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(2020) 20:20 film-essay by: Sami Hammana edited by: Ioana Tomici sound by: Lendl Barcelos voice by: Deca Mukhtar-Tawheed typeface by: Simone Browne colour by: Seecum Cheung trailer The recurring aim: making sense of that which can’t be sensed. Coming across the following image: workers effectively walking transoceanic distances in the act of manually coiling undersea-cables inside of steel ship-hulls. In relation to the cartographic images of undersea cables, tacitly laying on the ocean’s floor following the similar oceanic navigational routes as 16th and 17th century colonial wooden ships, the recurring aim is recapitulated. These are a few examples of images that are engaged with in the film essay ~~~~, with the aim to aesthetically elucidate the complicity of contemporary maritime technology with colonial violence. Consisting out of four acts,(~)engaging with that which is above the water surface, (~~) establishing the limits of sensing large-scale systems, or what is dubbed ‘the phenomenal threshold of perception’, and (~~~), ‘the interscalar ship’, or attempting to aesthetically annotate the importance of being aware and able to travel between multiple and differing scales. Concluding with (~~~~), which aims to read and reenact the hidden movements of the human-labour involved. Through this process, ~~~~ obsessively observes the image-debris found in the aphotic corners of maritime spaces. Do lightless oceanic zones conceal colonial complicity? Written on the curved wall of the lightless cable-laying vessel’s hull: “Nabil Sharif”, “Mohammed Qasim”, “iron like lion in zion”...