Hydra Decapita
2010
Video, 00:31:00.
Materials: HD video, colour, stereo
Collection: Courtesy of The Otolith Group and LUX, London .
The film Hydra Decapita, 2010, is located within the domain of Drexciya, the Detroit techno duo who imagined a sub-aquatic fictional nation of Drexciya in the Atlantic, populated by the unborn children of pregnant women thrown overboard during the ‘Middle Passage’ journey of slave ships. Hydra Decapita depicts the dark ocean, overlaid with electronic music and vocals sung by Sagar. This ‘liquidity’ possesses a duality, evoking both the historic trade in humans across the oceans, as well as the abstraction of the present-day system of financial capital. Hydra Decapita contemplates the complex relations between power, death, language, global capitalism and abstraction, prompting us to imagine alternative possibilities for societies.