“Somethings in the Water” is not about the water. It’s about something. Something is us. “We are the ones who chose to sea”. We are the ones who must Revive, Resuscitate, Regain, Reinvigorate, Reintroduce. We as African people, Our them the Something.
500 years ago, the empire began calculating… at that moment we as Africans started to forget the memory of those who chose the sea, their Underwater resistance, and the defiant creative mind of a people who foreshadow the oppression exploitation, and erasure of a people. Today Africans Craftshow evidence of what once lived in us as a remaining stillness. “Something in the Water” uncaptured Africans constantly in regeneration, regaining, and revolution to restore our dignity and honor to our culture.
The creative mind remains intact just as physics teaches us that energy is never destroyed only transformed. In most African traditional cultures, there seems to be no distinction between the mother and the rest of creation. The African worldview focuses on the universe and all its people as an interconnected whole and seeks harmony and rhythm.
Underwater Craft Show is like a Voyage to the bottom of the sea. A View observed deep in the depths of our imagination can we retrieve this African craft that minds hands and feet of those who chose the sea their defiance to accept the conditions and trainings of capture, confinement, and capitulation in this Show a memory of the unforgotten People of African descent who have been marginalized for centuries due to the legacy of slavery and colonialism. They are often “invisible” and today suffer from exclusion and poverty.
The Underwater Craft Show envisioned to give exposure to the word “art” as the othering of the experience “craft” in the expression, skill, concept, and spirituality, that embarks to shape more awareness to shift our material presentation of conditions through an aesthetics that can be seen through the difficult lens by African Worldview in the diaspora.
The Underwater Craft Show wants creatives to bring awareness to our material reality and conditions. With a lens that imposes style, intention, and the aesthetic perspective of African people. We aim to make Underwater a destination point to rescue the unforgotten.