Not Drowning But Waving

A response to Bettina Seitz's ‘Underwave’

by Tara McGinn

The dolphins peeled in and out of the coal-coloured water, their slick, oily skins glimpsed arching and sliding silently. We tried to count them and became confused, trying to differentiate one from another. Whether there was just one at many times or many at once, we couldn’t quite tell and resolved to eat our sandwiches. A great white ferry blocked the view to our left suddenly, pushing away the horizon and flattening it with sequential rows of porthole windows. We turned our heads back down and watched to see how the creatures would respond or which direction they would take. We didn’t see them again.

The hunched and shrouded forms of Seitz’s installation floated above me the day before. This perspective placed me on the seabed beneath them, like in the video projected onto the adjacent wall. I moved through, up, over and back down amongst these strangers in the water, becoming a curious submarine or a lonesome shark. I call them strangers because their identity was concealed, but I’m considering the possibility that they weren’t meant to have any. Like the dolphins, I could only generalise them and categorise their forms and characteristics, but I couldn’t touch them or ask their names; they remained at a distance and imbibed with secrecy. I noticed more of them on the gallery floor, almost crawling away like unwanted mice, resting stoic and motionless. Perhaps these were the ones who wanted to sink to the seabed, to escape any prying eyes of surface creatures like myself, and now were obliged to be witnessed. The cold, damp floor was substituting their watery fortress, like carbon fibre icebergs for penguins at the zoo.

Ireland is a country characterised by a narrative of borders, and the sea is our most definitive. It ebbs and blurs the boundaries, separating all other bodies of land whilst consistently touching them all at once. We could regress to a mermaid or half-fish self that could traverse coastal borders and then shift upright once we reach sandy shores again. However, we cannot make sovereignly separated neighbours our amphibian compatriots in this way, and so the drawn political lines on maps are merely technicalities that float. The sea is the vernacular fence with a nice view over the top; its limitlessness is the limit we are forced to accept.

Seitz’s installation implies a series of bodies arranged like a migrating flock of birds, perfectly spaced apart and facing in one direction. Their intended path is unclear as I consider whether they are moving towards or away from the shore. Just below the surface, their presence is revealed and concealed in the subtlety of the tide. This processional time-lapse is a recording of the live stream that took place over four days in September 2020 for the Tread Softly festival. Perhaps the odd isolated walker on the beach could spot their submerged sequence. It is almost a mimicry of the first land creatures - emerging from the sea, growing legs and breathing in the crisp, dry air - yet these are secured and kept in place, with no legs to speak of. Their pale-coloured veils are like hardened molluscs of ghosts that cannot enter nor leave this world.

Arriving is not as simple as stepping on dry land despite the blurred edge of our natural perimeter. Crossing thresholds is a process of passports, visa checks, scheduling, affordability, legalities and restrictions. Seitz’s creatures, kept in the water, in a constant state of not quite here nor there, feel like an adequate analogy for being stranded in a crisis with no solution. The sea cannot be claimed by a flag or a sense of control that’s exercised over land. Those with the necessary privileges simply smile at the camera and walk through the barriers. Others, who have no choice or who are in no position to stay where they are, are met with a system of asylum that is another type of imprisonment. You can exist but disappear, be trapped within laws, but float on the edge of society.

The desire to live and work here comes with being shamed and patronised by a government that treats Big Tech like how their predecessors welcomed Catholicism. National identity is now aligned with the ironic trope of Irish migration - as if our sense of Irishness needs to be sold back to us for the price of our self-worth. People leave because, time and time again, it’s too miserable to stay, only to be plagued with homesickness and come back because returning is at least a consistent option. With ‘Underwave,’ Seitz was able to translate both in tactile sculpture and film how the experience or fear of leaving may never actually leave. The exhibition was curated by the Centre for Creative Practices, an organisation that explicitly supports culturally diverse or migrant-identifying artists.

Pirates or migrants (or the ever-elusive “ex-pat”), it’s another collective destiny if the rising sea levels don’t get to us first and swallow us whole. Everything peeping out of the surface will be a refugee shelter, living in a nightmare but living all the same. Like the soft yellow lights that warmed the exhibition, the torch of Poolbeg lighthouse behind me could perhaps still glimmer underwater and highlight the homes of those we refused to acknowledge. I kept watching for the dolphins, disturbed by this mass of moving boat parts, like being pushed aside by someone else too eager to get on the bus. Their solitude was interrupted for the sake of another’s journey taking priority. Part of me wished the boat engines would backfire and all its passengers would be forced to float and join them, even momentarily, in being stuck out there.

Tara McGinn is the inaugural MLP x The Complex writer in residence.
’Bettina Seitz’s ‘Underwave’ took place at The Complex Gallery from 16 – 25 August 2024, and was curated by the Centre for Creative Practices.