sound film

residence time

The work residence time consists of several series of photographs I took of the ocean during the crossing of the Atlantic on cargo ship and scans of files of the German Imperial Colonial Office, that I made during research for the project Dispossession with the Willful Weeds group.

I decided to show these images together as one work. I was really certain that they belonged together, but for a long time I could not explain to myself why. Was it because the ocean was constantly on my mind, while I was going into the archive? Or because while being on the ocean, my mind wandered from 1938 (the reason I was on the ship was that this was the passage of the director's Jewish grandfather) to times before that event? Or because the usage of the building of the archive also linked German colonialism and facism? I learned about the dispute around the “continuity thesis”, the question if and how the German colonial apparatus was a precursor to the fascist apparatus to follow, or how the German genocide of the Nama and Herero informed the Holocaust. The continuity theory is argued especially heated among German historians, but still it wasn’t why these pictures belong together. Something about the ocean and the files in the archive really stirred, unsettled and haunted me in a way that wasn’t about this line of argumentation. It was through the writings of Christina Sharpe that I came to understand that maybe my approach to time, human and non-human actors and to death had been shaken in contact with water and paper.

Sharpe writes:
The amount of time it takes for a substance to enter the ocean and then leave the ocean is called residence time. Human blood is salty, and sodium, Gardulski tells me, has a residence time of 260 million years. And what happens to the energy that is produced in the waters? It continues cycling like atoms in residence time. We, Black people, exist in the residence time of the wake, a time in which “everything is now. It is all now” (Morrison 1987, 198)”
(Sharpe 2016, 41)

I experienced something like the energy she describes as rauschen or noise. The rauschen didn’t leave me but grew, both times and I wanted to stay with it. I found immense solace in Sharpe’s writing, sensing that there is no such thing as disappearing and that while being in the now I can tune into the then.

Even though residence time would be described as a photographic or visual work, it remains a sound work for me, because it comes from rauschen/noise and it wants to be rauschen/noise. The desire to make and be with the work resonates what Tina Campt termed as listening to images.