Deep Breath
Shown at: Pamphilos, Athens (2019)

Film
Duration, 25′

Sometimes, the finding of an antidote to the most basic and lethal form of amnesia, ‘the forgetting of air’, may require the undertaking of a deep dive. The site of descent is what it’s really all about, isn’t it? Where and when to dive into the thick of things?

Somewhere in the depths where the Saronic Gulf meets the Aegean Sea, Raqs Media Collective are marking a fragment of an aphorism that has to do with forgetting. The phrase that Raqs inscribes on to the sea floor and then films with the help of three divers, sign-posts an interval between the resting place of two shipwrecks; one ancient, another not. Together they might have transported a cargo of all the old and new things that defy memory, had they kept sailing.

This submarine aide-memoire is as much about what it means to remember to breathe as it is about the forgetting of the fabric of life. It makes for the first underwater art work by Raqs Media Collective, and leaves a submarine epiphany in its wake.

(email us on studio@raqsmediacollective.net to request access)