Text by CLOT Magazine
As part of the programme of the current Royal Academy of Arts (London) exhibition Eco-visionaries, TBA21-Academy is organising the panel discussion Oceans in Crisis with architects Territorial Agency (John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog).
The panel discussion will be held at the Royal Academy of Arts, held in collaboration with the exhibition, which has been curated by Gonzalo Herrero Delicado. The panel opens up a conversation across multiple fields of research, engaging with spatial, poetic, imaginative and scientific explorations, addressing the world’s oceans. The renowned paleobiologist and conservationist Jeremy B. C. Jackson, artists Anjalika Sagar (The Otolith Group) and Ayesha Hameed are invited to imagine alternative ecological futures for the oceans in a discussion moderated by TBA21–Academy director Markus Reymann.
Territorial Agency will share some of their long-term research on the material, technological and ecological changes affecting the ocean’s sensitive ecosystems resulting from the intensification of human activities. Together with their co-panellists, they will transform a series of paradigmatic oceanic sites, urging us to rethink the complex relationship between ocean and land. Violent oil and gas extraction on the continental shelves, sea-level rise, Exclusive Economic Zones, overfishing, intensified shipping, dead zones, and the depletion of the seabed, to name only a few anthropogenic intrusions – are affecting the lives of billions of humans and innumerable other forms of life.
Oceans in Crisis inquires into the entangled processes of the Anthropocene in order to decipher ecocidal and necropolitical instances, calling for collaborative analysis and deep care. The panel discussion places into proximity scientific reasoning and aesthetic sensitivities, data-driven capacities and situated knowledge, traumatic pasts and scenarios of atrophy and dying inscribed in the oceanic space.
