Lead researchers:
Amandine Vabre Chau
Lemeeze Davids
6414.36 nautical miles begins with a friendship between two curators across distance. First held in the form of calls between Cape Town and Hong Kong, the project unfolds as a Course of Enquiry shaped by coordinates that are both intimate and socio-historical.
This line between these two cities draws attention to their shared inheritances of imperialism, asking what persists in the ecological, cultural and economic. It is less an attempt at an answer than a mode of sensing: how the urban and natural environment carries traces of the past while conditioning the present, and setting the terms for what is yet to come.
As Lemeeze Davids (Cape Town) and Amandine Vabre Chau (Hong Kong) work together, their research dialogue turns towards form. 6414.36 nautical miles becomes an articulation of a curatorial process, understanding how ideas take shape across time zones, and how research can be held in correspondence. The expression remains deliberately indeterminate, attending to the unfolding of questions as much as to their possible futures. Gradually extending into forms of writing, shared discussion and presentation, each iteration adds to an ongoing process of curatorial exchange.
A4’s Course of Enquiry invites curators to develop a six-month programme centred on ‘making public’ their modes of investigation.
Course of Enquiry offers insight into research as process, with all the attendant segues and obstacles necessary to the curatorial form. Curators’ engagements with their guiding questions are observed and documented through a programme that considers the journey of ideas, from experimentation to expression. Where are the meanderings, the dead-ends, the points at which thoughts coalesce? How might this unfolding be made apparent? In the spirit of ‘elastic rigour’ (to use Carlo Ginzberg’s term), the accompanying translations of curatorial process – be they aural, written, visual or tactile – are guided by the individual enquiries, their outcomes anticipated but as yet unknown.
The resulting research and its traces are shared with the public in a series of events, texts and multimedia offerings.
A dialogue in three parts between Lemeeze Davids and Amandine Chau in which the researchers begin plotting coordinates between Hong Kong and Cape Town en route towards their shared project 6414.36 nautical miles.
17 October 2025
Location:
Delfina Foundation, London
Tagline:
A roundtable asking after expressions of power on or through the natural world in Hong Kong and Cape Town.
Lee Kai Chung
Cynthia Fan
Josh Ginsburg
Kerryn Greenberg
Jiaying Kou
Yolanda Li
Tau Tavengwa
Sumayya Valley
Patrick Waterhouse
This roundtable discussion marks the mid-point of 6414.36 nautical miles, a Course of Enquiry bringing together a group of practitioners whose work intersects with the histories of Hong Kong and Cape Town as port cities. Hosted at Delfina Foundation in London during the week of Frieze, it uses the gravitational pull of the art fair to think through two coordinates of research: botanical imperialism (palm trees, pine trees, plant migrations) and marine entanglements (abalone smuggling, mollusks, ocean ecologies). Meeting in England invites a direct confrontation with the British imperial histories that continue to affect both Hong Kong and Cape Town.
The invited participants, based in or passing through London, were selected because their practices link to different facets of the enquiry: ecological research, urban planning, or curatorial strategies attuned to extraction, migration, and Afro Asian politics. Their contributions help open up larger conversations around spatial inequality, kinship, and how plants and marine organisms become charged carriers of memory.
Using these coordinates, alongside postcard-sized prints of artworks and harvest cards from A4’s database, the practitioners build a shared field of reference to bolster, challenge and grow the Course of Enquiry. The materials act as entry points into a dialogue about how urban and ecological histories shape contemporary life across cities marked, in different ways, by colonial rule.
