"otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua" [other mountains, adrift beneath the waves]
Nadia Huggins & Tessa Mars
April 5 –
November 2, 2025
Design: Pardo
TBA21–Academy
Ocean Space Venice
Exhibitions
On the horizon that sustains our planet’s countless life forms, the Ocean emerges as a shared space—both the origin and destination of contemporary emancipatory processes. Certain onto-ecological frameworks have moved in this direction, challenging the instrumentalization of knowledge and the compartmentalization of thought. However, for centuries, these processes have struggled to harness the energy required to unleash the latent potential of what certainly awaits us. From this crossroads, communities living at longitudes between 60º and 90º W and latitudes between 10º and 20º N have developed aesthetic strategies and tools that relate to other forms of life, seeking to engage with life-giving forces, accumulate experiences and, in doing so, shape new ways of being—otherness—both within ourselves and in our environment. Improvisation stands out as one of the most prominent aesthetic strategies in this region and is at work from the highest mountains above sea level to other mountains, those adrift beneath the waves. This exhibition, featuring works by artists Nadia Huggins and Tessa Mars, unites reflections that have been integral to their artistic practice from the very beginning with those that have surfaced during two years of work on The Current IV: Caribbean. It underscores the power of improvisation~freestyle as both a tool and an aesthetic strategy that can be used to transcend terrestrial and extractivist perspectives, reimagine systems for sustaining life, and grapple with entrenched notions of power. These three monumental tasks are approaching the horizon but will converge in the ocean, a shared space that sustains our planet’s life forms—our origin and our destination.