Master-Symposium: OCEAN INTELLIGENCE

The new interest in nature is not naming a new trend, but the necessity to expand our public space inhabiting it, not only with the institutionalized presence of art and culture, but with questions that represent a transformation on the way we think about the role of art and artists in the invention of a new ground to sense the future. Nature, and so the Oceans, name a complete revolution in the way we sense, in the way we relate organic and non-organic life, in the way we understand gender, generative life, power and life.

It would be wrong to think, therefore, that to say Ocean is to identify a "subject". One could be as radical as saying that to say "Ocean" today is to say "art". Art without the burden of institutional life, without the ideological twists of cultural politics, art as a practice that belongs and should belong to the artists but that needs to socialize with all those that care about life. Or, in other words, to say Oceans is to replace the historically notion of the avant-garde with a code that is not determined by form and the invention of new gestures, but by an investigation of the code of life, placing this as the mission of art.

This means that all those artists directly interested in the process of life under water, nature and new forms of sensing from a non-human centered perspective are, of course, invited. But it also means that all those that are interested in art in its relation to the limits and possibilities to the exhibition or with the structure of our current public life and citizenship must also come. Those not directly interested in thinking that the intelligence of art lies in its radical interest in life as even more important that the first group. Think about the current situation of all the structures constituting the art world, about the impoverishment of a language inherited from past left and liberal social visions and the impossibility of reinventing these dreams under the same premises, under a late-capitalistic economic system and the need of a new sensorium to invent new notions, to build new sentences, to embrace a new idea of equality and social justice. If we think so, we can see that saying Ocean is to say the expansion of the Museums, of the public space... that the Ocean is a source that reprograms our senses and entails a potential of transformation that may affect the future of architecture, of communications, of gender entanglement, of economy, of art.