Slippery Intimacies — naakita f.k.

Slippery Intimacies is a multi-screen video essay that considers the interrelations of mining in the Deep-Sea and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The work is the culmination of two and a half years of research into the colonial and extractive histories that have kept the Congo destabilized in order to fuel every industrial revolution since rubber, and the ways that these same histories have enabled the Deep-Sea to emerge as a new frontier for extraction.

Using intertitles, recorded performance, found footage, 16mm cameraless experiments, diegetic and non-diegetic sound, the video essay examines the policies, events, power structures and geological kinships that connect the two sites. Created for three channel playback, the video essay’s images and texts split and drift across the screens, creating new dialogues and associations that produce new forms of knowledge of the two sites rarely discussed in relation. The installation expands a constellation across time and place to make visible the seemingly antithetical but slippery intimacies of capitalism.