About The Current

The Current is TBA21–Academy’s curatorial fellowship and roaming research program, organised in multi-year cycles across different oceanic regions, designed to cultivate transdisciplinary practices and the exchange of ideas around the Ocean and its understanding. It brings together curators, artists, and researchers through expeditions, convenings, and collaborations that map situated issues and weave them into wider conversations across science, conservation, policy, and culture.

Each cycle of The Current is led by one or more curatorial fellows selected by the Academy, who in turn nominate artists, scientists, environmentalists, and other cultural actors to join a collective research project unfolding over three years. The leader of The Current is entrusted with conducting intensive research, considering new knowledge metabolisms and expanding their network of collaborators, each cycle focused on specific geographies and their human and more-than-human communities. 

Through this program, the Academy aims to inquire into how a situated fellowship can serve as a prototype for a meaningful decolonial infrastructure of exchange, striving to enable porosity between the cycles as a means of intercultural worldbuilding around the Ocean. 

Since its inception in 2015, cycles of the fellowship program have been led by curators Ute Meta Bauer, Barbara Casavecchia, César García, Yina Jiménez Suriel, and Chus Martínez, and the artist group SUPERFLEX.