 Good afternoon. First, a very sincere thanks to Sharjah Art Foundation for inviting me and us. Second, I want to start with a parable. In western India there were a number of unusual temples dedicated to gods called jugs. In the 1990s, the custodian of one of these temples told me that the jugs were Hindu deities ..y'r ddioch yma iちwch i ballwyr hyn sy'nien fydd yn cynnig yma. Ydiwedd ar gyfer frydd y llythydd a'r wyneb ar Llandfyniad... ..y hynlad allan rhoi allan yn ystod. Ysgrifwll yn y Llyfriddur Llyfridog ym lle o r Siw Llyfridog ym unrhyw fyddenn... ...yng Ngwyllus i Anatholi o Seriau, Y Grein o Turks... ...nydd yn ymdangos i Central Asia. Felly, yn ein bod yn ystod y cyfnodd cyfnodol o'r cyfnodd rhywbeth yn ymweld, o'r ffantasol yn fawr o'r ffordd o'r ffantasol. Yn Ysbyty, ystod y gweithio yn ystod o'r ystod o'r bwyddol yn y 1820. Y gweithio ystod y gweithio yn y 1830, ac yw'r gweithio yn y 1880, o'r allan o'r ddaf. Yn yr allan o'r llyfr yn y gyfnoddol yw'r llwyddiadau, ac mae'r ddau i gynllunio'r hollfach o'r cyffredinol ar gyfer y cyfrifiadau yn y ddweud i ddau cyfrifiadau o'r cyfrifiadau, o'r ddau cyfrifiadau. Mae'r hollfach o'r cyfrifiadau, cesydd, ac yn siaradau ac'r meddwl mewn gwneud. Mae'r storiwn yn rhan oedd yn y 1920 ac 1930, bydd gyda'r ddaf i ddweud. Bydd y 1950 oes, mae'r gyfrifiadau ar ein llwyddiad, Heel felly anghen am Damaskus. It was sitting on a hill. The hill, however unable to sustain so much purity, began to sink. So the jugs moved from hill to hill. From the same necessity. Just as they had done in the 1820 version of the story. A different author presented the story in 1961. ac yn cymhwysir i'r llwyddon argymell argynnu ar gyfer y rhindu wahanol, ac yn cwrs yn ymdod i'r ddweud cyfaint yma ar gyfer y ddweud yma ar y gyfer Ysgrifes Ysgrifes Ysgrifes Ysgrifes ym Bostyn yn 1999. Felly oedd ychydig yn ddifen i'r rhindu yn eu cyfrifiad yng Nghyrchys Gwyddiwyr a'r eu cyfrifiad o'r gyfrifiad o'r gyfrifiad ymlwg is largely self-referential, and draws on no external evidence from the wilds of living culture for nearly two centuries. The story is frozen in time, or at least in print. In Boston in 1999, the juke myth was presented as an inversion history. Muslims as invaders appear as the heroes, and the natives as the villains. Furthermore, it's argued that it was probably in the interests of the early colonial British to nurture this myth, for it strengthened their own colonial interests as a president for invasion to convey prestige and liberation. So in this sense, the myth of the juke speaks of the assimilation of the values of the conquerors by natives. Invasion becomes liberation and prestige. Today, however, the origin myth of the juke, as told by the custodians of the temple, the myth in the wild, so to speak, has no resemblance whatsoever to the version I have just dutifully traced through the literature from India in the 1820s to Boston in 1999. Recently, I visited again the temple. The jukes had become this magnificent and haunting sight, more so than in the 1990s. They'd been painted, they'd been dressed in regal cloth turbans and bedecked with jewels and garlands. The horses were now a fine, luminous blue-white. They were surrounded by deities from the Hindu pantheon and symbols of om and swastika. Loud speakers issued words of devotion to Lord Shiva. As I listened to those words, I was told not how the juke emerged from the sea, not from the ocean, as I've been told in the 1990s, but how they'd fallen to earth from Lord Shiva's hair. The jukes then are no longer immigrants. They've been drawn firmly into the local traditions of Hinduism. Their story shows the hegemony of the written over what is not. For the literate writing is often seductive. Writing is easily reproduced as writing. What is not written is much harder to put in words. In the parable of the jukes, we also have the reverberation of colonial ways of seeing into the religious traditions of postcolonial India. History, we also see, is largely plagiarised. What historical truths to the texts I've mentioned actually represent, especially when they have such a clear genealogy. What other ideas and tales that have become writing have been propelled through time from that period primarily because they were written down. At one level we have laws, regulations, at another we have the separation and distinction of languages, we have nations, oceans, cultures. At another still we have ways of thinking, doing and believing. In another sense, the myth and its transformations point to the problematic relationship between the land and the sea, and how things from the sea may endlessly trouble or challenge those on land. This then is the parable of the jukes, and I'll be back later. So to turn around and go briefly in the opposite direction from the question of what of the sea could be assimilated into a land-based meaning, would be to ask perhaps what kinds of things, qualities, effects have and do radiate out from one coastline with some momentum or some desires enough that they reach another far away shore. Or put a little differently what if small ports in Gujarat and Iran and Somalia and places like Elman on the Somali coast, which is not even a port, a kind of beach, but that nevertheless acts as a port for an entire kind of district. And the boats that fly in these places would be rendered in a kind of painting as small suns, and suns is S-U-N-S, not my son. As radiating possibilities and capacities and needs and expressions in all directions, I'm trying to draw an image, a very different image from the one that we have been of transport and of exchange that we have become used to in a kind of networked era. A very different image from the more kind of technological metaphor of railway connections and airline routes and roadmaps of point-to-point connections that have their routes in a kind of military cybernetics of control of specific guns. So this, which is a catchy painting of an unknown era by an unknown person, but from the sailing age is, that's what you see, but my image would also be something that does not totally obscure the, as I think, kind of network diagrams tend to do, but not totally obscure the requirements and the presence of energies and the work required to keep up one's own little suns, so to speak. So I'm talking about a project by the way of something that happened in 2009. The quote we see here is from a Brecht essay, whose English title was, The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication. It's from 1932. And we are talking about radio here because in 2009 our first engagement with Sharjah Creek as artists took the shape of a publication and a series of radio transmissions from a boat on the creek where we were radiating through a kind of high-powered FM setup to an approximately five to seven kilometres radius, kind of creating a new kind of space, not a network space, but something else, a bit like a star. The radio is, the criticism of radio that Brecht does here I think was obviously right in a major sense that it was about, it was right in the sense that it talked about the democratising possibility of speaking as well as hearing. But I think was off in a couple of other senses and I want to, and this drove us in our deployment of it. One is that radio is exactly not a network of pipes as he says I think in the sixth sentence. And I don't know why he used that. I think maybe he had a kind of subconscious memory of Soviet style wired radio which was radio piped to your house, literally radio without radio, the possibility of radio. I'm not sure why he used that very strange metaphor because radio is exactly not like pipes. And the other thing perhaps is that the feedback loop, the way of listening, the necessity to listen and transmit in the same circuit we have found since then is perhaps not as liberating as we had thought earlier. And we were more interested in parasitism, in ideas of how you describe so-called networks as actually great leaps across domains, very unlikely leaps rather than the containment of a domain or the creation of a domain. So this is an image from 2009 from a rooftop near the museum where people could listen to the radio transmissions from the boat which is about a kilometre away. One of many listening posts, the book is there as well which was an account of every material entity that was shipped to Somalia from Sharjah port that year and everything that came back. But what's interesting is that there is a person pointing kind of impossibly to the location of the radio station. So these were two things that radio did for us in a way. It opened us a space that didn't exist previously. It cut across many boundaries, disregarding property, propriety divisions that existed obviously on the port and in what has now become the heritage area. And at the same time it was not exactly not a conversation. It was deeply one way. There was no sense in which anybody was talking back to a radio station like no one can talk back to the sun. So this directional nature or its possibility in the world of communication and the tyrannies of feedback and control systems that we are more familiar with now was a sense of possibility. And I think in a very different way and in a different world we are thinking through about this possibility with boats as the medium of our new work. So to rethink movement as a vector form, as not movements in general, and to be able to think of each transmission as unique and not expecting a reply. We are trying to re-describe what is usually described as communication, trade, exchange, explained away in these ways as actually something much more directed. Parasitic, sucking or dependent, supportive, outward facing. And many dimensions of this. And so this is a way in which I think we could sense better the movements directly to Somalia, right, where the food program refuses to go. Where the change in direction from something passing by the seas to something going to Somalia made a crucial difference or completely changed its relationship to piracy, for example. So the boats were directly passing through the pirates on a daily basis, which is one of the other things that attracted this to us. And this is also a sense of kind of orientation or redirecting our interests in which it's also the sense of kind of outwardness in which small boats are still made as family enterprises in small towns in Gujarat and in Iran and elsewhere, which are built kind of looking outward. And it's also the reason why, and it's kind of kind of orientation, which is the reason why the sailors that we worked with have much more often been to Dubai and Sharjah than to Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat. We know that mapping, cartography can be a form of translation or representation. Colour, shade, infill, crosshatching and symbols can denote things, people and other stuff. We can subvert conventions. We can ignore the invention of longitude and if you forgive the pun we can approach with latitude the weight we give to the points of the compass. We can calibrate scale against qualities other than size. Cartography is an epistemology or how we know things. The journeys of these ships pass through different kinds of cartography through the changing contours of history and relations between the world of fluidity and movement and another world, the same world actually, in which things are static and form a relatively fixed series of beacons of meaning. These ships might encourage the observer to think about what is generally known. But often I'm afraid what is generally known has already been written down, so it's therefore difficult to subvert. Where are we? We're not in Sharjah now, but we're in the seemingly unpronounceable Gulf of Cutch, a gash of brine-soaked tidal mud in the side of western India. It's a part of the modern state of Gujarat. It's the gulf in the centre of this map, part of the diamond of India which borders both Pakistan and the Indian Ocean. It's also home to the Jux. The shores of the Gulf are littered with the filthy industries of India's new prosperity. It is here, as elsewhere, that the spinning, forging, moulding, electoralising, smelting and melting of India's industrial manufacturing takes place. This is the dirty end of India's shining. In a mid all of this, men make wooden ships. The wooden ships that you can see on the opposite shore of the creek outside this venue. A goat is killed. At the point on the land reached by the highest tides, the keel is laid out in blocks. The most skilled craftsmen do not require diagrams or plans to build these ships. They have embodied the knowledge. They know what they are doing, mostly. They have refined their eyes for proportion and the relative strength of materials. Around them teams of men work at shaping the ribs of the vessel, while others drill and bolt, hull and decking, flanking. Most of this work is done by hand. For others, of course, building a ship may involve nothing more than being beaten and making 4,000 cups of tea. Later, the seams are corked and anti-fowl and oil is applied to where the timber remains naked. The vessel is floated and towed to Dubai, where it's fitted with motors and electronics. Along with the construction of the ship, crews are produced through labour, brutality and discipline. The sensible arrangement quips the sailor with an appreciation of the construction of the vessel on which his life depends at sea. Once complete, the ship and the crew migrate under diesel power, the sails have long gone. The folklore and indigenous knowledge of the sea, stars and sirens is formed by ship to shore radio, GPS and SMS. Later, their trade routes from Gujarat bring them into the creek at Sharjah on their way to other port. It's in vain that we attempt to say what we see. There can be no ship-shaped ship in my speech. It's also in vain that we attempt to show with images in a certain sense what we are saying. To places where the hulking handmade ships achieve their splendour are in our eyes and in the sensations of our body. Technology such as this has enchantment, it has powers of its own. What is built on the shoreline possesses qualities quite aside from robust water tightness because these ships carry magic. The vessels confront our ideas of craftsmanship and scale. They appear too big to be handmade and too old to be modern. They ask questions of our place in time and space, wooden ships and hand tools in the hyper-industrial and hyper-global space of the Gulf of Kutch, wooden ships and cheap cargoes in the Sharjah Creek. What assumptions of yours about progress, civilisation and the conceit of nations does the wooden ship call to question? I should be back once more. So how to face Somaliland for example in the sense of the encounter described by many, the Levinasian encounter that allows us to have a relationship to recognise the stranger. A clip, a few clips of continuing in the direction that I described earlier. Goats going to Bandarabas, cars, used cars going to Bandarabas. And daily goods arriving in Bossaso in Pantland which is northern Somalia. Goats going to Salala and returning to Somalia again except to a part of Somalia that calls itself independent, Somaliland and the port of Berber. Again carrying toothbrushes, dentist chairs, children's clothes, pasta, coffee, hospital equipment, you name it. It's the only supply chain of daily goods into Somalia by sea. Jackol carried from southern Somalia, Kismayo in this case, back to Sharjah. A reason for much regulation, anxiety attempts to control the export. Used tyres from Muscat to Karachi, a sailor from Kutch. And a boat returning completely empty to Jan Salaya in Kutch. How much time do we have left, Claudia? Five minutes. The work we did went this way because the face-to-face encounter is, as we all know, increasingly impossible. Or only one of many, many, many other kinds of encounters from ships approaching different legal regimes. From encounters between Iranian diesel and Chinese engines and wooden boats. Or encounters between sailors and new immigration laws. Or boats and no laws at all, as is sometimes the case in Somalia. So in order to start to enter this world, we realized that one would have to pass through or approach since we have no sense organs as artists somehow to sense diesel directly. We have to invent forms of understanding what it means and what effects it could have. We have to pass through a range of mediators. And in this case, the mediators were sailors and a kind of medium of self-expression that they had started to in the last five years develop. And the film that you can see every night at 8.30pm was inspired by this. And these were videos taken on a cell phone, often or on small cameras, recording daily events, landings, port scenes and things back home. When the sailors would return in the monsoons. So the sailor as a kind of agent and the boat as a kind of agent that is not consumed, that is not eaten in the relationship of consumption that connects many of these places. And his kind of shelter or carrier of it became our medium as well. And a funny, obviously, part of this is that sailors professional ethic of a sailor is to not eat their cargo, right? I mean that would work. So there's a kind of relationship, an indirect relationship to the trade and to the kinds of consumption that we are describing that we had to enter in order to begin to describe what was happening. And what we saw in those videos which inspired the film showed us how every trip became its own kind of distinct entity. And in that sense what we imagined was that every boat among the hundreds and perhaps thousands of boats, at least a thousand from Gujarat was changing in its own way the space we call the Indian Ocean. This is the final leg, we're perhaps slightly behind our schedule. We have the juxts, we have radio waves, we have carpenters who have not written anything down, we have churning journeys into ports. In this story we have the view from the other boat, not the NATO patrol vessel, not CNN, not the moorings of the nation state or the straightforward march of progress. Instead we have a variety of messages conveyed by a somewhat creaky medium. However, from the shores of the western Indian Ocean there is a myopia towards life and the churning ships, the ones we've just heard and seen. Whatever these ships represent it is not part of the post-colonial heritage impulse found in many nation states in the region. In this impulse there is a yearning for the Latin rig for extinct vessel types and for a glorious and more innocent past that has given way to bad modern things. We want to end by looking at the work of one pioneering nostalgic whose endeavours preempt a broader nostalgic impulse in the littoral countries of the western Indian Ocean. We shall call him Mr F, a curator of sorts rather like the Austrian farmer we heard about yesterday. Today Mr F and his collaborators who sailed and prospered in the good old days of empire shout that thou is dead as their mansions slowly fade. Along a wharf in the gulf of catch, colonnades of port buildings mark authoritative and regular intervals along the shore, clean vertical lines, architectural perfection, circles on top of golden rectangles, classical proportions, which for the sailor must have appeared striking after a voyage amid horizontal horizons. Here they are. These buildings housed passengers resting on their journey between unpronounceable catch and elsewhere. In time the passengers stopped coming but the buildings remained. What repeated earthquakes had not managed to break nostalgia for the past has. Mr F got there before UNESCO. With the application of concrete and iron, one of the rest houses has been reorientated to represent a ship underway. In the absence of a real ship, Mr F has turned his building into a ship. And this is happening all around the western Indian Ocean, often on a much grander scale. Now, from the rooftop terrace, a man can imagine himself on the bridge of a ship looking down over a cargo hold, beyond the peak of the stern and out across the waves of the immediate future. Only this ship is on land, not on water. The ship, like the juxts, has moved from land to sea as power has been reoriented. Inside the ship on land, a small group of men make model ships from pieces of wood. Here they are. They lovingly recreate the shape and form of vessels no longer found in the waters of the Indian Ocean, ships within ships. Alongside their miniature productions is a concern with preserving the past through tales of adventure and maritime bravery. Stark in the repetition of a small number of stories and repeatedly remodelling the curbs of a hull, nostalgia has become the impossible desire for its own absence. The nostalgic seeks a quieter self and therefore, in a sense, is searching for a time when nostalgia was itself absent. The nostalgic attempts to place themselves in a time when the burden of hindsight was not so heavy, when there was no awareness of what it was that they would later yearn for. Nostalgia is generally thought to emerge at the critical juncture of historical loss and the dissipation of moral certainties in changing and aging worlds. In this case, a new Muslim mercantile diaspora has risen to dominate the industry of shipping. The Hindu captain of the ships within ships on land structure is steering a course across the estuary towards the bold green and white homes of new Muslim seafarers. Perhaps he imagines he'll be able to run them down. In his path at sixes and sevens lie the new fleet of motorised sailing vessels. Here they are. The mud is full of ship life. Why should nostalgia for the past flourish when there are so many ships in the present? The myopia of the nostalgic towards this motorised sailing vessel is striking. The death of the dow is mourned by Mr F's modest maritime museum, while at the same time a fleet of wooden vessels prepare for the sailing season in full view of his funeral entourage. And we both thank you for your time and patience.