OCEAN / UNI

OCEAN / UNI is TBA21–Academy’s itinerant pedagogical platform, an ever-evolving online learning initiative shaped by bodies of water, knowledge, and the people who care for them. It is a space where art, scholarship, and activism converge. This Fall 2025, OCEAN / UNI returns with a new chapter: Spaces of Collaboration. This semester focuses on moving image as a strategy of repatriation, guided by filmmakers, thinkers, and caretakers deeply connected to saltwater communities. 

This semester of OCEAN / UNI is designed to prepare students for their own lens-based research by sharing methods, ethics, and strategies for working in sensitive watery environments. Through case studies from Namibia, Peru, Chile, and Australia by authors based in these specific communities, we will reflect on the power of historical archives as they return to inspire contemporary art practices. The repatriation of practices, intellectual properties, and intangible cultures related to Ocean stewardship will be our focus this semester. Together, we will enquire into the Ocean’s role and agency in artistic image production, engaging with cultural practices that relate to ancestral knowledge, identity, and collective healing. 

Informed by Indigenous studies, particularly within the fields of Oceanic, Latinx*, and African artistic research methodologies, the Fall 2025 program adopts the moving image as a medium of repatriation through experimental documentary filmmaking, participatory learning, and relational aesthetics that prioritize collaboration and situated knowledge.

The program brings together a diverse group of contributors, including artists, philosophers, cultural activists, and researchers. Through a series of public lectures, experimental workshops, and collaborative activations, participants are invited to reflect on what it means to return, to resist, and to reclaim stories long held under water. From the traces of the transatlantic slave trade to the rituals of rivers and coastal guardianship, OCEAN / UNI encourages new ways of learning through water beyond disciplinary boundaries.

The Fall 2025 edition of OCEAN / UNI, titled Spaces of Collaboration, is curated by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, two thinkers and practitioners deeply engaged in the intersections of art, colonial history, and cultural restitution. Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll is an artist, writer, and professor of global art at the University of Birmingham. Her work explores the entangled legacies of empire through performance, film, and visual research. Verena Melgarejo Weinandt is a Berlin-based artist, curator, and scholar whose work draws on Afro-diasporic and Latin American feminist perspectives to challenge dominant narratives and reclaim embodied ways of knowing. Together, they have shaped a semester that gathers powerful voices from across the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. Guest speakers include filmmakers Joel Kaudife Haikali, whose work reclaims African stories through lens-based resistance, Britten Syd Andrews, whose work utilizes storytelling for social impact, and Kasimir Burgess, who explores the intersections of art, music, and film; Karmen Franinović, leading a Zurich University of the Arts research group exploring the sensory interfaces of ocean and technology; Roman Kirchner, an artist and designer whose work unfolds processes of metamorphosis; Alfredo Ledesma Quintana and Liliana Gómez, who bridge Indigenous ritual and philosophical inquiry; Seba Calfuqueo, whose work listens to the desires of water through Mapuche and Latinx thought; and Adéwolé Faladé and Sénami Donoumassou, who confront the echoes of the transatlantic slave trade through cultural activism and archival resistance. 

As part of TBA21–Academy, OCEAN / UNI moves in concert with a constellation of interconnected platforms. It is nourished by Ocean Archive, a growing digital commons where the knowledge generated during the semester (such as video essays, recordings, and reflections) is made accessible to global audiences. It is sustained by ocean comm/uni/ty, the vibrant network of collaborators, students, storytellers, and Ocean stewards who shape and are shaped by the academy’s work. It is grounded by Ocean Space in Venice, a physical gathering place and center for critical Ocean literacy where aquatic research becomes visible and shared with the world. 

Whether you are a student, an artist, a researcher, or someone who feels the pull of the sea, you are invited to drift with us. Join the dialogue, take part in the workshops, or submit your stories. Help shape a collective memory of water.

Register for the upcoming semester of OCEAN / UNI here.