Deep in the eye of the belly screening

This evening screening of Sam Williams’ Deep in The Eye and The Belly (Chapter 1) was followed by a panel discussion with the artist alongside art historian Dr Pandora Syperek, and Principal Curator of Mammals at the Natural History Museum, Richard Sabin.

Response to Sam Williams, Deep in the Eye and the Belly 
Pandora Syperek

This is an annotated transcription of my response to Sam Williams’s four-part video series Deep in the Eye and the Belly (2023), drawing on my research to respond to a series of themes I identify in the work

On the Necro-Aesthetics of Natural History
The first instalment of Sam Williams’s multi-chaptered moving image work Deep in the Eye and the Belly engages in the dialogue between the destructive and exploitative treatment of nonhuman animals for natural history display (specifically, whales) and the knowledge of the natural world that has resulted from this killing.

Although in the material culture of the natural history museum we find ample evidence for a Victorian necro-aesthetics, to limit our understanding to this would be simplistic. Whilst natural science and industry were increasingly distinguished from one another, they were mutually informative in the nineteenth century. And yet a third term – art – was also intricately linked to both natural history and industry, science and art having not yet been definitively divided into the two cultures C.P. Snow identified in the mid 20th century.

My research has led me from the Natural History Museum, London, where I was looking at the aesthetics of the displays, primarily at the time of its foundation in 1881, and specifically in relation to gender, to across the road at the V&A, where I am now researching the museum’s historical Collection of Animal Products. I have discovered that although ostensibly kept separate from natural history, organised according to ‘substance’ (textiles, pigments and dyes, perfume, etc.) rather than by species, the collection was nevertheless organised to emulate an ecosystem. This tendency is illustrated in a print from Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’s mid-nineteenth-century series Graphic Illustrations of Animals, / Shewing Their Utility To Man, In Their Services During Life And Uses After Death, in which the whale’s body is deconstructed like a catalogue of parts. And yet even here in the Victorian paradigm of animal-as-product, the capitalistic ‘human desire to own things’ alluded to by Sam’s narrator, is not black and white, nor is its antidote, as demonstrated by the complexities of the international moratorium on whaling in the 20th century. The Inuit of Canada, whose traditional lifestyle spanning back several thousand years is dependent on whaling, used all of the whale, eating skin, blubber, flesh and internal organs, fashioning baleen and bones into buildings, furniture, tools and decorative items and harvesting oil to provide heat and light. The naturalised ecosystem represented by Hawkins entirely overlooks the massive impact commercial whaling had on both cetacean populations and such communities.

(Queer) Rebirth and Watery Gestations
Hermaphrodite, although no longer an acceptable term for humans, is still in current use in zoology to connote an organism that has both male and female reproductive organs, structures or tissue. Despite transphobes’ customary reliance on biology as scripture, they balk at the comparison with other species, commonly deploying a dog whistle along the likes of: just because clownfish can change their sex doesn’t mean humans can. This denotes a fundamental misunderstanding of queer theory, which has also been deliberately misconstrued by the right and its conspiracy theorists, to provide evidence of the corruption of the left. The literalist reading of queer theory renders its authors paedophile apologists, or paedophiles full stop (because you don’t find any of those on the right) just as the literalist reading of marine biology assumes that a close genealogical link is required to learn from or relate to other species, when it is the common historical classifications that have been applied and the resulting constructions that, when interrogated, point towards other ways of thinking about sex and gender. The point is that evolution is not a law, but is by its nature adaptive, fluid and without end – that Darwin’s original evolutionary model was coral attests to this.

Rather than look to concrete examples of same-sex desire or sexual shape shifting in the animal world – although there are many – the most generative theory focuses on how our interpretation of various gender configurations in nature (including in plants) has shaped attitudes to human gender and sexuality and vice versa. Another example that comes up in my research is: just because many marine invertebrates reproduce through hermaphroditic and asexual means, it doesn’t mean humans are able to multiply by budding, fission, and fragmentation. And yet that didn’t stop Victorian visitors to the Natural History Museum’s Coral Gallery from wildly imagining and comparing such possibilities to their own binary, heteronormative and nuclear structures, creating a schism from the normative understandings of the period that we continue to think with today.

The Voice of the Animal and Interspecies Communication
At the beginning of Chapter 1 of Deep in the Eye and the Belly, I thought the narrator was a whale. Even upon seeing the actor (Nando Messias), who is revealed in Chapter 2, I wasn’t completely convinced that they were not a whale, reclining (perhaps beached) and resplendent, ornamented and oracular. This human-animal confusion made me think of the writer Henry Hoke’s Open Throat, a novel told from the perspective of P-22, a real-life cougar (puma or mountain lion, depending on where you’re from) who stalked Los Angeles (known to the protagonist as ‘Ellay’) for over a decade, becoming an embodiment of American dreams and fears. In the book, P-22 is queer, starving and deeply sensitive to human dramas and their entanglements with the environment; they have such a convincing narrative voice that one reviewer proclaimed ‘I am not convinced Henry Hoke isn't a mountain lion.’

Like birds, although inhabiting drastically different lifeworlds, cetaceans are highly relatable to humans, and endlessly anthropomorphizable, living as they do in family units, exhibiting distinct cultures based on family ties and geographies, and audibly communicative.

Colonial Relocation and Climate-Induced Adaptation, or ‘Becoming Scaley’
Despite the real threats increasingly posed by the oceans due to global heating and other factors of anthropogenic ecological devastation, the fear of the sea has become an unpopular topic. Perhaps this is a side effect of the rejection of the sea’s traditional associations with the sublime, and a Kantian aesthetics of detachment. A more relational lens is deemed essential to preserving the oceans and ocean life. Thalassophobia is passé. Thalassophilia is de rigueur.

And yet is there not a neo-colonial undercurrent within such so-called ‘critical’ ocean studies’ warm embrace of the sea and presumed sense of oneness with it? The ocean is not always hospitable to humans, as the Transatlantic slave trade and other forced migrations have shown. In urban centres, people of colour are dramatically more likely to be unable to swim. Across state schools in London, many children have never visited the seaside. As made stark in the coinciding tragedies of the imploded Titan submersible and resulting death of five and the drowning of approximately five hundred people aboard a migrant ship this past June, the sea does not offer equal access, nor are lives lost to it given equal value.

Deep in the Eye and the Belly, Chapter 4 speculatively envisions not only a forced relocation due to anthropogenic climate change but also the ensuing adaptation of the community. It is reminiscent of people being relocated here within the UK recently, due to flooding and coastal erosion, but also colonial relocations, such as that of the Inuit by the Canadian government (see Isuma for the Canada Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale) or the eviction of the Chagossians by the British government upon declaration of the Chagos Archipelago as a Marine Protected Area (MPA).

The adaptation envisioned in Sam’s film as growing gills and fins, ‘becoming scaley’ as one performer imagines with a mixture of acceptance and horror, harks back to Drexciya, the 1990s Detroit techno duo that imagined a Black Atlantis inhabited by the descendants of drowned enslaved people. Here the actor grapples with the u/dystopia of a holiday that isn’t really a holiday. In this way, as in the 2nd and 5th chapters, in which the actors speak of them and us, going up and going down, there is a sense of an undercommons, as in Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s formulation of a community forged by force.

Different Models of the Body as World
The ‘body that is also a world’ (ch. 2) is multiple, not singular. It speaks to the micro/macro. All bodies are worlds, including dead bodies (as in the whale fall), and therefore there are as many worlds as there are bodies.

Oceanic Histories and Futures, Geological and Cultural
‘The past is permanently over’ (ch. 4). This statement and the surrounding sentiments, which unfold as much in bodily movement as in dialogue, brings up questions of historicity and the cyclical nature of time, both geological and cultural. As such it evokes Derek Walcott’s 1978 poem The Sea is History, which pictures the bones of drowned enslaved people soldered to coral, and cowrie beads returned to the sea as manacles, merging the horrors of slavery with deep time, thereby becoming a poem for the Anthropocene. An exploration of the utter inextricability of the one from the other is the contribution such work – Walcott’s poem; Anthropocene thinking, including its contestations; and Sam’s series – can make.