2024/12/05 by Dylan McGarry, Cleo Droomer · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Global Maritime and Colonial Histories #South African History and Culture
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/17524032.2024.2433073
openalex publication_date 2024/12/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
This paper engages in a dialogical meaning ∞ making between South African Story-tailor Cleo Droomer and sociologist/artist Dylan McGarry, exploring Droomer's creation of “floatation devices” or “Life(Jackets).” Using a “pedagogy of echolocation” that surfaces the living archival memory of Droomer's artworks, the authors navigate the haunted entanglements implicit with our relationships with the ocean. Their tactile research, rooted in personal and intergenerational trauma, utilizes heirloom fabrics to craft social wearable sculptures. These pieces facilitate a dialogue with his ancestors, from the apartheid-induced removal of his grandparents from the ocean to his enslaved forebears. Droomer's work highlights the ocean's role in the transatlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades, underscoring the need for recognizing it as a site of remembrance and intangible heritage. This contrasts with the acknowledgment of other sites of human suffering, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging the ocean's historical significance.KEY POLICY HIGHLIGHTSOur oceans are haunted in South Africa by complex exclusions, violence’s and sunken histories, and require re-configured “flotation devices” to surface them.The rush for Oil and Gas and other extractive rapid Blue Economy activities are not just violently excluding marginalized communities, they erase the necropolitics of our ocean.Art-making as a form of thinking, theorizing and re-membering/re-configuring our histories can offer ways to surface and work with our ocean heritage with the context of Blue Economy expansion.Global Bodies like the International Sea-bed Authority (ISA) and UNESCO overlook the seabed and ocean as sites of human suffering and cultural history, and should consider Droomer’s sculptural policy briefs, i.e. (Life)Jackets.Social Sculpture and “story-tailoring” offers ongoing living archives or “an-archives” to support meaningful approaches to practicing Ubuntu and re-figuring our relational ontologies with the ocean.Mending both as a practice, and as a figurative theory is an embodied phronesis for decolonial justice, or “love-language.”