Mooring, Waters, From Far Away
Frida Jiaying Chen
In residence from September 3rd to November 1st 2025
At Ada X
Mooring, Waters, From Far Away is a mixed-media installation interweaving geocoding, mapping, and meteorology. It traces the ocean’s dual quality—as a reservoir of cultural memory for coastal inhabitants, and as a colonial pathway for imperial powers. A mooring, the stationary device that anchors a boat, is both infrastructure and metaphor: it evokes belonging and rootedness, yet historically enabled colonizers to secure their arrival on foreign shores. The sciences of tides, waves, and meteorology, essential for fishermen and maritime exchanges, were likewise used by colonizers to reach distant lands and pursue expansion. Emerging from this tension, the project asks how knowledge in moorings, tides, and waters has been transformed into instruments of divergent purposes, from sustenance to violence.