Ayesha Hameed

After being cheated out of her dream job, a long-suffering receptionist plots revenge.

We were huddled in front of the thin light of a fire in an abandoned house on a cold January night in Calais. X was making another cup of very sugary tea. Y, stirring the kindling, yelled as he accidentally grabbed a burning twig. “are you trying to clean your fingerprints?” laughed X. ‘A Rough History’ is a performance lecture, installation and 16mm film following several visits to Calais, that considers a practice by migrants entering the EU of destroying their fingerprints to avoid detection by the Eurodac system, alongside other histories of fingerprinting and fingerprint erasures. It sees the fingerprint as a scaled down landscape, looking at the circulation of the image of the fingerprint, and the different lives and journeys of the migrants whose hands produce such images.

Black Atlantis is a multi-part, live audio-visual essay that looks at possible afterlives of the Black Atlantic: in contemporary illegalized migration at sea, in oceanic environments, through Afrofuturistic dancefloors and soundsystems, and in outer space.

Black Atlantis is a multi-part, live audio-visual essay that looks at possible afterlives of the Black Atlantic: in contemporary illegalized migration at sea, in oceanic environments, through Afrofuturistic dancefloors and soundsystems, and in outer space.

On 29 April 2006, a twenty-foot boat was spotted off the south-eastern coast of Barbados. On board, eleven bodies were found by coastguards, preserved and sun-dried. The ghost ship had been drifting for four months on the Atlantic Ocean. The film presents an inadequate narrative of a story that relies on media sources to evoke the complicity of the weather, ocean currents, and state violence in the ship’s journey. The glide between film and forms tests the measurement of tragedies related to crossings and immigration, highlighting the power of the sea and the horror of the figure of the ghost ship.