Three years ago, we reopened the doors of the Church of San Lorenzo by inaugurating our newly found home, Ocean Space, a global center catalyzing critical ocean literacy and advocacy through the lens of art. Since its inception, it has strived to be a place of kinship and community, a home for action and imagination. In a time when these two concepts can be a powerful tool of resistance, we want to continue being a space for dialogue, sharing projects and programs that are inspirational and transformative and which amplify stories that need to be told. We look forward to welcoming you into a new oceanic season filled with exhibitions, performances, and educational programs.

During the opening week of the Biennale Arte, we kindly invite you to join us for a rich program of artist talks and performances, starting on Wednesday with a conversation between Chus Martínez and artists Dineo Seshee Bopape and Diana Policarpo. Under the heading of Animated Science, Interior Activism and the Ocean, the artists and the curator will talk about the new exhibitions at Ocean Space. ​​Both of these installations display a strong belief in creating conditions that modify the ever-so-present power of epistemic colonialism and extractivists histories. The animated science of art is an arduous method that weaves together many different artistic languages in order to erase the possibility of an ‘opposite’. There are no opposites in nature, no opposite sex, no opposite of the real. To surpass this dualism, we need new beliefs, new movements of thought capable of stopping further damage and wars to come.

Saturday, April 23, will be dedicated to a night of poetry and performance examining Indigenous futures organized at Ocean Space in collaboration with aabaakwad. 
Word warriors Timimie Märak, Janet Rogers, Mosab Alnomire, and Kulleh Grassi will share a soul-defining experience of poetry. Rana Bishara, an artist who uses materials to communicate the complexity of a political situation, will perform a new work. They will be joined by performance artists New Red Order in collaboration with Krista Belle Stewart examining Indigenous futures and the imaginaries of ‘Indigenous’ in Europe.

From April 20, TBA21–Academy’s Ocean Space will host a new performance by studio DRIFT, presented by Aorist, a next-generation cultural institution. DRIFT will stage their first-ever indoor aerial drone performance titled Social Sacrifice. Exploring the swarming dynamics exhibited by a school of fish encountering a predator, the work highlights the tensions that emerge between collective action and individual freedom, as well as how these change in the presence of external threats.

In addition to the program at Ocean Space, together with Hartwig Art Foundation, we proudly present the Italian premiere of Wu Tsang's MOBY DICK; or, The Whale, on April 20 at Teatro Goldoni. The feature-length silent film with a live symphony orchestra is directed by award-winning artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang, whose works often explore hidden histories and marginalized narratives. With her collaborators, she has created a silent film that follows the white whale above and below the water's surface, developing a visual cosmology that resists the exploration and exploitation of the earth under imperial colonialism.