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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.
Mongjoo Son creates her Swing Pavilion series with broken pieces, fishing nets, and fishing gear floating on the sea. She shows viewers high, wide-ranging installations on an extraordinary scale with a dramatic sense of space. Her work presents a place for rest and play, where people can fully enjoy it through activities.
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Atelier NL, which was founded by Nadine Sterk and Lonny van Ryswyck, is a design studio celebrating the richness of the earth and the value of local raw materials. The two artists reshape raw earth elements into everyday objects, reflecting the subtleties of the natural world. Notably, their Clay and Glass project uses locally sourced clay for ceramics and wild sands for glassmaking. This honors cultural heritage and promotes sustainable design. Atelier NL inspires appreciation for our planet’s resources, advocating responsible sourcing and production to foster global environmental consciousness. Their passion-driven research creates tangible connections between humanity and nature, calling for a renewed sense of stewardship for our precious earth.
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Rebecca Moss’s artistic practice explores notions of absurdity, precarity, and instability, and takes a variety of forms across different media. She is drawn to slapstick for its sense of reciprocity inasmuch as our surroundings can act back upon us because we are not always in control. She is inspired by slapstick performances and creates scenarios that stage interactions between human gestures and elemental forces, where an idea or gesture is humorously played out to the point of futility, chaos, or crisis.
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Ari Bayuaji was born in Indonesia in 1975 and immigrated to Canada in 2005. Dividing his time between Montreal and Bali, the artist is known mainly for his art installations, which incorporate found and ready-made objects from different parts of the world, thereby exposing himself to the different mechanisms of cultures. In almost all his artworks, Bayuaji has consistently used found/old objects from around the world as the material and subject matter. He is an expert in conveying aspects of daily life, as his works usually try to show the overlooked artistic value in everyday life through objects and places, and their roles within society.
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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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The ocean is the origin of uncertainty and the beginning of navigation, an opening of the world where dreams of submission and domination meet. According to French philosopher, theorist and writer Michel Serres, it is the origin of noise.
Part cosmic weather report, part geo-strategic briefing, part romantic novella, Ocean Briefings is a series of daily transmissions taking place over the course of the Sea Art Festival. Telling tales of logistical breakdown, geopolitical scrambling, meteorological anxiety and erotic intrigue, it takes inspiration from the instability of a world in the making. For the duration of the festival, it functions as a “subtitle” to Ilgwang Beach, framing the sea in search for signals in an ocean of noise.
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It is said that during the Goryeo Dynasty (918 — 1392), Koreans discovered that whales would eat seaweed after giving birth to recover their strength, and it became a custom to feed seaweed soup to mothers. Even today, on birthdays, along with the congratulatory wishes, the question follows, "Did you eat seaweed soup?" It is the first dish cooked when a new life is born and invokes care, affection, and dedication in the Korean psyche.
In Gijang, this tradition is even stronger: According to research by Gijang County, when a child is born in the region, seaweed soup is served to the family on the ceremonial table every day for a week and every week for a month, to wish for the child’s health and well-being and give strength back to the mother after giving birth.
This installation and studio creates a special place for the seaweed that shaped the local cultures, next to Halmae Shrine and Halbae Shrine, an acknowledgement of a community’s multispecies entanglements and relations. It is a kind of ‘seaweed shrine’.
The artists exploring this natural resource aim at healing the damage that has already been caused and, in a synergic system, produce a material to be used on land with a low impact. However, it is crucial not to view seaweed as another resource to be extracted. In imagining future possibilities, Julia Lohmann and Kayoung Kim take on a regenerative mindset, rather than an exploitative one. The organism is seen as an embedded part of the ecosystem, and it is considered in all its life cycle. Through interdisciplinary, hands-on, creative and holistic approaches the “Seaweed Shrine” showcases new ways of engaging with a local organism and to explore its potential to restore and create.
As members of the Department of Seaweed - an interdisciplinary group dedicated to exploring the cultural, environmental, and sustainable aspects of seaweed and kelp, founded by Julia Lohmann - the artists delve into the vibrant stories of the people in the area, where seaweed and kelp play a significant part in their lives. It explores their relationship with the resources they obtain from nature and the material and psychological impact it has on their daily lives.
The collected materials, exhibited alongside the kelp sculptures, create an immersive experience that allows the public to engage with local stories and evoke a range of emotions.
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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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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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The sea has many faces. Sometimes, it comes to us with a calm smile, sometimes with a storm as if it were angry. Today, people have led an affluent life with the diversity that the sea gives humans. At the same time, people wonder whether they can pass on the earth's ocean to future generations in its entirety.
This installation expresses the symbiotic relationship between people, marine environments and the sea, which is still a base of infinite life that can be restored. In the ocean, the deep sea has a deep interior. Attention moves quietly and slowly, not being swayed by the changes and waves of the busy world. Deep Sea Meditation the feeling of walking along the path of the deep sea, a realm where you can enjoy quiet and deep contemplation away from the hustle and bustle of urban modern life. It also intends a time to look back on the relationship with the sea in the past, and consider a future where our connection with the deep sea hopefully wouldn't be one of exploitation.
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