The question of representing slavery, and more specifically the transbording of millions of children, men, and women throughout the Atlantic slave trade, lies at the heart of this collaborative project. It echoes with a movement initiated by African-American writer Toni Morrison, whose influence can also be found in the work of Martinican author Édouard Glissant and African-American writer Saidiya Hartman.

Indeed, as she attempts to reconstruct the lives and deaths of two young women who perished during a slave transport, Hartman reflects on the necessity of writing — or choreographing, performing, and filming — "a history of violence" and the possibility of "revisiting scenes of subjection without reproducing the grammar of violence". To achieve this, she proposes a method of writing she calls "critical fabulation", a "double gesture" that "reckons with the limits of the archives to write a history of the captives" while simultaneously reconstructing "the impossibility of precisely representing the lives of those captives through narrative processes".

This method, this double gesture of reconstruction and fabulation, deeply resonates with our desire to extend past choreographic and cinematic experiences, intertwining them with biographical, intimate, and collective histories. We believe in the ability of these choreographic and cinematic forms to summon histories as much as they challenge the straitjacket of conventions that render them inaudible.

The Sea is History is a choreographic and cinematic answer to the absence of archives from the hold of ships during the transbording of enslaved people from Africa to the Americas. As Toni Morrison emphasizes, no songs or stories have been passed down from this space. What remains are account books, diagrams mapping the layout of the hold, the writings of shipowners, and a few accounts of mutinies, but nothing that conveys the lived experience of this foundational space for Afro-Caribbean identity, as told by those who survived it.

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc and Betty Tchomanga February 2024