Tessa Mars

Tessa Mars

a call to the ocean, 2025

Installation with "Mountains and rivers" (pigments and acrylic on five canvases), "Mangrove" (PVC tubes, wire mesh, plaster cloth, acrylic paint), and "Ritual call" (single-channel sound).

Dimensions variable

Commissioned and produced by TBA21–Academy

In her painting installation “a call to the ocean” (2025), Mars considers improvisation~freestyle as a strategy for accessing spaces of "fugue", a concept formulated by artist and philosopher Dénètem Touam Bona, for whom "to fugue is not to be sent running but, on the contrary, to make flee, to put it through endless variations so as to evade its grasp in every way. The fugue is creative ardour". Thus, the interplay between improvisation~freestyle and fugue engenders a multiplicity of ways of being, resisting the co-optation of imposed realities while contributing to the saturation of the binary logic that underpins power structures.

In Mars’s work, mountains are not merely passive features of the landscape but entities in themselves, their geological evolution inscribed within a cycle of fugue that has directly shaped human and non-human life. The artist contrasts terrestrial and oceanic perspectives: the former regards mountains as exploitable spaces within extractive economies, while the latter perceives them as key agents in the evolution of otherness. As visitors navigate the work’s multilayered composition, they encounter figures seemingly caught in deep slumber and undergoing morphological shifts. While each figure appears to be at a different stage of introspective transformation, the interplay between these layers suggests a form of collective harmony, a network woven through ethereal visitations from life forms whose movements belong to other temporalities, accompanying them in their process of (trans)formation. Their bodily realities are reconciled within the larger oceanic process of perpetual motion.

Mars proposes that the mountains above sea level serve as guides in our journey toward submerged mountains. Endowed with our planet’s timeless wisdom, these mountains, adrift beneath the waves, remind us that they have not only harbored and catalyzed the possibility of other worlds, but may also provide the conditions for the materialization of alternative horizons yet to be seen.

This work was commissioned and produced on the occasion of the exhibition “otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo del agua” (other mountains, adrift beneath the waves), curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel for Ocean Space, Venice 2025