Contribution short abstract:

Following mollusc-related practices via video, sound, ethnography, creative non-fiction, photography and drawing, this lecture performance inquires and sensuously evokes multispecies conviviality in the Sine-Saloum Delta, Senegal and critically reflects multimodality in more-than-human research.

Contribution long abstract:

In this lecture performance, I will take the audience on a patchy voyage through a day in and beyond the Sine-Saloum Delta in Senegal. I draw on my multimodal dissertation research on human-mollusc-spirit relations where I inquire the amphibious work of female mollusc seeking and the ways molluscs and their shells are engaged for a range of other practices, such as for nourishment and trade, infrastructuring, governance, or spirituality.

We will start by immersing into a video scene of mollusc seeking that employs collectively produced 'haptic cinema' and amphibious, more-than-human perspectives. It seeks to both evoke a speculative multispecies sensuality and a critical reflection on the constructiveness of mediation. I tie on to this with a creative non-fiction narration about diasporic belonging conveyed by the taste of molluscs from back home. Then I will read an ethnographic account accompanied by a soundscape that transport shell-infrastructuring in the face of sea level rise. Consequently, we move towards an experimental catalogue with glow-in-the-dark ink and photography. Created with artist-curators, it inquires the in/visibility of mollusc seeking and infrastructuring and invites for an interactive transgression of image-text conventions. Finally we will move towards a creative non-fiction narration on a deltaic encounter between humans, manatees, molluscs and spirits, combined with excerpts from a comic in development with the Senegalese visual artist Pamplumus. This brings together text with drawings and photos and mobilises the productive friction between the fictional and the documentary for postcolonial reflexivity and the imagination of deltaic futures marked by multispecies conviviality.