 Good afternoon and welcome for those physically present in the auditorium and for those attending the live stream My name is Joelle Vallabrega. I'm curator of performances and public programs here at Modem And we are here today for the second appointment of the year-long series of keynote lectures and screenings by cultural producers thinkers and Scientists devoted to the subject of climate change Entitled radio disaster the program is an homage to philosopher Walter Benjamin's radio broadcast for children Which was devoted to catastrophes around the world such as the 1755 Lisbon earthquake or the Great Mississippi flood of 1927 the series is therefore an attempt to develop a deeper discourse on climate change as a catastrophic and Irreversible change for our planet I'm super excited to be here today with choose Martinez who is the director of the art Institute at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel Martinez has been chief curator at El Museo del Barrio, New York She was the head of department for documentary 13 and member of the core agent group in 2012 She was previously chief curator at Macba in Barcelona Director of the Frankfurter Conspirin and artistic director of the cell rock held in Bilbao Martinez curated the National Pavilion of Catalonia for the 56 Venice Biennial and the Cyprus National Pavilion in 2005 she served as the curatorial alliance for the 14th edition of the instable insta Instable biennial and in 2010 she served as curatorial advisor for the 29th biennial de San Paolo This year Martinez was included in art reviews annual list of the most influential people in the field of contemporary art Starting with the question is the ocean an art space choose Martinez has explored a different concerns with the state of the Ocean and the discourse around it through the three-year program the current commissioned by TBA academy She has engaged with the most pressing issues related to oceans and the contemporary solutions and relations to art Following the talk there will be a dedicated moment for questions So for those present in the auditorium, please keep them for later and for those attending via live stream You can use the chat form The screening will be followed the talk will be followed by the screening of sea lovers by artist and writer in go near man With no further delay it passed the word to choose hello choose and welcome Hola, hello I see my face projected in that screen and it feels really weird. I see myself twice What the pity that I cannot be there with you this afternoon. I hope that the sound is okay I think it is no so you can all hear me the sound is great Fantastic. So thank you for giving me this opportunity to talk about the ocean and I must confess that this the second time that I speak publicly about the ocean even if if I am Been working with it. I felt that I couldn't yet talk about it or articulate my ideas about it the reasons why is probably because it's very dense and very difficult and Also, I don't possess any of the disciplines that normally study the ocean I'm not I'm not a marine biologist and I'm not a scientist and I'm also not an artist So it is very difficult and this is one of the proofs of the important part That I think we need to we need to consider as art institutions as museums are curators How difficult it is actually not to think about the ocean or not to consider the ocean as an ecological event, but also as a cultural Instance and substance that may be integrated into our future programs and future ways of talking learning communicating Educating about climate change and about nature in general I've been struggling with this question and When I was working with Karoline Christof Bakargev at the documentary set team We both were very interested in questions of Multispecies co-evolution and nature in general We have been surrounded by many artists that they consider nature one of the priorities and the integration Of nature as a culture element. So the surpassing of the binary distinction the dialectical distinction in between culture and nation and and nature on the other hand You don't go really deep into into the aspects of Of the problem. So when I was invited by TVA 21 Academy to engage with questions of the ocean I discovered that I knew nothing about the ocean even if myself I am from a family That during many generations. We are born in the ocean type of I think it's like 125 meters from my Parents house to the ocean. So I'm from the north coast of Spain but but it is with kind of a horror that you discover that you You are next to it living with it in the narratives in the experience in the climate But actually you don't know anything or what you don't know is it's not knowledge But some sort of a sensation and your sensation is kind of filter by the fact that there's an immense difference in between The massive presence of the ocean and the human and actually you have been suppressing your knowledge of the ocean You have been trying not to know so you know labor and the ocean You know suffering and the ocean, you know climate and the ocean and you just I don't think that much About it at all you experience it. So when they invite me to to create Expeditions and to deal with the question of the ocean. I was struggling with it because Again, the ocean was appearing in the narratives of science and in the narratives of those Interested in the ocean as another interest as another subject, but also as as another territory. So Many many times when people address the ocean, they are talking about that only five percent of the ocean is known So we humans we tend to talk about it as a territory as a territory That's still unknown and we may conquer. So when we talk about technology We so many times address the fact that our technologies are not just now adjusted To the depth the fact that our cameras cannot capture What it's inside the ocean that our cranes and our ships cannot go deep enough To actually tell us how many minerals and how many surprises and resources may be there for us to exploit So I was kind of struggling what doesn't mean actually as a curator And as a person very interested in as I said surpassing the none like the binaries of our of our way of thinking to deal with the ocean and I was giving myself the chance to think about it as a method So is it possible to think of the ocean as a method in other words? Would it possible to actually think that the ocean is another name for philosophy and you may say But why do we need actually to replace the name of philosophy? By the ocean is that necessary and I would say it's not Necessary, but it would be very convenient to think about questions of climate change and nature as we were thinking in the past About the big questions of how to come How to come to terms with new New notions and if you come to terms with new notions, what do you need? What do you need to actually invent a vocabulary that would name what you experience in a complete different manner? You will need experience and since experience is what provides a new naming a new naming May provide a new order a new way of relation or relating the human with the ocean The human with the natural order the human with the species living there and so on and so forth So it was very important for me not to think about the ocean as water Not to think about the ocean as a container, which is very dynamic and of course has certain traits that are incredibly also because we as humans cannot live inside it So the ocean already possess some sort of a symbolic Character because we cannot live inside the ocean. It's a territory that we may conquer But if we conquer it we would need all the time tools and appliances to go inside it To be able to live there. So even that possession is a mediated possession We cannot really fulfill the dream of totally being able to live and breathe inside that ocean Even if there is of course many experiments that deal with the possibility of exo-exkelete that we can just wear But all of those narratives and telling about the ocean are very very embedded into the questions of a territory that we need to expand or gain on earth So the colonial mind is totally there. Every time that we talk about a new entity, we almost without noticing it, we name a new possibility for us humans A new possibility of getting bigger, of enhancing So thinking about the ocean as a philosophy would mean thinking about the ocean, about how this substance which is full of life And it has its own agency and it's full of its own logic may help us to think differently and then shape our language first, shape our mind second So one possible question is through thinking the ocean can our mind and brain become much more of the brain of a fish or the brain of a different intelligence The question of the future and the future of intelligence, not only artificial but naturally intelligence in interrelation, means also a modification of our own organs So one of the considerations, if we think about the ocean, is that of course many of us and many of those of colonized territories don't even know how to swim So the film that we are going to see tonight, The Sea Lovers, is part of a reflection onto the idea that before coming to a thinking and before coming to anything, we need an experience That is an experience that would help to train our body to become less human To become less human does not mean to become less valuable as a human, but to become a paradoxical human body, a body that is at the same time human and non-human A body that is at the same time human and a mermaid, human and a fish, human and a turtle, human and the organs of the human acting, performing like the organs of fishes, like the organs of the sea So this that may seem metaphorical and poetic is actually a very important thinking because otherwise we cannot even consider facts that are very important and also very obvious for those that have organs that perform differently For example, turtles, they see in the water we do fishes, they perceive the reality in a completely different manner as we do, their stomachs, their brains, their mouths, their eyes, their skins Everything is made for a completely different environment, it means that their intelligence and their way of absorbing this environment is also completely different from ours But since we are kind of aiming to a coexistence, this coexistence cannot be framed in the context of tolerating, it's not that the fishes need to tolerate us or us need to tolerate the different environments But we need to come to a real understanding and a comprehension of what these other forms of lives entail and how we need to be able to get modified in other words So in one of the expeditions, the expeditions that they were conceived with TBA 21 Academy are kind of trips where artists, curators, like one curator, me But artists and scientists come together in order to foster a conversation on the possible togetherness that different fields of knowledge make great around the question of the ocean Since none of us coming from the art field know a lot about science, artists much more because they are interested and they research in it One of the most important subjects was the subject of experience, how does a scientist experience the ocean and explore and inquire the ocean and how does an artist explore and inquire and experience the ocean Is there any similitude? Is there something that comes together? And if yes, we need to go to the simple things, we cannot breathe inside there, we can float, we can go and submerge ourselves, we need gear If we need gear, we need to understand that we are mediated and so on and so forth So we have been trying to, during the course of that trip, that it was called the Solomon exercises, we went to the Pacific to the Solomon Islands And we have been having very long conversations about something very simple, how could we for example integrate the ocean in the school curricula Would it be advisable that every public school and every school would actually introduce the question of the ocean? What if the question of the ocean is not relevant for those living in contexts like the urban or context without or not close to the ocean? Why then is the ocean important? The ocean would be then important for the reasons that I was trying to name, the question of thinking method through water And then we were developing exercises, simple exercises of becoming, becoming an animal for a couple of days, becoming a turtle, becoming a fish, moving like a fish, acting like a fish Having the choreography of fishes in togetherness, fishes are moving in stools so they have some sense of the collective, this collective is synchronized Learning with the scientists to synchronize ourselves as if we were not humans We call it plane, so we were kind of playing with our body, human body, in order to become something different than we are So that's how the movie came to life, The Sea Lovers, where different actors are having some sort of a choreography in the ocean Asking themselves about this moment of losing an awareness of the body that we got, losing an awareness of the function of the organs that we got And kind of intaking in the ocean, a different function as a human So it's something in between daydreaming, thinking and perceiving that every one of you can super simply kind of rehearse So imagine that this summer after seeing the movie you would go hopefully to Woda, to a river or to the ocean and you would be able to perform And this performance is a little bit silly, it's a little bit idiotic because it's actually completely framed by our limitations and you need to embrace that silliness You need to embrace it in order to become a little bit of a child, a little bit naive, a little bit playful, in order to be able to relate And this type of relation is not an argumentative relation, but it's a relation that is based in the storytelling performed by experience So there is a storytelling that is performed by the tongue, that's performed by language, but there's also a storytelling performed by the ocean in itself And this comes back to the question of the ocean having an agency, so one of the big problems that I've been encountering when I was dealing with the ocean is that every one of us humans We want to rescue, we want to act, we want to stop using plastic, we want to stop throwing things into the ocean, we want to stop to pollute and we should stop doing all of this By framing our relationship like that we are also kind of patronizing again the ocean, imposing our agency and our capability of both destroying the ocean and then rescuing the ocean Both are symmetrical, we are capable of total destruction, of the total annihilation of the ocean, but we are also capable of rescuing it apparently So in these narratives the ocean has no agency, the ocean in itself cannot say anything, and you would say but what can the ocean say, the ocean cannot speak But the ocean can perform, and the ocean has and is kind of alive through many different intelligences, and getting to know them better implies not only getting to know the details of how those intelligent creatures work but also how we are able to be listening to those intelligences, so I would say that one primary important exercise would be the exercise of imagining the ocean as a storyteller And you would tell me but why do I need to imagine the ocean as a storyteller, and I tell you because through and I was talking about philosophy, storytelling is antagonistic to philosophy If you study philosophy, you would be trained to develop arguments, those arguments they come to life if there is a distance in between you and your object of study If the object of study is the ocean, you immediately need to implement a distance in between you and what you want to know the ocean and through that distance it comes an argument Then the ocean would have another argument if the ocean could talk to you and be philosophical with you and then both of us would try to gain in that kind of argumentative war For dialectical thinking, there is always some sort of a sublimation, so every time that there is two arguments, one has better ground and the one with a better ground has more power and then it goes forward So there is always this exercise of annihilating one part of the argumentative body and going forward with some sort of a Darwinistic argumentative philosophical way of thinking In storytelling on the contrary, if the ocean would be a storyteller, it's totally unnecessary to come up with arguments, in storytelling everything is about relating and finding a way of telling a story that may or may not have a moral But telling a story that its main aim is to make the bodies relate through some sort of an incredible empathy, some sort of coming to terms with the fantasy elements in order to retranslate them in a sensorial way So storytelling, you like it or not, for me has been coming a really interesting in opposition to philosophy element that may allow us to think that also the ocean has its own agency and in storytelling there is no winner But it's some sort of a coming closer through the senses, so every time we swim, every time that we are inside, we could say that we are experiencing the ocean as a storyteller So that may be all very abstract, I'm going on and on about that, so so very difficult not to be in the room and being able to perceive your faces, but to summarize my thinking, I must say that I engage into that exercise because my dream is actually to see that in the programming of institutions in the working with artists we kind of soften the walls of the of the museums and exhibition spaces and we just more and more are able to convey these experiences that I am relating and referring and trying to describe to you into the into the context of the institutional world, that's why I've been writing quite a lot about the ocean as an art space, without at the beginning knowing exactly what do I mean by it, but more and more what I mean by it is actually a literal meaning that it would be really nice to understand that there is certain traits of the agency of nature that we are able to translate into the exhibition spaces, these may take decades, because we have been really trained in a really heavy way, we have been trained to understand the walls, we have been also trained to understand the neutrality of its whiteness, and I'm now asking you to understand the possibility of those walls being blue, being liquid, being fluid, having waves, having winds, having moods, having tempests and having disasters. And this is a necessary event that is important in order to transform the way we relate also as community or as communities in plural. So, after those expeditions and you are going to see the movie The Sea Lovers where was one of the results of these trips. I've been trying to produce projects with artists so in the last three years, or two and a half, I've been very invested in working with several artists. And in the last year and a half I've been like very deeply working with two particular artists that I wanted to introduce to you this afternoon. One is Taloi Habini, an artist from the Solomon Islands, actually from the island of Bougainville, which is in between the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, and from the island of Bukka, and the other is a Swiss artist, Claudia Comte. They were both like in entanglement with the expedition, Claudia Comte participated in the expedition where The Sea Lovers was also, no it was the expedition before, sorry, one of the trips that we did to New Zealand. And Claudia is an artist that comes from Bali, so a space without the ocean, and Taloi Habini is the country, it's an artist coming from the ocean and actually working and being very invested in and understanding of the ocean. So the image that you have now on the screen belongs to a cycle that I am going to be living for two years, that I call the soul expanding ocean. I thought that since as I said, we so many times think about the ocean as a territory, it would be nice to understand that what is expanding is not our territory from Earth to the sea, but our own soul or our own possibility of expanding and understanding through sensory experiences. So we plan, we have like the foundation TVA 21 Academy. They have a space in Venice that they restore, and they are able to use for a decade called the ocean space and the ocean space a very particular space, because it's actually a former church, the church of San Lorenzo. And that church actually you have a roof, but it's a space which is really not institutional as you know the mudam for example, is a space without climatization. So it's a church that's very cold in the winter and it's very hot in the summer, and it has a roof, and it's very high, it means that the scale of the human is very relative. The human has been relativized for religious reasons, so that we actually come to terms with the presence of God in the temple that this has been, it has been designed for an assembly, or for a convening for a coming together. And on the other hand, you know, it has a dimension that it makes really difficult to exhibit certain things. The plan was to invite Taloi Habini, Taloi works mostly with video, video installations and sculpture. She is the best at understanding the history of exploitation and colonialism in the in the Pacific, and she is working many times with archives of images that belong to the past, that she kind of entangles with new documentary images of the situation of her island and the in the present. So, you know, a situation of exploitation, of lack of autonomy and self determination of absolutely despising of the of the knowledge of the indigenous people, and also of their of their way of living, and if of their forms of life, in other words, so she has been very vindicative of all these aspects in her practice. So I wanted to invite her to produce a new exhibition thinking about video at that time in the ocean space. And then all of a sudden, the pandemic happened, and she is based in Australia. So she couldn't really travel to Venice. And I thought that we were about to cancel and it was kind of really begging her not to cancel the project because it was a new commission for me as a curator. It's also a new opportunity to relearn everything I know, and the complete different light and also to bring issues to the public and the public sphere that are really, really relevant and important, even more so in these times of restriction. So we have been working for a long time, and we came to the, to the conclusion that without knowing the site and being able to travel to Venice, it's almost impossible to produce a piece that it would be a piece, a sculptural piece, or a video installation. And she came to the idea that the only thing that she could give to us is again her own island. So we started the conversation with the idea of generosity. Since we cannot travel, we need to connect. Since we cannot have a real presence of all of us in the place, we need to bring that presence through a symbolic form. Symbolic form is the form of her own island. So if we just start by that, giving the giving of the island, she's also giving us the ocean with the island. So what you see in the image is the shape of the island of Bucca, and you see surrounded by the shape of the island of Bucca, the ocean of Bucca, which is the ocean of the Solomon. And by seeing the ocean, we start activating our senses to listen to the ocean. So she proposed 22 channel sound installation, which is articulated in two parts. Perhaps we can see different images. So now we can move. Another one. Yeah, stop here. So one, one part of the project was talloy being part of an expedition, a real scientific exhibition expedition, organized by Schmidt ocean, which is a scientific foundation. In that expedition, talloy encounter the way of mapping and the way of measuring time by modern science. Of course, you knew already. But in modern science, the depth of the ocean is explored through sound. You know, it's a sonic, it's a sonic message that that signal that is sent. And then by reading the time it takes to the signal to be like coming back to us. The maps are provide so many questions came to her mind. I remember incredible conversations when she was on the boat. And then she's saying fundamental things like modern science is mapping a territory that already has maps. Those maps are made by the indigenous people and the culture of those indigenous people that with their knowledge, they have been mapping their territory. Modern science is giving names to those territories that already have names, indigenous people and indigenous knowledge have been given names to those territories. Modern science is defining time in a modern way with the devices and the technologies that modern science is using to a time that already has a dimension that I mentioned that the indigenous people and indigenous knowledge gave to that time. It was really interesting to talk to Taloi about all these things and and her accepting, of course, the methodologies of modern science, but modern science been much more reluctant to understand indigenous knowledge and to give a place and a dimension inside to those knowledges. So by her giving us the island, she gave us also those knowledges, those understandings of the territory, those names, those times. So perhaps you can go to the next slide. So she proposed to listen and to listen means also to communicate, because listen and communicating in her culture is kind of synchrone, it's kind of happened at the same time. So she asked two musicians, Mario Celestino and Ben, yeah, the name would come back to me, I'm really bad with names, but it was a drummer and a flutist to compose music, to compose for her some sort of a communicative code that is normally used to communicate in the island for the rituals for the events for the communities and for the different islands, the wind and the water acts as a, you know, as a substance that help people to communicate through the vibration and through the rhythm. So she kind of mixed those new, this new composition with the hydrophone recordings that she was doing during her expedition in the Schmidt Ocean. And in the middle of these two substance, the substance of the traditional vernacular music and the substance of modern science recording, she plays some historical recordings of the rituals of her own community in Bucca, of her own people singing and chanting in very important moments, moments of birth and moments of death. So what you are seeing in the image, and I, yeah, it's kind of difficult to convey sound, what you are seeing is actually the installation, which is a sonic installation. So she wanted to go with the logic of the church, and the logic of the church is the logic of the sound, the sound of the mass, the sound of the voice in order to congregate. You congregate in the church, you congregate in the island, you congregate in the church, you congregate in the ocean, you congregate in the church, you congregate through sound. You communicate with those on the other side through this kind of sound that she has been able to send to us. So our island here and her island there, all of a sudden they are present with each other. As I said, it's very difficult to explain it if you did not experience, but hopefully you would be able to go to Venice at a certain point and sit there and listen to that really, really moving substance that she did for us. So perhaps you can move through the slides a little bit. So this is another view, you can see also how high and almost how small this very, very large curtains and elements, but in relationship to the architecture of the church, they look small. Go farther. Another one. Yeah, you can see it from different angles. And more like that was not go further because it's a video which is just a drone. Another one. Yeah. And the second artist that I was mentioning is Claudia Comte. You can go one further. Another one. And another one. Now perhaps the past one. Yeah, we can stop here. So Claudia, as I said, was participant of one of the expeditions my first expedition with TVA 21 Academy and 20 like the Academy has also another endeavor which is a sanctuary for fishes like a reservoir that is trying to regenerate the reef coral in the island of Jamaica. She was supposed to invite Claudia Comte to a residency to, to a program where she could actually come to terms with the environment, and Claudia normally works with installation sculpture and painting, and also video lately. She has been also working with vernacular materials. She's very interested in the in the memoir into the into how actually a tree or a forest keeps a certain memory of the weather. And the memory of the word of the weather is record in the in the rings, you know, that are at the center at the core of the tree, and how trees are completely sensitive to the environment and we can learn from the environment through the trees. She has been doing sculptures with those trees, and she was fascinated by those trees that they perish in a, in a, in a storm in the those tropical storms and inside those trees, she kind of car in a in a direct carbon method corals. So, for the period of three, three months, she has been working hand in hand with boot covers of the island of Jamaica, and she has been producing corals, and those corals, of course, they, they refer to the necessity of regenerate in the reefs. Many of you may not know that corals are really essential in the production of oxygen, and that corals and forest are as equally important in the production of the oxygen of our planet. But also that corals are very particular symbiosis in between an animal and a plant, and that they are incredibly incredibly sensitive to virus. What I discovered studying the question of the of the corals is that because of the acidity of the waters, of course, because of pollution, because of climate change, they have been very, very affected. But they have been affected mostly through the transformation of that the circumstances. So the sea is full of virus and the virus of the seas are really, really important because they control the bacteriological life in the ocean. So the ocean without virus would be not would not be alive. So the viruses control the bacteria so that the bacteria can produce life. So it's actually a very good relationship that is there. So when the circumstances are altered, the virus increment and they start to attack the living beings so they totally kill the sea eagles at the beginning and then the reefs so they the bleaching of the reef is also a process where viruses play a fundamental role. To cut the story short, the question of understanding what are the micro elements that get activated in a negative way to destroy the reef has been one of the main elements of research of Claudia, the difficulty is how to translate all these elements of research into an sculptural work and an installation so you can go farther. So we have been working really quite for a very long time, more than two years. She produced these families of corals. These corals came from the core of those trees. These trees being in the in the coast are trees that know the corals know about the corals, know about the winds, know about the waters, know about the tempest and know about all the disasters that actually work in some sort of entanglement of the elements. So she has been carving those corals forming this family. So there is two families of corals. We only exhibit one of those families, this group that you can see. And then in a handmade mana, she produced this wall painting that has the form of the curve of a scallop. It's also very interesting that some of the forms of nature cannot refer to a dynamic and elements that are abstract or invisible so the waves have the form of a curve, and the clamps very often also are curvy. So what the ocean does is how the ocean looks like. So the wall painting in the first room refers to the morning, the morning light in the reef, the light entering the white, the light reflecting, you don't see it. In the plinth of the family of corals there is glass. So in the glass the corals reflect the water, the waves of the sea reflect, the light reflects, the curve reflects. And there is an incredible dynamism that it gets produced in between all these elements that work in entanglement with each other. In the second room, I think you need to go farther now. I think it's kind of farther away in the presentation. So this is another view of the same room. You can see that the work is transformed in a gradient. So the colors, like in the reef, they are brighter and brighter when the light is, you know, it's kind of closer to the surface of the water. So you can go farther. Here you can see Claudia working first with the, with the, I don't know how to call it, this kind of electric chain saw that she uses to shape the super big trees at the beginning. Another slide. This is a cactus that she put in the reef that is used as a platform to corals to regenerate. You can go farther. This is another one. You can go farther away so you can see the good covers here. Yeah, this is the second room. So this is the room of the night. In the night in the depth. Our eyes are not cannot see. So here the, the mural, the wall painting is made of bioluminescent colors. As you must say many animals possess bioluminescent pigments that they get activated. They are able to send signals for life for danger for communication purposes. And since we humans did cameras that only resemble our eyes. For many, many years impossible to capture the richness of the bioluminescent signals. So it has been only when the cameras are adapted to the depth and also to the orthotic, orthotic nerve of animals that we have been able to understand how they work and how their skins are not only skins, but organs that are also broadcasting somehow their skins are screens. So in the center of the second room, we have a cube, which is a digital cube where forms of corals are are rehearsed. We're working together with a group that is called Coral Morphologics. And it's very important to know in the regeneration process of the coral reefs. If you plant a coral form, but the coral form regenerate equally to whatever form, or are they also sensitive to form and composition. So to say is every platform, every ground, okay for a regeneration. There are corals, almost artists that are also sensitive to, to how the form look like. And apparently it is so that they are sensitive to form, and they, they regenerate differently depending on the form. Scientists have been kind of recording and in a big data manner, they have been studying the forms of the coral. So what you see in the second room is this digital forms that they are coming and going. And you see also the, the mural also handmade, which is an incredible effort, totally possessed by the view luminous and power creating a complete different dialogue, nothing between the sculptures and the reef, like in the same, like in the first room, but in between the skin of the animals and the corals themselves as a digital presence. So you can go further in the presentation, like you can see. So I forgot to say that this exhibition opened only a month ago in the Tizen Borne Misa National Museum in Madrid. Yeah, this is kind of the two projects that I've been mostly working very intensely, very intensely on in the last two years, and I wanted to share with you so probably now it's a good time to open for questions and also clarifications, which is probably better because I mean, I feel I'm talking to the screen like nonstop so I kind of lose touch of, of you, so I would love to have, you know, a possibility of entanglement. Thank you choose that was really inspiring. Are there any questions from the auditorium. What's the sound okay. The sound was perfect. Great, because that's one of the most important things to connect with. So there's one question from the auditorium one second. Thank you for a very interesting presentation. You mentioned that you were looking earlier on you mentioned communication between animals. Did you study that at all for instance. Well, the octopus for one uses color and and and texture and and even it's ink to communicate. I'm fascinated because you know, I am equally today I did not talk about it because it demands that I would be in the space to tell you but I am possessed by by decentralization. When we talk about the colonizing, we are normally talking about territories and ideas of power that are related to the human. But I do think that one of the of the most effective way of the colonizing the mind and the territories would be also to the colonize the senses. In order to the colonize the senses, it means that we need to understand differently, how our senses relate. So, in scientific descriptions, every time that we get a description of a species and also of the performance of our senses. There is something at the peak normally the human and normally the human senses are at the peak at the peak of the senses of the human is the brain the brain would be like the president of all the senses that capitalizes all the actions and the rest of the senses and organs that we have. And that is related to the brain. It has been very important for me to get to know scientists like for example Alex Jordan, which has its laboratory at the Max Plan Institute in constants and Alex Jordan has been a primordial researcher into the intelligences of fish, and he discovered that fishes can can recognize their image in the mirror. If fishes can recognize the image in the mirror, it means that the pyramid as we know it's already broken, because after the human will not come the ape or the mammals but it would come the fish and the fish were kind of down in that pyramid. One of the fights the idea that a certain intelligence is in the possession of mammals, and those that are not mammals don't possess the same intelligence. So the shape of the human and the idea of the body of the human and the mammal has had an incredible influence in that, in that perception. In science, we have been discovering that the brain is not only a centralized organ, but some of the cells of the brain, you know, the ones that are able to produce synapsee are also present in our gut. So some people that don't like certain food, they don't like it not because it's a question of taste, but it's a question of the signaling system that is also in our gut signaling from the gut acting as a brain to the brain. So already in science and many discoveries are actually pointing to a completely different communicative system that is not all the time referring to that center referring to that peak referring to that pyramid. So I think that also following your question, these has been super motivating in science to push scientific research into understanding the very organs, the very skin, the very eyes of those animals in order to understand the signaling and the language that they use. We are in touch with we I mean in TVA 21 Academy, one of our really great friends is David Gruba, and David Gruba is a scientist, marine biologist, and he's very invested now in probably the most important and large research into the codifying the language of the whales. Probably the codifying already sounds horrible because it's every time that you say the codifying it means only that it's the codifier so that humans can understand it. But what it means is actually to understand the ways that their intelligence understands itself and we don't understand so it's clear that the way for they don't understand perfectly what they say. And we actually now we know they talk and we know that they are understanding what they say, so it's not only like some sort of mystical entanglement that they talk and by a mystery performance. They act upon what they say, no they understand what they say so I think that as your question is referring to, it's an immense moment of discovery of this intercommunicative possibilities that may affect the way that we perform and design technology that we perform and design education that we perform and design our work with institutions because imagine ourselves we are thinking that the white cube is a cube is a box and it's white and in the whiteness it kind of signalizing neutrality so our metaphors to deal with communication and what communication says what the white cube says to art to culture. It's really rudimentary. So that's why I think that we need to get bioluminescent we need to get octopus and waley in order to to produce a new cultural and artistic scenarios. Thank you. Another question from the auditorium. Hello. Thank you for your very inspirational talk. And thank you for thinking outside the box. I'm interested in the scientists you had a relation with in this project. Did it help in any how do you think it helped in any how of letting them know to think about the ocean in a in a philosophical way as a cultural space. Was that something new to them and do you think it could be beneficial in helping the ocean regenerate. That's such a beautiful question. I was trembling when they found the I think during the comment we got in touch with many scientists. And at the beginning I was very reluctant and my reluctancy came from the fact that when I was a student, I always saw people referring to science as better than us. So there is a level of culture and we are some sort of a rudimentary. Human so I don't know how to call it. And then the scientists are possessed by some sort of a modern gift of a retranslating culture into a bigger dimension, a much brighter dimension of happiness and success. I thought, wow, working with scientists. It's going to be really challenging because they may be in total opposition and then how to gain them to the other side. And to my surprise, what I discovered is that science is suffering a lot. Because science is also even more, even more subject to questions of funding and to results than we are. And they think as a community they have been losing the opportunity and the possibility of becoming speculative. And they think that the speculative science is really primordial to integrate these courses of gender nature race post-coloniality that they have not been able to actually absorb and incorporate because of this lack of speculation and this kind of push towards goals. I was incredibly surprised when I was presenting and talking to them about the idea of thinking about the ocean as a philosophical substance. And I still remember one of my dear friends, marine biologist Mara Hart, starting crying and saying, you know what, in art, you are able to say this and I believe that what you are saying, I believe on it literally, but I cannot say that as a scientist and I want to be able to say it. So I kind of sense, you know, in the 90s, in the mid 90s, many art spaces started to invite philosophers to talk in our public programs. And when we did so, we forgot that we were kind of answering to the fact that many philosophy departments all over, they were disappearing and that the philosopher was kind of finding a new shelter into the art space. And I got a similar feeling now working with scientists. They think that they need that shelter. And for the first time, the relationship is non-hierarchical. It's not about scientists telling us what to think or how to look at the real, but I feel a real interest from the field of science and scientists of producing a new entanglement and actually expanding their own space through our space. So I think that it's an enormous potential in producing alliances, not all over of course, because as you know, science is also very framed by economical interest and they are not that free. I mean, it's not that art and artists and institutions, we are super free because we are also very conditioned by the lack of funding, but I must say that their funding is very conditioned by their providing certain results. So I think that in the next decade, we are going to see an evolution in that conversation that's going to be really interesting one. I also had a question. You briefly said it before but how has the pandemic changed your way of curating and are there elements that you would like to maintain in the future as well. Well, I think that I never before thought that I could use different channels that very honestly like social media conversations and different methods to produce. Right now I see that every opportunity to be with artists and every space to be with artists and produce with artists every language to produce a storytelling and a relation is a it's a welcoming one. So, probably, I'm not waiting. I became more active. And I think that it's not important to wait for the circumstance but to produce them in whatever humble way, because every circumstance would produce a possibility of relating. And this is the most important thing I did not discover it through the pandemic I must tell you that the most important thing for me is friendship. And, and I rediscovered through the I re actualize that friendship is also something that interests me greatly in my curatorial work and in my work. It would be really, really impossible to work without love and to work with love. It's so easy in every in every circumstance and how to actually make it happen. I think I one of the most amazing things is that I've been able to make friends during the pandemic. So, for that reason, I'm not that depressed, I think that it has been horrible, but, but I made some incredible friendships. Through channels like this. So it's, yeah, it has been an incredible. I would not say lesson because it's not a lesson but a different training going back to the sea lovers. I've been training my own senses to make friends, even if it's almost impossible to make friends, if you don't meet. So that that already proves that we can condition ourselves and modify our organs towards what is important for us. And for me, it's fundamental because without friendship I cannot. I cannot do anything I'm paralyzed. So the final question with which we could close the Q&A from the YouTube channel, which is what has been the most interesting discovery you have made or that has impacted you the most while working in artistic projects that aim to raise awareness on the value of the ocean. And are these processes a sense of the value of the intelligence of other forms of life that nobody else processes, maybe all the disciplines and, and, and, you know, knowledges may respect it and may study it, but they sense it and they made sense it. We cannot take it seriously somehow we cannot make it relevant for our own life. And, and this is so humbling, and also so beautiful and so joyful that I cannot be more thankful to artists for, for really making it happen. Thank you, choose. So I would like to remind everyone that in a few minutes the the screening will begin for those attending via live stream, you have to reconnect from muddam's website. And the next episode of Radio Disaster will take place on the 18th of July with the screening of Alps by Armin Link. For more information, you can check muddam.com. Thank you to everyone. Thank you.