It is strange staring at the horizon in Hayati Mokhtar and Dain Iskandar Said’s Near Intervisible Lines. Almost perfect halves—sky above, land below. Except it is also ocean and beneath the sand are traces of lives once lived here. Unseen.

It is also strange because this work mirrors imagery I created in the film Kainayssini Imanistaisiwa: The People Go On. Except it was the land in Kainai territory in southern Alberta. I also wanted images of the horizon equally divided—I was trying to find a way to represent the four directions of the land in two-dimensional screen space. In post production, I letterboxed the images and then linked them in a continuous ribbon of horizon. It was a simple statement: space behind you, in front of you, all around you. That is where the Kainai stand and see, thousands of times a day.

In Near Intervisible Lines, the horizon appears like a line on a flat space—criss-crossed randomly by movement across the flat plane, suggesting an almost abstract formalism. Then there are the stories, histories, and songs creating trajectories of memory and distance, of perspective in time and place: tension against the formal elements.

“The site lent itself to our exploration of the shifting and often oppositional tensions that function at the foundations of the concept of landscape,” says Hayati; “The panorama has the stillness of a painting, and yet social life is all about process—it is never static—and this fact is emphasized here by means of the far left screen which traverses the landscape to uncover further complexities.”

The visual tension draws us to the voices. We hear from the stories that the land shifts and shakes as the ocean swells, envelops and rises, recedes and in its receding, erodes. Where there was once a home is now a postcard beach in Malaysia where tourists would love to stroll, on the bones of another time. Then it is not a line at all or a flat surface, or even a horizon, but a place thousands of miles away that signifies the 360 degrees of space: behind, above, all around.

As a filmmaker, I choose where to place the camera so the subject is above the horizon or below the horizon or a vertical line against the horizon or no apparent horizon. Where I place the camera will become part of the storytelling and the formal organization of time and place, light, and shadow.

There is a long history of the horizon, how it plays in art history and the imagining of Western culture. There is an obsession with the horizon—striving, reaching, going beyond or even flattening, rejecting. And there are age-old dichotomies in which the horizon is always ineffable, unreachable: one is the searching for the idealized space of beyond. But to the men and women in Near Intervisible Lines who share their music and stories, the horizon is not ineffable. It is read from the land, it is read while navigating the ocean, it is read because, well, that is life. A few thousand ocean-miles away, the Polynesian canoe culture was reborn with the help of Mau Piailug, one of a handful of traditional navigators from Satawal, Micronesia. Piailug taught Nainoa Thompson non-instrument navigation, wayfaring as some call it. It isn’t just star navigation without a sextant. It is currents and sky, ocean and stars—in fact, seeing beyond the horizon.

Malaysia certainly has histories that stretch back long before this current round of imperialism, where ocean-going vessels from China and other nations meant reading the ocean for signs of visitors—and invaders. And from Malaysians, there are histories of trade or war or migration to other places, where knowledge and lineage were exchanged and oceans navigated.

In Near Intervisible Lines, the histories and stories imagine a different geometry of time and place, told in a steady current of moving camera and framing off and then on again, editing from one story to the next, with soundscape and music. And there is a lament for the loss, for the long ago, for the homes that stood there and are now gone, for the work that was performed and the expectations for a constant place.

There has never been a constant of any part of any society or culture. There are always trade and migration, assimilation and resistance, border zones and transgressions, war and diplomacy. Here on the west coast, where it takes 19 hours to drive to Kitamaat, it took days by ocean-going canoes and catamarans, yet families, clans and villages were renewed with marriages and trade. Currents were navigated to visit neighboring villages where celebration, gossip and knowledge were exchanged. Here, visitors came from China and Japan years before Europeans, and over the mountains from the prairies and from the south along ancient routes other visitors arrived on their own journeys.

“From the ‘Incense Route’ across the Middle East,” says Dain, “to the ‘Silk Roads’ of Central Asia or the maritime ‘Spice Routes’ that brought the ancient Egyptians into contact with the peoples of the Moluccas in the Indonesian Archipelago… [this] was the matrix of the Asian civilization. Our current ‘discovery’ and much-touted tropes on globalization would have our ancestors laughing round their camp fires. Movement was nothing new. Borders were porous, cultures were on the move and subjected to constant influences.” But then there was “the arrival of the first European, and the need to monopolize these age old established trading routes, that cracked our world asunder.”

That monopoly has played out in more than the trading routes. Museums are efforts at a cultural monopoly. Even the claim at ‘globalization’ could be argued as another effort to monopolize the trade routes. Art practice is valued or not valued, voice is heard or not heard, space is opened or not. Artists must negotiate many oceans and different horizons while offering up what will play in art houses driven by monopolistic cultural purveyors.

Dain and Hayati signify but do not mimic Western art traditions. Perhaps that is what I value most about Near Intervisible Lines. Their art practice is porous like the borders of old—they situate themselves within and without landscape and concepts of the horizon once the line is drawn. “We embarked on the project by wanting to look at the relationship that people have with place, and our ‘place’ in that relationship,” they explain; “how we would translate and transform ‘their’ world as two people who share their culture… but not quite.”

And from that, they hybridize but do not assimilate, they document not as native informants but as participants in the memory and intellectual, cultural, and creative knowledge of people.

“Girl. Cree. Metis. White. Writes (been to Sundance Writer's Lab). Directs (lots of films, many festivals). Thinks (essays that are full of tersely cogent remarks or flamboyantly theoretical analysis). Challenges herself and others (why do it like everyone else?). Makes things happen (without too much fuss and with way too much Cree humility). And yes, she has many awards and accolades.” - Loretta Todd

Still from Near Intervisible Lines by Hayati Mokhtar and Dain Iskandar Said