TBA21–Academy, The Current II: Phenomenal Ocean

Free admission with online registration

Julieta Aranda, Amanda Coulson, DIS, Elena Mazzi, Skye Morét, Francesca Mussi, Katrin Niedermeier, Ingo Niermann, Tabita Rezaire, Marzia Rover, Teresa Solar, Lena Maria Thüring, Alexander Tarakhovsky, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, and with a special contribution from Niño de Elche. 

TBA21–Academy presents a day of ideas for a new ocean language in response to the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate. Led by Chus Martínez, Expedition Leader of The Current II, the second of three annual Convenings exploring the theme “Spheric Ocean.”

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 September 28, 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 is head of the Art Institute at the FHNW Academy of Arts and Design in Basel, Switzerland and Artistic Director of Ocean Space in Venice. She is also the Expedition Leader of The Current, a project initiated by TBA21–Academy (2018–20).

Participants of the Summer School #2 at the Ocean Space September 23–27 are: Hamza Amleh, Vela Arbutina, Céline Maria Brunko, Nadien Cueni, Damien Juillard, Leah Joséphine Nehmert, Jacob Ott, Diogo Pinto (Art Institute, FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel). The Summer School is mentored by Thomas Lempertz, Teresa Solar, Lena Maria Thüring, María Montero Sierra, and Marion Ritzmann with the special participation of Jane da Mosto, Fabio Cavallari, Angela Pomaro, and Microclima.

About The Current
TBA21–Academy’s The Current is concerned with the state of the ocean and the discourse around it and seeks to provide a platform for the cultivation of interdisciplinary thought, the exchange of ideas and new knowledge production. Organised in three-year cycles, the programme centres around annual expeditions at sea and land-based Convenings linked to the exploratory theme of each ocean encounter. Each cycle of The Current is led by one or more Expedition Leaders selected by the Academy, who in turn nominate Fellows–artists, curators, scientists, and other cultural actors–to join a collective research project unfolding over the three years. The Spanish curator Chus Martínez and Danish artist collective SUPERFLEX have been appointed by TBA21–Academy as Expedition Leaders of the second three-year cycle of The Current. Their projects will run in parallel from 2018 to 2020.

About TBA21–Academy
TBA21–Academy leads artists, scientists, and thought-leaders on expeditions of collaborative discovery. Founded by Francesca Thyseen-Bornemisza and led by Director Markus Reymann, the Academy is dedicated to fostering a deeper understanding of the ocean through the lens of art and to engendering creative solutions to its most pressing issues. TBA21–Academy commissions interdisciplinary research that catalyses engagement, stimulates new knowledge, and inspires artistic production. Established in 2011, the nonprofit’s programme is informed by a belief in the power of exchange between disciplines and in the ability of the arts as a vessel for communication, change, and action. 

About Ocean Archive 
Ocean Archive is a digital platform for collaborative research. Designed to be a pedagogical, research, and storytelling tool for a broad audience, the platform aims to translate current knowledge about the ocean into a common ground to enable us to make better decisions for urgently needed policies. Ocean Archive is created to stimulate action and policy change through collaboration and education, and to make visible, discoverable, and understandable a range of perspectives, supporting synergy among art, science, and policy. The ethics of Ocean Archive follow the mission of TBA21–Academy: to establish a community of equal participation, care, and support towards its human and non-human collaborators and users.

Phenomenal Ocean continues with a public programme presented in collaboration with Beta-Local from October 16 to 18. Beta-Local is a Puerto Rican nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting and promoting aesthetic thinking and practice. It is our interest to understand "things" from our context and by our geographical condition of the island the ocean plays a fundamental role in that thought.