A contribution from Rebecca Ryall, FEELed Lab Associate Researcher for Littoral Listening, recounting the session she led in May 2023.
Five participants, five countries, four faces and one in shadow.
What makes for a shadow?
A shadow is a shadow, until it isn’t.
Poetry from the shadow people – two erased, one denied and the other cancelled.
Angry black men, painted and armed, chanting their sovereignty. Shadow people asserting their place, the shadow place of ceremony and connection, still alive, still sacred, despite its rape.
Beautiful words, constructed in carceral shadows; a love poem to a place, itself at once a shadow and a yearning.
Words about ‘nothing’, that is really something, or all things?
Settler-colonialism, extractivism and complicity.
Refusal of safe harbour, of respite; a haven withheld.
What might happen if we refuse the refusal?
Globalisation and movement across borders, extending the reach of the shadow.
The shadow of neo-liberalism looming large, extending across the seas to cast shade on the sacred places of others.
Shadow places, shadow people.
‘How to be a good predator?’*
And what of protection?
Protection of what and for whom?
Mistletoe reaches across oceans to connect us.
Mistletoe is mistletoe, until it isn’t.
‘what touches you is what you touch’
What is my response-ability in this touching?
*this is a question asked by oceans researcher Sue Reid
The FEELed lab 