockage of the Suez Canal, oceanic infrastructures and crosscurrents have quietly structured the contemporary crises shaping our global social reality. What does it mean to listen to global crises from the vantage point of oceanic currents? What histories of imperial extraction, racial-colonial violence, and relationality come into focus as we listen through the waterline and across the storied waters of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean littorals?
A Thousand Secrets is an immersive, multi-sensory exhibition that engages the sonic multiplicity and opacity of water as a provocation for alternative modes of collectively listening to a world in crisis. Dionne Brand (2002) describes the sound of the ocean as a "thousand secrets, all whispered at the same time." Inspired by Brand, A Thousand Secrets holds multiple registers of world-making in tense relation, and grapples with the ineffable stories of the sea that are, "inaudible to ordinary ears but still detectable with the right listening device, like the mother's ear" (Habila 2019). Working against the spectacle of human suffering, each artwork in A Thousand Secrets unsettles conventional listening devices to uncover entangled, nonlinear histories of extraction and whispered traces of the otherwise through the transformative properties of the ocean.
A Thousand Secrets is an immersive, multi-sensory exhibition that engages the sonic multiplicity and opacity of water as a provocation for alternative modes of collectively listening to a world in crisis. Dionne Brand (2002) describes the sound of the ocean as a "thousand secrets, all whispered at the same time." Inspired by Brand, A Thousand Secrets holds multiple registers of world-making in tense relation, and grapples with the ineffable stories of the sea that are, "inaudible to ordinary ears but still detectable with the right listening device, like the mother's ear" (Habila 2019). Working against the spectacle of human suffering, each artwork in A Thousand Secrets unsettles conventional listening devices to uncover entangled, nonlinear histories of extraction and whispered traces of the otherwise through the transformative properties of the ocean.
Mae A. Miller is an interdisciplinary scholar, curator, and museum educator. She has held curatorial fellowships at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (NYC) and Impakt Centre for Media Culture and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Geography Department at the University of California, Berkeley.