Lead researchers:
Amandine Vabre Chau
Lemeeze Davids
6414.36 nautical miles begins with a friendship between two curators across distance. First held in the form of calls between Cape Town and Hong Kong, the project unfolds as a Course of Enquiry shaped by coordinates that are both intimate and socio-historical.
This line between these two cities draws attention to their shared inheritances of imperialism, asking what persists in the ecological, cultural and economic. It is less an attempt at an answer than a mode of sensing: how the urban and natural environment carries traces of the past while conditioning the present, and setting the terms for what is yet to come.
As Lemeeze Davids (Cape Town) and Amandine Vabre Chau (Hong Kong) work together, their research dialogue turns towards form. 6414.36 nautical miles becomes an articulation of a curatorial process, understanding how ideas take shape across time zones, and how research can be held in correspondence. The expression remains deliberately indeterminate, attending to the unfolding of questions as much as to their possible futures. Gradually extending into forms of writing, shared discussion and presentation, each iteration adds to an ongoing process of curatorial exchange.
A4’s Course of Enquiry invites curators to develop a six-month programme centred on ‘making public’ their modes of investigation.
Course of Enquiry offers insight into research as process, with all the attendant segues and obstacles necessary to the curatorial form. Curators’ engagements with their guiding questions are observed and documented through a programme that considers the journey of ideas, from experimentation to expression. Where are the meanderings, the dead-ends, the points at which thoughts coalesce? How might this unfolding be made apparent? In the spirit of ‘elastic rigour’ (to use Carlo Ginzberg’s term), the accompanying translations of curatorial process – be they aural, written, visual or tactile – are guided by the individual enquiries, their outcomes anticipated but as yet unknown.
The resulting research and its traces are shared with the public in a series of events, texts and multimedia offerings.
A dialogue in three parts between Lemeeze Davids and Amandine Chau in which the researchers begin plotting coordinates between Hong Kong and Cape Town en route towards their shared project 6414.36 nautical miles.