OPERATION SUNKEN SEA

2018 - ongoing
performance, multi-media installation

Dictators and Flowers, Visual Research

Operation Sunken Sea: Visual Research, Flower Bouquets, 2020

RELATED TEXTS

https://we-make-money-not-art.com/operation-sunken-sea

Furtado, Will. “Understanding the Contemporary Condition via Historical Megalomania”. Contemporary And, 8 Jan. 2020, https://www.contemporaryand.com/magazines/understanding-the-contemporary-condition-via-historical-megalomania/?fbclid=IwAR38POkMiFqLtqp-a6Tov3pmN5a14eZVJyTEb-uab5RHG7T2DwQYJ-BrLrA.

Senova, Basak (essay). “Flipping the History: A Collection of Notes and Quote Responses on Heba Amin’s Project Operation Sunken Sea”. di’van: A Journal of Accounts. Art | Culture | Theory. No 4, p. 54-62.

Njami, Simon (essay). “Chimera”. Kunstpreis Böttcherstraße Prize Bremen 2018,exhibition catalogue, 2018.

Operation Sunken Sea is an ongoing speculative, research-driven project borrowing the visual and rhetorical language of authoritarian regimes. The project exposes the political and ecological violence embedded within techno-utopian visions. Drawing on early twentieth-century European proposals to drain the Mediterranean and merge Africa and Europe into a single supercontinent, Amin revisits these geoengineering fantasies, such as the Atlantropa project, both as historical reference and as a site of disruption. Through acts of critical inversion, she reimagines these proposals from an Afro-Arab perspective, shifting the focus of power and authorship. This intervention extends into the realm of representation itself, most explicitly in works such as The Master’s Tools I—a restaging of a studio portrait of the architect behind the Atlantropa project—in which Amin replaces Herman Sörgel as the central protagonist. Across the project, the Mediterranean appears less as a stable body of water, but a geopolitical juncture to be drained, displaced and endlessly rewritten. By unsettling established cartographies, the work opens a space to question who holds the power to imagine, design, and claim the future and at what cost.

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