We all meet in the ocean.
The voices in the whorl of the seashell are whispers of future and past, composing and decomposing part-songs in the brine that nurtured the earliest life. The ocean is our mother but we fail to mother her in return.
We meet on the shore, spurred on by the sun, seaweed strands desiccated and reinvigorated by the going and coming of the tide on the rocks.
What is mothered in the deepest submarine trenches, where life clings (joyfully perhaps, or by the very tips of its being) to the hot mineral vents that blossom from the bedrock? Creatures unfound and unknown but no less alive for it. Connected to our human lives by genetic fragments, the consumption of bodies by bodies, the intermingling of our waste. Perhaps the particles of our nervous systems were once mixed together in the burning trail of a shooting star. We have all been here forever. The youngest child is also as old as the mountains.
There are tides in the body, Virginia Woolf writes. We are pulled through time and space, dragged along by currents of thought, social mores, the lure of people and places and things and desires and hungers. The moon turns her pockmarked face on us, exerting a gentle inexorable tug on the particles in the bloodstream.
Do you remember being mothered? Do you remember the arms that held you? Do you remember the eyes that watched you?
Do you remember the sea?
You are mothered by water, too. Rain and milk and groundwater and blood and lake and saliva intermingled in leaky bodies. You are mothered by the bacteria that cling to your skin and colonise your gut and invade your lungs when you laugh and cry. You are mothered by your own salt tears, an ocean in the corner of your eye. You see the sea and the sea sees you.
We all meet in the ocean.
A deep dive into TBA21–Academy
Latai Taumoepeau, “Deep Communion sung in minor (ArchipelaGO, THIS IS NOT A DRILL)”, 2024. Exhibition view of “Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania”, Ocean Space, Venice. Co-commissioned by TBA21–Academy and Artspace, and produced in partnership with OGR Torino. Photo: Giacomo Cosua
I recently caught up with Markus Reymann, director of TBA21–Academy, to talk about the programme’s multifaceted explorations of the interconnectedness of ocean life. Established in 2011, the academy is TBA21's research arm fostering a deeper relationship with the Ocean and other bodies of water through the lens of art to inspire care and action.
At its inception, Reymann explains, they were looking to understand the core interests of TBA21 and the artists they worked with. “We realised that many artists we worked with were looking at the causes, effects, and conditions of change – both positive and negative. We knew we wanted an environmental focus for this programme, but rather than thinking about “the environment” as a whole, we were asking whether there is a system within the environment that really embodies this kind of fluidity and change, where we can actually trace the causes and effects of change. That's how we came to the ocean - as an embodiment of fluidity, change, and movement. And further to that, it became this conceptual tool to untether us from land-based linear binaries.”
Joan Jonas, Moving Off the Land, 2019, Ocean Space, Chiesa di San Lorenzo, Venice. Performance with Ikue Mori and Francesco Migliaccio. Commissioned by TBA21–Academy. Photo Moira Ricci © Joan Jonas
A key part of the programme is about casting off from land-based systems. “We bring artists, scientists, environmentalists, and legal experts together on a boat to think from and with the ocean for two weeks at a time. We wanted to draw together different disciplines and to ask how knowledge around the ocean is created. How is the ocean governed? What is the state of ocean conservation? What is the state of ocean education? The urgency around these questions became clear very quickly.”
TBA21–Academy is unusual in its commitment to deep-dive research and long-term cyclical projects, sitting outside the usual rush of the art world calendar. “For the first four years, we didn’t make or show any art. Jana Winderen and Chris Watson were two of our first long-term fellows; it took us seven or eight years to finish Jana’s project, and Chris’s is still unfinished.” The programme is organised through three-year cycles or “currents”, in which curators are initially asked to take a two-week oceanic journey along with five cross-disciplinary collaborators. “Within six weeks of these journeys, we ask curators to stage a two- or three-day performative conference in which the questions and ideas raised on the journeys are brought to a public forum.” This in turn becomes a jumping-off point for opening up further curatorial projects.
Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta, “The Body of Wainuiātea”, 2024. Exhibition view of “Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania”, Ocean Space, Venice. Co-commissioned by TBA21–Academy and Artspace, and produced in partnership with OGR Torino. Photo: Giacomo Cosua
After several years of working itinerantly, TBA21 inaugurated Ocean Space in Chiesa di San Lorenzo in Venice, restoring and opening a church that had been inaccessible to the public for over one hundred years. “We opened it in 2019 with Joan Jonas’s show Moving Off the Land. We wanted to test the idea that cultural spaces or art centres could hold the possibility of rekindling a relationship to an immediate environment and neighbourhood. And of course, Venice is really a canary in the coal mine when it comes to climate change and sea level rise.” This year’s show at Ocean Space Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania is a “call and response” curated by Taloi Havini, drawing together installations by Pacific islander artists Latai Taumoepeau and Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta. (You can read my review of it on Hyperallergic).
TBA21–Academy also continues to work beyond the walls of its Venice space, often making points of connection in places where artists are not usually seen, such as the United Nations. “Within the UN, there are no officially recognized stakeholder groups for artists or cultural practitioners. Culture is not part of the sustainable development goals. There’s a real lack of transdisciplinary action.”
Usually, if art is included in international development or conservation conferences, it is tacked on as an addition or photo opportunity. However, TBA21 hopes to change this through its participation in Third United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice, in 2025. “We wanted to offer a different proposal from the cultural sector, as an alternative to the competitive model of NGOs that have to compete for funding. We’re collaborating on an exhibition and cultural programme for the conference. It has been a logistical challenge, but it is a response to the constant refrain at these conferences of ‘how do we speak beyond this room?’ We want to open the door and engage with the outside world.”
Read more about TBA21–Academy here
Spotlight on… Elise Guillaume
Film still of Eventual Horizon, 2023. © Elise Guillaume
Elise Guillaume is a Belgian artist whose work explores our complex relationship with nature. Her practice is situated at the intersection of psychology, ecology, and notions of care. Through audiovisual, photographic, and sonic mediums, sometimes manifested as immersive installations, Guillaume is interested in the relationships between psychological health and environmental change. The body is a key element in her work: it becomes a vessel for interpreting the interconnections between the beings that form our world. In her often intimate works, Guillaume explores the possibilities for a renewed relationship with the earth.
Her last film, “Eventual Horizon”, which was filmed in the Arctic, threads together her experience of insomnia, grief, and hope, making a parallel between the experience of mourning a loved one and ecological degradation. Perceiving grief as an active element of hope, “Eventual Horizon” considers the transformative and healing power of these states. The film’s soundscape is created from Arctic field recordings, capturing the sounds of glacier ice melting and the vibrations emitted by these bodies of water. Since April 2024, Elise is a current resident of the EMBracing the Ocean residency programme led by the European Marine Board, during which she is developing a sonic project addressing the psychological impact of climate change and the therapeutic potential of ocean sounds, in collaboration with psychologist Marine Severin and acoustic ecologist Clea Parcerisas.
Website | Follow @elise_guillaume
Unfurling leaves
This article from Atmos explores how, for Black archaeologists, the Atlantic Ocean is an ancestral graveyard. The @slavewrecksproject, an initiative spearheaded by @nmaahc, is on a mission to study the global slave theft by excavating sunken slave ships. The effort unites a network of communities, scientists, and institutions from across the diaspora, spanning from Mozambique to St. Croix. For 31-year-old diver and maritime archaeologist @gabrielle.chantal, part of the practice is tending to these graveyards. The ships and the artifacts are important, but her divers are urged to ask themselves: How was this space used? How do we memorialize it? This includes cleaning up shipwreck sites from ocean debris and plastic pollution, and building art exhibitions on land to raise awareness.
In the mycelium…
Feminist Lecture Programme curatorial programme at Nunhead Cemetery Chapel, London | Aug & Sep 2024
The Nature of Things, curated by Jane Hayes Greenwood at Castor, London | 31 Aug - 28 Sep 2024
Lap-See Lam: Floating Sea Palace at Studio Voltaire, London | 18 Sep - 15 Dec 2024
Embodied Forms: Painting Now at Thaddaeus Ropac, Ely House, London | 2 - 28 Sep 2024
Lisa Price: Transforming Karma at Loom Club, London | 19 Sep 2024
News from Everywhere curated by Olivia Bright at Ravenscourt Park, London | until 22 Sep 2024
School of the Damned degree show at 10 Greatorex Street, London | until 1 Sep 2024
Primordial Soups curated by LATAMesa at Mucciaccia Gallery, London | until 21 Sep 2024
Writing for artists
I’m holding an online back-to-school writing workshop for artists at 7pm on Monday 2nd September. We will explore strategies for artists writing about their own work, whether for an artist statement, website, or residency application. Through a mixture of theory, practical tips, and creative exercises, we will work to grow your confidence in your own voice and in your writing skills.
Pay-what-you-can tickets available here!
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