This drawing is the unmaking of a book and chart into a drawn tapestry of sites and geographies - a practice of pattern-making as recounting and imagining site, place and bodies.

The practice of redrawing is an engagement with the archival imaginary, a means of reorienting these historical drawings as translated from word to line, which constructed oceanic terrains as small and strategic, as available for dispossession, even as they annotate the presence of settlements, conflict and resistance.

The silk, cotton and linen threads stitch together and map out the sites of the Watery Stories. Watery Drawings is a set re-drawing based on archival maps, which trace indexical points along the coast as drawn in the 18th - 19th century, from the 1st century Periplus of the Erythraean Sea to 18th and 19th Century admiralty charts, and contemporary satellite imagery. Index of Edges is curated and designed by Huda Tayob for the Biennale Architettura 2023, within Dangerous Liaisons - curated by Lesley Naa Norle Lokko, The Laboratory of the Future. This is work towards a relational, situated, and material axis where precarity and possibility meet at the shore where global empires coincide with fishing villages and where beyond danger, the coast is a site of joy and sustenance.

This index traces the accumulation of embodied detritus of layered pasts through an excess of specificities which collates stories of site and temporality, archival and present. Tracing indexical points along the coast from the 1st C Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and 18th C Dalrymple’s Nautical charts, to contemporary coastal data and continued ways of living with watery intimacies, is an attempt to recognise the ebb and flow of edge conditions, despite violence and catastrophe. In the Index of Edges, sites and stories of deep and near futures are drawn into adjacency. This project gathers sites, stories and approaches which collectively point to coastal pasts and futures through joyful, dangerous, abundant and difficult encounters.Īn index is not a map - rather than delineating boundaries it gathers people, repositions histories and draws out significance. Index of Edges draws on the vast global worlds of encounter along east African coastal cities to draw deep historical knowledge of living with and along seas.