The Sea Is History

The Sea is History, made in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, is a free adaptation of the poem by Derek Walcott. The film is a materialist and animist critique of the monumentalisation of European colonial history, reading the past instead as something intimately entangled within the present – as a living and mutational thing made up of the living and the dead. It is in this sense that the film suggests a way beyond the boundary event that could be called the Plantationocene (brought on with the onset of modernity and the system of globalised capitalism that started with the colonisation of the Americas in 1492, with Columbus arriving in Ayiti; latter day Dominican Republic) – and towards a possible “Chthulucenic” future of créolised assemblages as a politics of re-narrativising death within life.

photo: Courtesy of Louis Henderson and LUX, London