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Flickering Shores, Sea Imaginaries, this year’s edition of the Sea Art Festival, is inviting us to rethink our relationship with the sea, referring to the beauty but at the same time, the fragility of our shores, and exploring alternative frameworks and visions for engaging with the ocean and marine environments.
The sea is deeply embedded in our lives and capitalist society, a vital source for our survival, but also a vast industry we exploit for food, medicines, energy, minerals, trading, travel and so on. But increased human activity, from extensive cruise tourism, shipping and overfishing to nuclear testing, pollution and deep-sea mining have been plaguing the sea, having a huge impact on marine ecosystems and habitats.
Instead of viewing the sea from the coast as a divided and abstract surface for moving around commodities, Flickering Shores, Sea Imaginaries reminds us that we are part of this body of water. This year's Sea Art Festival aims to explore new relationships with the sea and its ecologies, enabling spaces for cooperation, collective visions and synergies as a call to resistance and restoration.
With philosophy at its core, Shailesh BR’s work contemplates the world by examining existing knowledge, systems, traditions, rituals, metaphysics, and philosophy itself through methods of science, technology, and artistic intervention. The artist was recognized in 2015 with the Emerging Artist Award from the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art, followed by a residency in 2016 at Atelier Mondial, Basel. He had a solo exhibition, Tarka at Vadehra Art Gallery, and The Last Brahmin at Villa Arson Nice, France. Shailesh has also exhibited at SAVVY Contemporary and the Armory Show, as well as numerous other galleries and museums.
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Merilyn Fairskye lives in Sydney, Australia whose recent video and photographic work explores the effects of powerful events of real life on humans and the environment. Current projects that explore the relationships between technology, atomic landscapes, and community have taken her on location to the Polygon in Kazakhstan, Sellafield, Chernobyl, and other key nuclear sites. Her work has been presented at over 180 exhibitions and festivals, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern, London, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
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Calypso36°21 is a women-led, French Moroccan collective that was created in Rabat in 2018 and founded by Zoé Le Voyer, Justine Daquin, Manon Bachelier, and Sanaa Zaghoud. The collective is named after the coordinates of Calypso Deep, 36°34′N 21°8′E, the deepest point of the Mediterranean Sea, which is located in the Hellenic Trench in Greek waters. Now headed by Sanaa Zaghoud and Justine Daquin, the collective has developed a curatorial, transdisciplinary, experimental, and participative approach. An itinerant research program imagined and produced by the collective called Out.of.the.blue. looks at the knowledge production processes that shape the comprehension of (liquid and solid) Mediterranean territories.
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There are no boundaries in the sea or land. Fences are human-made structures and boundaries are drawn and constructed by humans. A space surrounded by a fence gives a clear sign to people that it can not be entered, however one’s sight can penetrate a space enclosed with a fence or border. Boundaries can be penetrated from the outside.
In Yasuaki Onishi’s installation, the fence that separates this side from the opposite one marks that boundary. Works with fences of different types and sizes create permeable volumes by layering boundaries. Yasuaki uses a ready-made and mundane object such as a fence, sculpting an empty space and allowing it to be filled with our imagination. The space between ourselves and the sea or nature may be thought of as a separation or a border, but here this hollow space is materialized with a structure of vertical and horizontal lines, volumes and voids, allowing us to fill in these forms and create different interpretations or visualize new landscapes. Layer of Boundary explores ideas of emptiness and fullness, absence and presence. Through this installation Yasuaki also explores relationships - and borders - between human and nature. The familiar fence object is reversed; the artist manipulates it so it’s not a fixed structure anymore, but one that can be penetrated and one that can offer different points of view. In a way, what is thought of as a boundary between ourselves and the sea, we are invited to erase with our imagination.
Yasuaki invites us to rethink the division between human and sea, human and nature, but also the separation between human activity at land and sea. He reminds us of the need to look at sea, land and humans together and as connected entities in order to be able to address the urgent transformation the sea is undergoing.
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Who governs or makes the rules in international, globalized waters and what are the implications for seafarers and labor conditions?
In August 2016, Rebecca Moss was selected for the 23 Days at Sea artist residency program, run by Access Gallery in Vancouver. Traveling on the Hanjin Geneva container ship from Tokyo to Shanghai, Moss planned to cross the Pacific Ocean and arrive in Shanghai 23 days later. However, one week into the residency, the shipping company Hanjin was declared bankrupt, meaning that the individuals and cargo were stranded at sea on a ship which was unable to pay to get into any docks. Ports around the world barred the shipping company’s vessels from docking fearing that the bankrupt company will be unable to pay for port and service fees.
Moss, the only artist on board, two passengers and the crew of Geneva, dropped anchor 13 km from the coast of Japan, in international waters, and waited for over a fortnight for further instruction.
Maritime transport is still the backbone of international trade and the global economy, as over 90% of the world’s goods - including most of the things we consume, from gadgets, electronics and other appliances to fruit - are transported by sea. International Waters is a single channel video work made in response to being stuck at anchor and makes visible the largely unknown, but at the same time ubiquitous world of the global shipping industry. It is also a reminder of the harsh and often unfair working conditions for seafarers. Apart from Geneva, hundreds of other ships in the company’s fleet were also affected, with crew and cargo remaining stranded in the sea for a while.
Rebecca Moss through her work tells the absurd story of the bankruptcy from the perspective of the people on board the stationary ship full of goods and cargo but suddenly without a destination, and combines interviews and news reports from this time.
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What does deep sea feel like? As we are rushing to exploit the seafloor, mining for minerals, what are the likely ecological consequences and impact on marine species? Do we need deep sea mining?
The drive to explore and exploit the sea floor means this once seemingly infinite landscape is now being carved up into territorial space. Common Heritage is an urgent response to the gold rush of deep-sea mining for rare earth minerals, exposing how reverberant layers of industrialization and territorial claim have affected the way we relate to our environment.
Highlighting fantasies we construct and investigating the relationship between exploration and exploitation, the film draws into focus how these romanticized stages are in fact borders of conquest, annexed for geopolitical territory appropriation and mineral resources.
In 1967, Arvid Pardo, the Maltese Ambassador to the UN gave a speech, which instigated the Common Heritage of Mankind principle and after 10 years of international conference and debate, bore the Law of the Sea treaty. Pardo called for international regulations that would prevent further pollution at sea, protect ocean resources, and ensure peace. He proposed that the seabed constitutes part of the common heritage of mankind. His speech, narrated by science fiction writer, Gwyneth Jones is the provocation for the film. Dystopian science fiction motifs are harmonized with a poetic montage of deep-sea exploration archive footage including press conferences, interviews and speeches that reveal tensions, contradictions and disputes in the governance and territorial demarcation of such a vast and powerful landscape. This juxtaposition both questions our current state and our future engagement with this critical frontier.
Common Heritage was conceived during the 'Culture & Climate Change: Future Scenarios' residency, funded by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, the University of Sheffield, Open University, Grantham Sustainable Futures and the Ashden Trust. Film production was funded by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation.
Credits
Produced by: Elena Hill
Editor: Sergio Vega Borrego
Sound & Music: Nicolas Becker with Lucy Railton & Stefan Smith
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Mangroves forests form a vital ecosystem, connecting land and sea. Found in tropical and sub-tropical areas all over the world, mangroves provide shelter and food for young marine life, works as a barrier against floodings, and it is an important tool to help us mitigate climate change.
Renata Padovan’s interest in mangroves originates from her research concerning ecological and socio-cultural issues deriving from the neglectful exploitation of ecosystems. As a biome, mangroves are extremely important. They occupy coastal zones acting as an interface between marine and terrestrial environments. They constitute the breeding grounds for a diversity of fish, shrimp, crabs, shellfish, the nesting sites for many birds, and the feeding grounds for a myriad of terrestrial and aquatic species.
Furthermore, the forests and the muddy soil constitute an extremely effective carbon sink. Mangroves protect coastal areas from erosion and tsunamis. The muddy soil absorbs polluting
substances that are discharged in watercourses, ending up in the estuaries, such as pesticides and heavy metals from mining activities. Today, mangroves are among the most endangered habitats in the world, due mainly to coastal developments, logging and shrimp aquaculture.
To be inside of a mangrove forest is an overwhelming experience. The sounds, the incredible design of the tangled roots and embracing patterns of the tree trunks, the filtered light that comes from the canopies, it is magical.
During an immersion in a still pristine mangrove forest in northern Brazil, conscious of the devastation of the biome in many other areas in the artist’s country and around the world, Renata Padovan conceived this artwork that would call the public’s attention to this disregarded ecosystem, generating awareness about its importance and the urgent need for its preservation.
Explore more about mangroves in Renata Padovan’s short film, Transition Zone:
https://vimeo.com/843273956
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Famously, there are no scientific parameters to explain what consciousness is, or how it emerged: this is known as “the hard problem of consciousness.” But maybe this problem is only hard from humans’ point of view. All Is Water turns the tables and reflects on this problem from the perspective of non-human consciousness. Featuring a speculative text spoken and written by a computer, the film moves from meditations on the history and limits of science to an almost mystical exploration of fish consciousness.
All Is Water filmed in Corsica during the spawning period of the Chromis Chromis - a small species of ray-finned fish from the Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean - when the scientists Anja Wegner and Alex Jordan set up an experiment to determine how architecture affects the social behavior of the fish. SUPERFLEX supplied three buoyant structures designed to appeal to underwater life. The local Chromis Chromis population congregated around these structures in great numbers in order to spawn.
As the film goes on, the narration expands its scope from this specific experiment to ask which methods—beyond the materialism of Western science—might be useful for reimagining the hard problem of consciousness. Combining scientific speculation, architectural futurism, and AI-generated philosophy, All Is Water suggests that consciousness is not a stable category, and that humans can potentially shift their perspective in order to tune in to the needs, preferences, and spiritual life of other species.
All is Water is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.
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