Deep in The Eye and The Belly (2023, ongoing)

Leonie Pfennig: Chapter one of your new video work “Deep in the Eye and the Belly” starts with a recollection of a flood that made people flee into the sea. At first it sounds like a not-so sci-fi scenario: people were expecting fires, generated by climate change, but instead of burning, their cities were flooded from bursting banks of rivers due to rain that did not stop – something we already see happening nowadays. In fact, we don’t have to look so far away, a gigantic flood hit Germany in the summer of 2020 and destroyed entire villages and infrastructure, 133 people died. I recently spoke to a curator who told me that her curatorial focus has shifted so far that in every new art project she works on, she’s trying to raise awareness for the climate crisis. How does the global situation we all live in affect your work as an artist? Is it something you’re aware of constantly when you venture into a new project, or was it an idea of this filmic work specifically, to have it set in future times affected by the climate crisis (or climate collapse, as you call it)?

Sam Williams: The state of precarity we exist in at the moment, beyond just the climate crisis, is something that runs through the backbone of my practice. Consideration of this precarity is in the background of all of my research and work, but this project is perhaps the first that brings it to the forefront with a semi-narrative world or set of stories. It is speculative, but those speculations run through the past, present and future. As you say, the narrator suggests the tipping point of climate collapse happened in their past, which is our future, while they recall a story that is set both in our present and our recent past. It was very much my intention for the project to be set in an ambiguous and fluid timeframe and to also avoid a clear sense of utopia or dystopia emerging. Something that runs through my work is a sense that – in some way, shape or form – things continue.

I had been writing about whales for some years, collating images and stories, as I found them to be a strong image for many of my interests: ecology, mythology, bodies-as-worlds, and so on. Then, when I found the image of the people sat at a table inside the body of the “Malm” whale in Gothenburg Museum of Natural History, the project began to coalesce around it.

Text by Andy Grace Hayes

The microbial flora lining the gut of the organisation works toward the preservation and progression, in part, of the major organism’s life. Willingly or not, knowingly or not; the Jamie-Lee-Curtis-advocated microbiota, the collective organisation, the institution of bacteria, fungi and viruses carry out their duties in an amoral oasis of putridity. This collective microbiota carries out many of these duties to support immunity, aid digestion, synthesise and so on.

I find myself in the architecture of an inscrutable organisation. I’m inside the gut of a building, the lining of its intestines and even on the surface of its exterior skin. Rough. I mingle and network with all sorts of questionable elements. Within the architecture, the makings, the composite parts, something tells me it’s a bad man. I haven’t the faintest idea who this person might be, I’m only inside the micro of their functioning. For all I know, the gut I dwell inside may reside in that of a murderer, a sales administrator, or any other such blatant terrorist.

I had grown up impatient in the doorway of my parent’s bedroom. I stand waiting. My mum is getting ready to go, sitting in front of a mirror I can’t remember the shape of. With a jerk of her wrist, her face scrunched closed, a stream of bone-white Elnett Strong Hold fills the room. Shot in the head with glue. She dampens the air with isobutane, the particles, the fragrance stinging at my eyes and choking up my lungs. The smell tickles my nose. The atomised adhesive disturbs me. I splutter and cough, I feign a small performance of death in the doorway until it fades. The polymer cures on the surface of her hair. It disappears at the stroke of a brush.

I ask, in the muck, do the microorganisms all agree to keep the organisation alive? Healthy? The bits, the pieces nestle among the protruding villi in this garden of flesh. Some among my surroundings have intentions to cause cancer or sepsis. Others hope to cause inflammation or slow the structure down.

I can’t know for sure, it’s all conjecture. I can’t get my answer from the microbes, none of them are willing. The microorganisms in the building are too numerous and rampant. Too saturated is the architecture, to pin one down and ask its intentions—I can’t really know. ‘What are you up to?’

Inside a circle outside the body-building, I move around and around in a swirling rotted waste. Exiled, I float belly up in the pool. In the bowl of a toilet, in the sick, shit or blood. I feign a performance of death. I pass that which is venial, vitiating, volatile.

An essay by Paul Clinton

‘What if you don’t fancy being scaly? Scaling up? These are the kinds of questions Sam Williams imagines we will contemplate after the great flood, when our delicate ecosystem finally tips over and all but a lucky few are drowned. His multi-part film depicts the fate of a group of unrelated figures, strange to themselves, who are floating through a new ocean world in the belly of a taxidermy whale from a museum in Gothenburg. This real stuffed cetacean, still on display, was once used to house dinner parties for local dignitaries, but now forms a home for what look like social outcasts, wearing Coke cans for bracelets. Williams mixes the true history of this animal, with speculations about the future of humanity, to imagine life lived on or as a cetacean rather than anthropomorphic timescale. Stuck inside the belly of a whale, like Jonah, the survivors are forced into contemplation about the precarious society they have just left and the future they might have to embrace, as the questions indicate, against their will. And of course, their predicament leads to a whole set of questions of what it is to have a body, whether one ever possesses oneself, and the control exerted on their bodies by the society the survivors have just left.

The parts of this disjointed body are as follows: Chapter One tells the tale of the whale, its history as both animal and object, seemingly always in a state of disrepair, like its later inhabitants resisting any state of fixity; Chapter Two, a monologue on the disaster, escape and the coming into being of this new society; Three, the monologist performs a lament for the last whale. Chapter Four introduces more performers, seemingly stuck with nowhere to go after last orders have been called at a bar inside the whale, only for a tentative dance of transformation to unfold against an improvised monologue. Much of Williams’ work involves this kind of improvisation and collaboration within an otherwise tight choreography or scenario, allowing for his film to be the kind of precarious situation that it narrates. Chapter 5 continues that meditation on transformation, now through the experience of death and whatever happens after.

The survivors' queer position of being in a state of flux, or being alienated from their own bodies, is reflected also in the nascent queerness of the figures themselves. Dressed in a kind of apocalyptic half drag, they analyse a lost society to which they never quite belonged, and grapple with what they might become, perhaps as the quotation indicates, against their will. In fact, the tendency towards allegory –Jonah, the ark, the whale as extended metaphor for the body – but without a definite goal, such as redemption, draws Williams close to queer filmmakers such as Ulrike Ottinger and Werner Schroeter. Their films, like the artist’s, feature visually rich, but disconnected, tableaux for characters on a journey, usually only searching for some vague form of change or dissolution. And all three tend towards a kind of surrealist anthropology, a sense that to understand the world involves a degree of fantastical recreation, which is just what Williams does for our drowned world.

So there are several problems with queer resistance to norms and identities, and the idea of sanctuary or home:

The first is how to define what one is against, what it is a sanctuary from, without setting up some normative ideas of legitimate and illegitimate subjects, without identifying and excluding as queer, some new realm of abject subjects? How to have sanctuary without a list of whose in and out?

How to have sanctuary without therefore creating some prescriptive notion of the unsafe?

How to organise collectively or in solidarity to fight for or make a sanctuary without some idea of the shared project, or identity, in whose name one is fighting?

Against the alternatives of radical anti-social acts, separatism or utopianism, queer theory offers only ambivalence. This ambivalence finds its political expression as performativity. In performativity we have identities but only in quotation marks: they fail to name and contain, even as they function to give us voice. The ambivalence of performativity acknowledges that any definition is defined against something, and that excluded term is never actually outside but constitutes what is within. This ambivalence names a cause but never solidifies into an ideology, or an intransigent belief.

While all of this deals in cultural politics of identification and communication, there is the added related problem of material resources, something that queer theory doesn’t talk about enough. To claim sanctuary is either to have resources, access to property, to place, to provisions, only accessible then to those who have a degree of currency and recognition of rights within a broader society. That is privileging the same subjects who may not need sanctuary, who can pass or function. Or it means to claim place, space, resources illegitimately, which means sanctuary and those who claim it, far from safe, rather precarious, vulnerable to being surveilled, raided, prosecuted, reclaimed evicted.

So how does this relate to Sam’s work: well throughout it I think Sam sets up the problem of those excluded from society, as illegitimate, because they don’t procreate, or they may be seen as threatening and unstable to the continuity of society as it already is, as it is identified currently, and these people are seen in the film as without a future.

by Oluwaseun Olayiwola

I. In His Power

Q: How can a body find its way somewhere it does not want to be?

A: After evolving from water to land, and then back again, is beached on shore. Then is captured, then stabbed with a scythe in the eye. The stomach, the heart, the obsequious parts are dried, inflated, plugged with wood (which kind?), tied with chicken wire, purchased (capital, marine economics); samples are taken of skin (biological), of muscle, of bone (osteological); preserved in spirits, ethanol, isopropyl if shrinkage is ok; becomes a ladder and podium, oh yes, the metaphysical, a stage for hierarchy; bits are cut up to fry (remember this feeling of nourishment); documented, dissected, preserved in spirit; then the future, the body that did not want to be here cause it could not know what here was is painted, stained, replaced with rubber, skinned, taken (again?), cleaned (with more force this time?), split into what is beautiful and what is useful (nothing can be both?), hung on wooden frames, treated, peeled, boiled, cleaned, labelled, stretched over sweet-smelling spruce (it shouldn’t be sweet), concealed and transported, skin pulled, stretched (differently this time), scraped, oxidised (more at the start then less and less over eras), pumped, used for therapy, gas, spume, displayed so the mouth is at right angle, always open, always inviting, entered, descended into, cleaned, open for swanky dinner parties, political meetings (what meetings are not political please corroborate), used as sex dungeon, used as prison, which are the same, used as shelter, which are the same? used as trophy and trophy case, the psychometry of wax, used as crystal ball, used as divination, as communion, as ocean floor, as proof the extremities are not far enough, o ticking mortal closeness called intellect, used proof of history, was not gutted enough, gut further, as proof you can be in the wrong place at the wrong time and you die for it. It has always been the wrong Time: You die for it. Then, are lined with stars.

II. New Bodily Potentials

Could this be what French writer Edouard Louis means when he says “violence contains the risk of its own destruction.” Does the contemporary conviviality of breaking bread with one’s community inside a whale husk ameliorate the violence that has already occurred?

Part 2 opens post-flood. We enter a simulacrum of the whale’s interior physiology and are met with a monologist laying horizontally in a sequined jumpsuit, variegated feathers lining a hat, coke-can wrist braces. A painting of the sea is to their left. The canopy bed is draped with burgundies and golds. The body language of the performer is effectively muted, as though, were they to move too rashly, they might disturb their vessel, persuade them to push them deeper into the stomach to be burnt and broken down by acid.

As the monologue unfolds, I can’t help but think of Donna Haraway’s slogan “Make Kin Not Babies’ as the film enumerates anti-heteronormative modes of reproduction and co-existence:

*We knew of the possibility of asexual reproduction in our mycelial friends. We knew of self-fertilizing fish deep in the ocean. On our watery earth, we could become new, for and with one another. Restructured arrangements of family. We sought to expand the range of our relations with the more than human world around us. *

The “we” referred to is unstable and slippery (viewers are assured there is “no collective definition of people”). It’s a conglomeration of bodies too poor, too late, and/or too ecologically conscious to “(look) up to the skies to escape the damage they had created.” In contemporary terms, Elon Musk goes, Greta Thunberg stays.

Here the film makes an argument that those looking downwards –– those without ambitions to “colonise other planets”, who do not proclaim themselves the “Angels Of History” –– possess a capacity to transform alongside the earth dilapidation, which coincides with the rise of sea-levels. To survive, they need (and desire) new bodies, “slick and glistening”. They begin to “perform the bodies they wanted, the connections they needed.” Left for dead on the earth, they were “assigned” by these bourgeois abandoners.

Sounds like the inverse of another mythic formulation. Matthew 5:5: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” The remainers are not meek. And humans have always transformed alongside the change of the earth’s climate. It’s why we walk, it’s why our skin is different colors, it’s why some of us can't down jugs of milk.

While the film articulates an argument of ethical responsibility the remainers practice, as opposed to the phantasmagoric space colonization the abandoners desire, it seems to me that there is a fundamental and existential link between them that usurps ethics, morals, even finances. Because to look up is to witness a polluted sky, to look down is to see fields of garbage intoxicating both land and sea alike. Even to look forward is to sense the increasing temperature of one’s body. To close one’s eyes is to feel the microplastics that infect one’s body as they too aggregate in the local flora and fauna. Who is free from experiencing the collective decline of the ecosystem capable of maintaining the industrialist culture we have made commonplace? Who is free from experience? Who is free?

III. Mishearings

When folk singer Pete Seeger learned that whales “sing”, which is to say communicate between one another using an array of sounds that to humans may sound like cooing, pulsing, or even clicks, he composed an “anti-whaling” song, Song of the World’s Last Whale. While whaling as a whole peaked in the 19th century, the largest recorded amount of whales caught was in 1964 –– 82,964, according to the International Whaling Commission. Presumably Seeger, as a singer himself, was so moved by the fact of these whales’ ‘songs’, that he felt interspecies empathy. Don’t take my word for it, hear to the chorus of the song:

I heard the song of the world’s last whale as I rocked in the moonlight and reefed the sail It will happen to you also without fail If it happens to me sang the world’s last whale

The song suggests the whale foretelling the demise of the human population in line with its own species decline. In Part 3 of Deep in the Eye and the Belly, a lone performer moves along an orange-red light vessel, singing, on repeat, a rendition of the chorus or cry or call. I say a rendition because the chorus the performer repeats, at least it sounds to me, edits two words from the original:

I heard the song of the world’s last whale as I rocked in the moonlight and reefed the sail It will happen to you almost without fail If it happens to me said the worlds last whale

“It was very much my intention…to...avoid a clear sense of utopia or dystopia” Sam has said in an interview. The alteration of ‘also’ to ‘almost’ effectuates this, by loosening the net of totality ‘also’ implies. So too is the easing from ‘sang’ to ‘said’, which encases a loss of aestheticization. But the dismal nature of the wail is amplified, not only by the scenario of the shot, but by technique: the performer is a bad singer, but a fine wailer. Or perhaps they are a good wailer because they are a bad singer. Think less siren song and more sea shanty. All the performer can do, though they chant their foreboding melody of mutually assured destruction, is loop in circles, lyrically and topographically.

This misalignment, this slippage, purposeful or not, provides an insight into the myth-making energy of Williams’ work as a whole. In the same way Seeger bestowed upon the Whale the ability to foretell of humankind’s linked extinction to its own species, if one mishears “whale” as ‘wail” (by which I mean indulges the homophonic ring), then Williams has taken the torch from Seeger and fast-forwarded the viewer to this one-shot 10 minute moment of screen-capture: what we are subject to, 17 times by my count, is the last “wail” of humankind.

What does it all point to? Is it a post-human argument about the inextricability of aesthetic consciousness and oceanographical devastation? Is it a musical sample, revived here to remind us that these very-present anxieties have been stirring for 50+ years, and have, like trauma, fundamentally changed the bodies they inhabit? Maybe it’s not as dire as that, though, the sail has been being “reefed” for decades now. Soon it will be entirely folded and the way of the water is all we will be subject to.

IV. Memoiring

After the last wail, the last vibration of humankind, we witness a version of what the transmogrifications back into the ocean might look like. But remember, millions and millions of years ago, we evolved out of water. So the choreography of section four could be seen as less an imagining and more a remembering, a deep-time memoir, eons compressed into 25 minutes. The opening lines of American poet Jorie Graham’s ‘Sea Change’ set the stage better than I can:

One day: stronger wind than anyone expected. Stronger than ever before in the recording of such. Un- natural says the news. Also the body says it. Which part of the body – I look down, can feel it, yes, don’t know where. Also submerging us, making of the fields, the trees, a cast of characters in an unnegotiable drama, ordained, iron-gloom of low light, everything at once undoing itself.

The ‘us’ that is ‘submerging’ is the human populace in Graham’s vision. We are all the “cast of characters in an / unnegotiable drama”. Williams is a dramatist. The six performers that compose the scene form a microcosm of a world. But are we watching the pure immanence of a singular voice while the world churns, regardless, even at times, in contrary to his demands?

The section is the only section with a subtitle: ‘an improvisation’. An actor stutters fragments of a monologue that are part of a larger tapestry of presence and transformation the group is enacting. Sometimes the monologue distracts; sometimes it grounds. The performers exchange colourful fabrics, a shoe gets thrown, one dancer sails on another’s shoulders, another swims on a wooden table, another mostly doesn’t get involved, keeping to the perimeter, polishing glassware, donning an iridescent hand-mask. It is unnegotiable and individual. But simultaneously I understand the monologue’s particularly (and thus the actors’s) at this nexus between land and water, between the future and past, as a kind of stutteration (my word) of language attempting to be rebirthed, as though the actor were descending into the water, mouth agape, each utterance an air bubble floating toward the surface til it pops.

  V.            *The Blue Human*

Submerging, submerging further. The list of events that will occur as the hybrid whale-human container sinks to the ocean floor provide a water analysis for the fact that discussions of climate change can often feel as though corroborating an end to everything, when it is abundantly clear, the mass of our bodies, logging down in water, will provide sustenance for crustaceans, troglodytes, octopuses. We will no longer be the fittest. We continue to make the world less habitable for certain species, but not all; some might even thrive when our collective demise arrives––mussels, clams, limpets.

Steve Mentz in The Posthuman Glossary, defines Blue Humanities as:

an offshore trajectory that places cultural history in an oceanic rather than terrestrial context. Recognizing, in the words of science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, that ‘the name of this planet should be Ocean, not Earth…

For there to be Blue Humanities, we need blue humans. This chapter would orient its viewership towards this framework as it opens on a black woman, cast in blue light, delivering the final monologue of the film, wincing between memories. She is “curled like a foetus on the tongue, in a cocoon of wet”. She has the look of someone who will say much less than she means to as sensation rises and then is choked back down, the monologue the only kind of order she can manifest, surrounded by the “flesh and bone” of a cetacean’s “womb-like” mouth.

She speaks the compounded pronoun, you and I, again and again. But the perspective, left in the human lens, is not good enough. We must, or at least we must attempt to, hear from the cetacean taking her in, which provides the distinguishing feature of this section. The cetacean that has taken the human in, and thus, made her a kind of survivor (Sorry! Not everybody gets a cetacean-vessel! Too many have been killed!) speaks in blue-gray text across black backgrounds. “Kindred beyond taxonomy” identifies the human speaker, before a description of how their bodies will be ushered into the next groove of the life cycle: “We will tremble as carrion eaters feed and debride our underside.”

‘I don’t know who is me and I don’t know who is you. Perhaps these distinctions no longer matter.” Interconnectivity is the perpetual struggle for the human mind while the cetacean, possessing what we would deem ‘wisdom’, offers “Now we are out of time’s reach, we finally have it.” It reminds me of the phrase “we know more about space than we do our oceans”. The descent to the sea-floor, where life continues to thrive beyond light, is even more mysterious than the telescope, pointing at the sky on a clear night.