Text by CLOT Magazine
What if to save our seas and oceans, we should have a deeply intimate relationship with it, and understand its most delicate interconnections from within? How can we become a part of it, and how can technology help us?
Sea Lovers (2020), a film commissioned by TBA21-Academy – the arts organisation dedicated to projects that consider the future of our oceans, follows a group of people who train for a more intimate relationship with the ocean, namely through radical love. The group work towards a sea of love where all creatures help and celebrate each other.
Sea Lovers is written and directed by Ingo Niermann, filmed and edited by Roman Bayarri, and features Ana María Millán and other fellows of the TBA21-Academy expedition #2 The Solomon Exercises, led by Chus Martínez, the renowned Spanish curator, art historian, and writer. That expedition saw the team travelling to the Solomon Islands and embarking into an exploration on How to create a situation where Earth and Ocean questions come together? This is the task and the exercise is to imagine a method to convey and portray human relations with nonhuman species so that we will not only create but support many new scenarios on coexistence, on an education nourished by many transmission codes, where ideas and experiences from art and science take the form of scenarios and possibilities of future politics.
Sea Lovers is screened on the Ocean Archive for a limited time as part of Expedition #3, Life for Beginners. This time a digital expedition, the film is screened along with new podcasts, new artistic commissions, and screenings of films produced during the fellowship cycle.
The astonishing existence with the Ocean now turns into the exercise of giving voice, producing podcasts, making images, combining the bizarre, imaginative flair of a folktale with a profound meditation on questions of isolation and human interaction. That’s us now… with you.
As large parts of the sea are used similarly to the countryside, its liquidity and enormous size sustain substantial differences. The oceans slip away from national and personal liability. In the film, the group of people try to learn to enjoy not just the cute and the intelligent but also the gloomy and the uncanny. They work towards a sea of love through exercise and technology.
Chus Martínez and Ingo Niermann will do an Instagram live conversation Wednesday, April 29, at 7 pm (CET) at TBA21-Academy and Chus Martinez’s Instagram accounts.
