Whatever You Throw at the Sea...

Central to Zara Julius’s practice is polyvocality. Consequently, Whatever You Throw at the Sea… has been produced with the participation of a number of cultural workers (based in Johannesburg and Vienna) whose personal histories are implicated in the project’s source materials from across the African continent and her diaspora.

It is at once a critique of ethnographic and ‘scientific’ collections in the global north with their impositions of time and history, and their co-presences of violence, extraction, and gatekeeping, as well as a critique on the current climate-discourse that fails to implicate coloniality in the enduring climate crisis. The work proposes an oceanic world

view, and centres African epistemologies as it thinks through the survival guidelines and subversive strategies that are concealed within the material locked up in the aforementioned collections. The project imagines new futures and survivals for those most affected by climate catastrophe in the wake of colonial and settler thievery.

Zara Julius is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and vinyl selector based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She practices from a working methodology of ‘rapture’, and is concerned with the relationship between performativity, frequency, concealment, and fugitivity in the settler (post) colony, with a special focus on what we call the ‘Global South’. Working with sound, video, performance, and objects, Zara Julius’ practice involves the collection, selection, collage, and creation of archives (real, imagined, and embodied) through extensive research projects. She is especially engaged in thinking through the internal workings of the Black sonic, and how they might help us imagine new futures, and experience different present(s).

She holds a BAHons in social anthropology from the University of Cape Town and a MAFA in Fine Art by Research and Practice from the University of the Witwatersrand. Zara has exhibited and presented her work across South Africa and internationally.

www.zarajulius.com

(Text provided by artist)