The footage used in Dissolution (I Know Nothing) composes a form of seascape, assembling fragmented connections through material and time from Congo, Rwanda, and Nigeria through the Indian Ocean on a containership to China. Gunpowder, dissolved minerals, blinking LEDs, personal and colonial histories. All that is solid melts into flow.

I Know Nothing

We are not moving things on the water, we are moving their parts, a galaxy of components. We slide particles on the sea, we are particles sliding on the sea. Small pools of turquoise and dusty pink liquids, suspended molecules of remote minerals glide on a sea of steel. From the acids, I collect invisible pieces from the mine, a geography of systems, desire, magic and destruction. All that is solid melts into flow.

At the New Don Franc Hotel in Guangzhou where African exporters buy, pack, and ship Chinese products and parts, there are public scales in the corridors, a tape shop near the reception, boxes piled on every floor. The dusty rooms sit atop a mall selling generators, solar panels, LED strips, flat screen televisions. All day and all night the soundscape of packing tape is crackling around cardboard boxes being prepared to be stacked into steel containers.

At sea the war on entropy never ends, the ship is continuously and constantly repainted in patches of grey, black, and yellow. A choreography of maintenance, a durational performance forever incomplete.

Oil covers all surfaces. Oil slides down my stomach, black grease rubs on everything I touch. The dolphins play in the vessel’s wave at dusk, in 50,000 years, their fossilised bones will be buried in the depth, about to be turned to oil. In the Captain’s office, I sit through a slideshow of black and white photos of his grandfather in Odessa standing in the mouth of a dead whale. Oil everywhere.

I have a fever. It is our third day visiting factories in Liuyang in search of a gold explosion. In green rural settings, we travel through days of product tests; rounder, sparklier, taller, faster, burning particles of earth and gunpowder.

In the mining town of Numbi, the wooden huts are covered in a blanket of dust. The mobile phone charging shop flickers in blue and red LEDs; the heartbeat of a twentyfirst century gold rush.

—Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, 2016