To The Hunted, May You Continue To Be Their Worst Nightmare is the third intervention relating to an interpretation of the myth of Many-Headed Hydra - a subchapter of White’s thesis titled “Shipwreck(ed)”. Rooted in abolition and hydrarchy (from below), the Shipwreck(ed) questions the possibility of true emancipation whilst being contained by the Ship (the state, the Nation-State, the Capitalocene, the Human) and therefore seeks a Black Future through the obliteration of the Ship through its defeat at sea. The first iteration of this series of interventions was ‘Hydra Decapita’ at VEDA Florence (IT) (2021-2) followed by ‘Cinders of the Wreck’ at Triangle - Astérides (FR) (2022).
Deriving from Linebaugh and Rediker’s (2000) interpretation of the myth of the Lernean Hydra’s regenerative heads as the pirates, runaway slaves, and outcasts who threatened capitalism at its birth, this subchapter of White’s thesis speculates the inverse by confining the State to the beast’s singular body with regenerative, but destructible heads. Following the myth, White initially positions the Shipwreck(ed) forms as victors in ‘Hydra Decapita’ after severing the heads of the State leads to a partial escape, but this success is short-lived, with ‘Cinders of the Wreck’ portraying a pessimistic cyclical return to their detainment in the hull of the Ship and questioning whether a system that is repeatedly burnt down can ever truly be slain.
To The Hunted, May You Continue To Be Their Worst Nightmare portrays five fluid-like harpoons struggling under the persistence of the sargassum-like forms in a battle-like sequence, almost bursting from the confines of the booth. Instead of surrendering to an eternity of defeat, these amalgamations of raffia, sisal and kaolin clay climb, suffocate and strangle their predators regaining hope of a sinister victory and the possibility of a Black future. The sargassum masses are incomplete and unstable, shedding and dissipating across the booth as unmappable and intangible akin to other uncategorisable life-forms such as seemingly extinct or unrecognisable species of whales and dolphins (Pauline Gumbs 2020) or deep sea creatures that defy the laws of the anthropocene.