Oh escaping! For centuries, we have been conceiving travelling as both a way of discovery and a way of escaping. But now we need to carefully focus, pay attention to all the vulnerabilities that are at work: our bodies being so exposed, but also all forms of life being —still—so endangered. I would say, the situation renders the idea of a year expedition even more meaningful, as now we truly need to include as many as we can in this voyage. The astonishing existence with the Ocean now turns into the exercise of giving voice, producing podcasts, making images, combining the bizarre, imaginative flair of a folktale with a profound meditation on questions of isolation and human interaction. 
That’s us now… with you.

Chus Martínez


TBA21–Academy has organized annual learning voyages with scientists, artists, and activists for nearly a decade now—not only to enhance the knowledge of the Ocean, but also to give individuals the opportunity to form kinships; become friends. Based on these friendships, new forms of collaboration would appear. Over the past three years, TBA21–Academy and the Art Institute HGK FHNW in Basel have been collaborating closely through the latter's director, Chus Martínez, who was appointed as Leader of the second cycle of The Current fellowship programme, defining a series of three voyages and Convenings which she entitled Spheric Ocean. Due to the current global health situation, the third voyage, meant to happen right around this time, needed to take a different form. Martínez also gave names to her voyages: the first was called To Find the Vegan Lion—as in, to find a world without a trace of violence; the second carried the title The Solomon Exercises—attempting to learn how to transform our behaviour so that we alter the course of our relation with the Ocean in a positive manner; and the third and final one is called Life for Beginners—quoting Rilke, who had written: "there are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult". We are dealing with the most difficult now, and this is to care for artists and sustain a world where their practice is seen as a crucial contribution to a future of greater coexistence with nature.

And so, you need to imagine two friends holding hands—TBA21–Academy and the Art Institute—commissioning a series of conversations on the Ocean, on colonialism, on climate transformation, on the exercise we are undergoing both socially and scientifically, and a series of films dealing with the same issues in different ways. The NEW PODCAST SERIES appears under the title Corona Under the Ocean. You can stream it from the Ocean Archive, the Art Institute website or platforms such as iTunes, Spotify and SoundCloud. The maker of these ten episodes is Sonia Fernández Pan, a curator and writer, acting as the researcher and the interviewer. In the first episode—Oceanizing History—she talks to Greg Dvorak, Professor of International Cultural Studies (History and Cultural Studies, Art Studies, Gender Studies of Pacific and Asia) at Waseda University in Tokyo. This episode is dedicated to Oceania. Did you know that the Pacific Ocean was named so by Fernão de Magalhães, referring to his feeling that the sea was dull over there? He reflects on how the colonizer’s view has affected the region and on how the word “indigenous” needs to gain even more political meaning.

NEW COMMISSIONS. From May 5th, you will be able to watch periodical releases of new works by Temitope Ajose-Cutting and Quinn Latimer, Stephanie Comilang, Every Ocean Hughes, Taloi Havini, Alvaro Urbano and Ingela Ihrmann on the Ocean Archive, as well as a special microsite called Corona KINO, created by the Art Institute. In the first film, How to Move Like the Ocean (Liquefaction, Lubrication & Expansion in Twelve Easy Steps) (2020), the dancer and choreographer Temitope Ajose-Cutting passes through the rooms of her London apartment and then out into the seemingly emptied world, moving to (and against) spectral instructions that offer her the chance to become liquid, become ocean, become, that is, everything. 
Those instructions, written and read by the writer Quinn Latimer, offer some salty pedagogical drift, equal parts lesson and poetry, political current and personal query, as they sequence loss, levity, desire, kinship, kelp beds, and some tantalizing blue drink. Wet with the genres of both realism and speculative fiction, How to Move Like the Ocean reveals the depths that the imaginary of the body, ever slippery, can go. 

These commissions take the form of films, however, they are not video art per se, since they reflect on the body, on how, in the absence of the Ocean, we need to learn to move like the waves, to become water, to breathe like fish, to feel like nature.