Mariama Diagne

Modern Fish-Tales. Poetics and logics in aquatic nightscapes

Mariama Diagne’s project Modern Fish-Tales explores Within the research group, Modern Fish-Tales in fluid environments and their ambivalent orders of spatiality, corporeality, and temporality. At the core of Diagne’s transmodern and transcultural MerFolk research are historical and contemporary representations, practices, and modes of agency of hybrid figures inhabiting waterscapes at night or in darkness, as expressed across dance, performance, film, literature, music, and the visual arts. According to Diagne’s observations, aquatic nightscapes and dreamscapes poetically convey milieus governed by their own intrinsic logics, marked by a provocative moment of tipping or inversion. MerFolk do not walk (gehen); rather, they move by swimming, sinking, rising, and traversing vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. These modes of movement, which exceed the confines of a rectilinear coordinate system, elude the linear progression of thought (steppingstone) as a way of explaining (walking through) environments, just as they evade progress (stepping ahead) as the driving force of modernity and limping as its misstep. Inspired by Édouard Glissant’s notion of a “right to opacity,” Diagne is particularly interested in those zones of indeterminacy that unsettle, dissolve, or reorganize notions of normativity grounded in terrestrial boundaries. Within the research group, Modern Fish-Tales and its figure of thought functions as an interface project situated at the intersection of dance and theatre studies, media studies, cultural approaches to myth, and transmodernity research, while also engaging with intersectional and posthuman perspectives.

contact: m.diagne@lmu.de