liquid kin

The online moments for meeting, sharing and listening that make up the 2025 ocean comm/uni/ty festival are a mix of regenerative practices, contemplative rituals, and artistic innovation that merge art, ecology and activism.

Held in the wake of the 2025 UN Ocean Conference in Nice, the Festival allows us to move beyond “awareness” toward awakening: an embodied, collective sense of oceanic kinship.

“The ocean is our co-curator, our kin, our method. We are water remembering water. Return as ocean.”

—Lígia Oliveira, artist, designer + researcher; and Community Curator for the festival

Through interconnected zones of Imagination (Seeds), Kinship (Blooms), and Action (Harvest), the Festival brings together artists, scientists, researchers, activists, and policymakers to refract conference themes into poetic diplomacy, emotional processing, and future-prototyping:

1. Inspiration/Imagination (seeds) 
Making space for possible futures and speculative thinking, where we can imagine regenerative futures for and with the ocean.

2. Kinship (blooms) 
Exploring collective practices to deepen our connection to the ocean and prepare the ground for transformation. These include contemplation, storytelling, listening, or sharing knowledge and experience.

3. Action (harvests) 
Inviting tangible actions to happen throughout the festival, that can contribute to concrete outcomes – however small. These might include poems, the start of new collaborations, and the documentation of the festival on Ocean-Archive.org.