The Current II: Phenomenal Ocean. Featuring Ocean Archive

Can what is necessary be as well pleasurable? Can a radical transformation, following the principles of feminism, anti-racism, and anti-fascism be easier than we think and closer than we expect?

A day on ideas that contribute to the invention of a new language about the Ocean, one that includes pedagogy, structural changes, science, and hopefully some joy. 

Ocean Space has as its primordial aim to enhance—through a dialogue between art, science, advocacy, and activism—the process and the demands of becoming Earth. 

To this process belongs not only action and a sense of urgency, but also philosophy, art, and defining culture, so that it encompasses scientific thinking and analysis, political thought, community concerns, and justice in all its complex forms. 

If you are around Venice on the 28th of September, please join us. We are celebrating a convening, a gathering of different voices and ways of thinking about the tools, laws, actions, and experiences we need to discuss and take into account in order to generate change. The day will be structured as a series of interviews with experts, scientists, artists, musicians, and activists on the tools we need to perform better. Performing is a better word that doing. Performing includes the body, and it includes the Ocean itself as a performer. 

For instance: How to move away from familiar patterns of exclusion and domination? Does the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report truly contribute to changes in policy? Is there a way to face such devastating facts while thinking deeply about the difference in carbon footprint between richer and poorer nations? As philosopher Rosi Braidotti writes, is it really fair to speak of the climate emergency crisis as a “common human concern”? Isn’t it problematic to accept a negative formation of humanity as a category that stretches to all human beings, all other differences notwithstanding? How are we to contribute to qualitatively different planetary relations?

These questions will form a conversation in a broadcast-like situation intended to share them with you wherever you are, via a live stream that will later be uploaded onto an online platform called the Ocean Archive. We will also be talking about this, forms of sharing and inviting many to participate in thinking; the role education plays, how online media may be turned into hubs for sharing ideas, arguments, artworks, facts and writing of communities otherwise apart just because of the nature of culture today, the logic of disciplinary thinking. With the help of DIS, we produced a movie and a setting in the space to introduce all those questions, to host our guests, and to welcome you.

The motive of the day: to think how the language that presents us with separate worlds of interests and realms creates a barrier to reflect on the fact that we are all living in the same defenceless planet. 

—Chus Martínez


Commissioned and produced by TBA21–Academy. Supported by Art Institute, FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel.