A Re-Encountering of the Ancestral Indian Ocean

Abstract

Vasco da Gama set foot on Ilha de Moçambique and Calicut (present day Kozhikode) in March and May 1498. Da Gama’s arrival on both these coastal lands on the Indian Ocean opened the floodgates to centuries of colonial exploitation, not only by the Portuguese but also by the Spanish, British and other European empires that followed. The footsteps taken in 1498 set the course of a new imperialist era that would span the entire globe. The stories we tell have a profound effect in directing the course of history as an art of collective memory. But who has the power to shape the narratives we tell and retell, and how might erased histories help us reencounter a new sense of the future? This article explores decolonial futures as an unravelling of the past that leads us towards a different shared story. Two transboundary explorations take place to recount the past, present and speculative future of two coastal places linked by Da Gama’s arrival in 1498. The authors of this paper explore how one might translate filmmaking approaches to policy design related to the creative and cultural industries. Both authors are queer immigrants from the Indian Ocean, living in Western Europe and recounting stories from the places they are from: transformed by the arrival of Vasco da Gama, their ancestors and speculative imaginings of their own future as ancestors to come. Their personal stories of identity, culture and family history unearth a revolutionary re-encounter with coloniality through the singular story. This research project acts as a design provocation testing the boundaries of decolonial methodologies. ‘Körperkino’ - a collaborative storytelling practice - acts as a basis for blending film, archival materials and interactive games to dismantle hierarchies in the re-encounter with colonial history. Later, reflections on design practice take insights derived from ‘Körperkino’ to reimagine an alternative space for cultural policies on the Iberian peninsula. The result is a speculative project captured as an article, and delivered as dialogues where the reader is taken back in time and towards the far future: from da Gama’s encounter with the African and Indian coastline to the re-emergence of stories from a tropical paradise that is still unknown (from the Indian Ocean’s ancestral future).