Underwater Women

Week 28 Notes

Women float through this programme gathering food, harvesting the ocean, repairing ships, dancing or performing as mermaids.

Ethno-historians propose that women free divers may have travelled with the currents from continental Asia to southern Japan. The descendants of one of two groups that might have been carried north by a typhoon and shipwrecked on the Noto Peninsula in the Sea of Japan, are said to be today’s Hegura Island Ama divers.

Monira Al Qadiri, a Kuwaiti artist based in Berlin, tells us about the main industry of Kuwait before the discovery of oil: pearl diving. In 2000, thousands of years after the first pearl was found, the government closed the oyster pearl market because of the decrease in demand, one of the factors being the Japanese invention of cultured pearls.

Originally a male profession, the diving tradition in Jeju province, Korea, dates back to 434 A.D. However, since the 18th century, female divers, the haenyeo, outnumber male divers. They harvest sea food such as molluscs and seaweed from the ocean. The hard working Indian fisherwomen from Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu, also gather seaweed which is used in pharmaceutical and cosmetic products.

On the Sardinian coast Chiara Vigo continues the thousand year old tradition of spinning sea silk or byssus, a thread that molluscs use to attach themselves to rocks or the seabed, ‘…a fabric that light turns to gold…’ That could easily be a fairy tale, one related to Weeki Wachee, a location in Florida, founded in 1966 to promote the local mermaid attraction. The town has fewer than 15 residents. One of the mermaids is Barbara Wynns, who answers the question: ‘Are mermaids real?’, in a film by Heroine Katy Grannan. The women doing underwater construction and repair work regard it as empowering and challenging and are followed by a glimpse into the imaginary daily life of an underwater woman set to the music of the US-American alternative rock band They Might Be Giants.

Julie Gautier, a French free diver, dancer and filmmaker born in La Réunion, brings the programme full circle with the Making of Ama, an underwater dance film that refers to the Japanese free divers and was first performed for International Women’s Day in 2018.