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Thus Waves Come in Pairs. Thinking with the Mediterraneans
Sternberg Press, 2023

Photo: Enrico Fiorese

TBA21–Academy

Publications

Petrit Halilaj & Alvaro Urbano

In 2021, Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal recorded an intimate conversation about the Mediterranean at their Parisian home: “There are many Mediterraneans: the geographical, the historical, the philosophical... the personal, the one we swim, and we have swum in. It‘s an experience to swim, it is something you can‘t explain to somebody who never swam. This feeling of being held up by this water.”

The third cycle of TBA21–Academy’s curatorial fellowship program The Current, spanning from 2021–23 focused on the Mediterraneans in a program entitled “Thus waves come in pairs” after a line from Adnan’s poem “Sea and Fog”. It points to the necessity of thinking of, and thinking with, the Mediterraneans as plural — plural as their interconnected cultures, and bodies of sweet and salty water, and possibilities of narrating their current transformations. The rapid expansion of droughts, disruption of cycles of water and heat waves (above and below the rising sea level, where temperatures are rising and biodiversity is declining) across all Mediterranean shores is a key indicator of climate change in this area, occurring at a pace 20 percent faster than anywhere else on the planet. Mediterraneization is an expansive global phenomenon now, whose borders and inhabitants are on the move. It calls for reorienting, and registering “the limits of our own apparatuses of knowledge,” as Iain Chambers and Marta Cariello write in their essay “The Mediterranean Question: Thinking with the Diver.”

By taking the conversation between Adnan and Fattal as a point of departure and inspiration, this publication intends to collect interdisciplinary reflections around/about the Mediterraneans through art, oceanic thinking, science, and activism, as well as to record fragments of two years of research. Thus Waves Come in Pairs. Thinking with the Mediterraneans is copublished by TBA21–Academy and Sternberg Press.

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Book orders

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Barbara Casavecchia in conversation with Pietro Consolandi and Zeyn Joukhadar
Wednesday, June 7, 2023, at 6:30 pm
COMMERCE, Via Tadino 30, Milan

Simone Fattal in conversation with Omar Berrada and Barbara Casavecchia
Introduced by Markus Reymann
Friday, May 19, 2023, at 11:00 am
at Ocean Space, Venice

Book presentations

Thus Waves Come in Pairs
Thinking with the Mediterraneans
Edited by Barbara Casavecchia
144 pages, English
ISBN 978-1-915609-22-9
EUR 18

Sternberg Press

Thus Waves Come in Pairs
Thinking with the Mediterraneans
Edited by Barbara Casavecchia
144 pages, English
ISBN 978-1-915609-22-9
EUR 18

A conversation between Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal
Contributions by Jumana Emil Abboud, Omar Berrada, Barbara Casavecchia, Pietro Consolandi, Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu, Petrit Halilaj and Álvaro Urbano, Zeyn Joukhadar, Ibrahim Nehme, Giovanna Silva.

Texts

bruno, Venice

Design

bruno, Venice

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