International artists declare their feelings on Mediterranean.
This summer in collaboration with Es Baluard Museum duaring 1 – 2 July 2021 period we will present Video Art works of 14 artists reflecting on Mediterranean sea.
Es Baluard Museum, Palma de Mallorca
Since 2019 Maritima 01, contemporary art project, promoting the protection of the Mediterranean to raise public awareness of the environmental challenges affecting the Mediterranean sea.
Elena Posokhova, curator of Maritima01 project and festival program:
"We believe that the most profound we can dive into this topic by connecting artists working together with scientists, to make collaborative projects that draw general public attention to the environmental issues, such as climate change or marine biodiversity extinction. In coming months we will present artists and scientists with their words about the artistic projects that resulted from their collaboration within the framework of the artistic residency of Maritima01.
Mediterranean Sea had been a cradle of great empires and rich cultures and a source of myths, legends, art and discoveries for more than three thousand years - and to this day it shapes relationships between people. It is a substance that has a life of its own - it breathes, it changes its shape, it changes its state - from utter serenity to ardent storms. It is a microcosm full of mysteries, incredible creatures and fascinating processes. Over the centuries, we have ravenously consumed and exploited the resources of the sea through overfishing, plastic pollution, the concreting of the coast etc. And this is a planetary danger."
We ask artists participants to think about what is Mediterranean for them and we are happy to share the answers:
MUSTAPHA AZERUAL
An experimental artist of the digital generation, in ten years he has become emblematic of a photograph that is reset before our eyes.
«My relationship with the Mediterranean is strongly linked to the special light around the Mediterranean, also, for me the Mediterranean is a sea full of history and legends. First of all I am a photographer and I use video because it intervenes in a natural prolongation of the photography. I use the video in an experimental way in order to re-transcribe experiments of light.
My work "Presance" is questioning our relationship with the visible and the invisible, for me this work tends to suggest that the visible constitutes a tiny fraction of what surrounds us and of what human beings can perceive, what is beyond, according to me, is the universe of the sensitive, what goes beyond vision, touch…”.
MIGUEL SBASTIDA
A visual artist working across sculpture, video installation and site-specific performance, in an investigation around the intersections of geologic time, cultural ecologies and climate breakdown. In his works, he investigates the geo-poetics of matter and environmental processes through ontological, scientific, eco-critic, and post-humanist perspectives.
“My relationship with the sea is based around Andalucía, where I learnt to sail and then taught it for many years. I do video art because it`s my favorite way for documenting site-specific performances. It is time-based like my interventions, and it develops into more than mere documental footage. My work “High Tide” explores the movement of the tides, and the erosive action of the ocean as a form of non-human labor that is constantly at play. It is also connected to ideas of induced sea-level rise and the ocean as a time-marking device.”
KALIE GRANIER
An interdisciplinary California-based French artist and curator. Her artistic practice explores the natural world below the surface and the interdependence between everything. She questions the links between our underwater environments, their ecosystems, and our human bodies in the Capitalocene era in order to reveal social and ecological imbalances while imagining alternatives for a more equitable future.
“Looking at the sea is a plenitude. Being emerged into the sea is a transcendence. Beyond being my source for inspiration and fantasies, the sea is our inheritance, our ancestors. Re-connecting with the sea is the pursuit of our century.
As I grew up close to the Mediterranean sea - I was always fascinated by the underwater environment and, their ecosystems. Experimenting with my surroundings is feeding my humility for the natural world. As an interdisciplinary artist, video is the medium that allows me to create the new narratives of tomorrow from another perspective and dig deeper into collaborative and participative experiences in dialogue with other disciplines and practices.
My “film Priority Habitat” is a shamanic dance that explores the underwater movement of the Marine Plant Posidonia Oceanica as a quest for survival. This project depicts the spiritual journey of a hybrid being’s metamorphosis into a creature half-human half plant. At the border of two living species. This project sits at the intersection of art, performance, science, ecological commitment, and our actions in the face of global warming.”
MARIAGRAZIA PONTORNO
Mariagrazia Pontorno was born in Catania in 1978. She lives and works in Rome. Since 2004 she has taught Multimedia Installations at the Accademia di Belle Arti.
Her research is focused on the relationship natural/artificial. She builds life like settings inspired by a vision where the borders between fiction and reality are lyrically blurred.
In artist's recent works, the intersection between reality and material, art and science, digitally reconstructed fiction and archival images has become more complex.
Her work Pinna Nobilis Golden Moon was realised in framework of Maritima residency program in collaboration with scientists of laboratory Valencia and Calpe and Maritima team. Acqua Foundation provided the financal support of film production.
«Mediterranean for me is synonymous with home. I was born in Sicily, raised with the myths that crowd the island, and as a child the greatest fun was swimming in Acitrezza, the place where the myth of Ulysses and the Cyclops Polyphemus is set.
Video art is one of my media, because of the passion for cinema but also a pictorial idea of the moving image connected to the Italian tradition.
«Nobilis Golden Moon» is a movie straddling two pandemics and two full moons. A documentary in the moonlight, about the relationship between scientific thought and magical one, told through Pinna Nobilis, the largest bivalve in the Mediterranean», said Pontorno.
NIKOLAJ LARSEN
For more than a decade Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen (Denmark originally, France living) has been working in a variety of media and materials to create visual responses to challenges within today’s society. Migration and disempowerment are some of his main areas of research. Larsen’s work can seen as poetic visual anthropology. Arguably, Larsen has earned his international reputation as a filmmaker and video-installation artist, but parallel to this production is a comprehensive production of photography and sculptures.
“The Mediterranean is a complex entity, impossible to encapsulate in a short paragraph. It is history, trade, wars, religion. It is marine ecology, it is beauty, tourism, culture - gastronomy, art, poetry, film; luxury and leisure. But it is also a hotspot for hope and human tragedy.
As migration has been my main topic of research over the past two decades, the Mediterranean has been an extremely relevant space for me to work. In recent years millions have tried to cross the sea to enter into Europe to find safety, and tragically many thousands have died, whilst hundreds of thousands are displaced indefinitely in camps in Europe whilst seeking asylum. Like life itself the Mediterranean continues to develop in unpredictable ways.
Video has always been my main medium of expression. I love the moving image. I love making work about people and places. I love interviewing, working with camera people and sound designers. I love editing-telling stories. I love being in the dark seeing film and video installations overwhelm me with beauty, scale and urgency. Most of my work can be categorised as poetic documentary, and ‘Quicksand’ is my first work of fiction. I am very taken by the opportunities fiction offers and am continuing to explore this direction. ’Quicksand’ is a film set in 2033. It tells the story of Jason, a man fighting for his life in the Mediterranean Sea. 'Quicksand' amplifies tendencies within present day Europe and sets it in the near future in a hostile environment where the manufacturing industry is long gone, job security is a thing of the past, and people are competing for work that is poorly paid and on a casual basis. The economy has imploded, hospitals and state schools are closing, trains rarely run. Politically, the far right has become increasingly influential, taking advantage of people’s frustrations to stoke resentment against immigrants. EU has collapsed and throughout
Europe, borders have closed. It is against this backdrop that Jason, a husband and father has decided to join the exodus of people who pay people smugglers to help them leave Europe in the hope of starting a new life ‘somewhere else’. Jason’s journey ends when the boat he is in capsizes and he and many other European migrants are struggling to survive”.
SENA BAŠÖZ
Sena Başöz is an artist and filmmaker living and working in Istanbul.
Sena Başöz’s artwork focuses on healing processes after cases of trauma evolving out of the importance of care, the ways nature self-regenerates creating a balance in the long run and the organism's capacity to repair itself.
« I was born in İzmir next to the Meditterenean. I see and respect the Meditterenean as the ultimate source of life and healing. I take it as an example on how to be; It is vast and powerful but it's also very gentle on us and all the beings that it houses. When I am swimming in it or travelling on it I feel connected and in flux; linear time dissolves.
I first studied economics and worked briefly for a finance job before I chose the art path. I started making my first videos in the office space. It was like my visual diary. They are performative videos depicting my fish out of water status in that corporate environment. I went and bought a camera just for this. Working in a business plaza influenced me to start making videos. Those videos constituted the departure point of my practice. I was feeling stuck in life during this time. Making these videos were healing me through expression. This is also the beginning of my interest in healing as the general focus of my work.
The playful video «The Screen» of floating white bones and human body parts on the sea is shot in Çeşme-İzmir on a shore that is close to the Greek island Chios. The images in the video are cut outs from the Sobotta Atlas of Human Anatomy, first issued in 1904 and has been published in more than 300 editions, still in use today. It maps the layers of human body. The cut outs float between borders and dissolve onto the source of life; representing an ultimate unification. How can we grasp the meaning of human life and tragedies when we look from the perspective of the earth and its own time?»
GIOVANNI OZZOLA
Born in 1982 in Florence, Giovanni Ozzola lives and works in Canary Islands. He is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in photography, as well as video and sculptural installation. Ozzola’s practice demonstrates a deep sensitivity towards the phenomenon of light and its various physical characteristics. His main thematic interests lie in conceptualising and representing infinitude and exploration, both geographical and introspective.
Fog or sunlight streaming through colorful curtains is just one of the light effects at the core of the artist Giovanni Ozzola’s oeuvre. Working mostly in photography and, more recently, video, Ozzola produces picturesque images that oscillate between the immediacy of capturing the ephemeral and the carefully constructed artifice traditionally associated with painting—all while evoking the five senses.
What is your "Mediterranean? “Light, salt on lips, history, home, the "land" between continents, powerful as a symbol, strong as a smell that recalls memories, perfect like love.
I literally grew up in it, I originally come from an Island, Elba a rock in the middle of Tirreno, I had my first kiss in its water, I've sailed between islands, I've read tons of books on it. I love it as deep as a kid can love his own parents.
Video, this media, allowed me to live an experience, not only the peak of the experience but the whole. I mean, in my videos there is not any narrative, something happens in front of the camera, I do nothing, I just live the moment, from the seed to the blooming.
In my work Sin Tiempo a man indistinguishable in the landscape, a larger landscape, getting closer on him, his shapes and energy stand out, he is the center in that specific moment, in that specific place. The man face the ocean and speak to it. His native language is a whistle. A flow of air coming out from him that melts into the wind, merges with the landscape. nature and man become one thing, again».
ENRIQUE RAMIRES
In 2014 he won the discovery price of Les Amis du Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France. He has since exposed in some major places as Le Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton or le 104), France (le Grand Café, Saint-Nazaire) and in Central and South America (Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico ; Museo de la memoria, Santiago ; Centro Cultural MATTA, Embajada de Chile en Argentina, Buenos Aires).
In 2017, he is invited to the 57th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia curated by Christine Macel. Enrique Ramírez is nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2020.
“For me the mediterranean is a place where very different worlds meet, culturally distant but united by the meeting of the waters, but also the mediterranean is the biggest cemetery of the world, a place where bitterness and migratory disaster are present every day... I can't stop seeing that beauty of nature as a dark and sad sea…
The first sailors told that the Mediterranean Sea was a sea in the middle of the land, “Mar Medi Terraneum”, an intermediate region between sea and land. Thus the sea both united and separated the world.
The video is a language, it is a window open to the public, a window that raises questions.
My video 'Lauso la mare e tente’n terro' talks about two different worlds united by a sea, a man who thinks about the future and what the world will be like when the sea level rises, and climate change forces us to move away from the sea coast, and a woman who could be anywhere in the world ... who looks at the other side ....”.
MARCO GODINHO
Marco Godinho was born in 1978 in Salvaterra de Magos (Portugal).
He lives and works between Luxembourg and Paris.
For the past fifteen years he has been unfolding a singular universe, reflecting on our subjective experience of time and space. He shows a sensitive approach to post-conceptual practice, questions of exile, memory, and geography inspired by his own experience of nomadic life, suspended between different languages and cultures and nourished by literature and poetry. From installations and videos to his writings and collaborative pieces, his work forms a map of a world shaped by personal experiences and multiculturalism.
“My Mediterranean is to live with an altruistic conscience and to experience the thresholds between land and sea and its physical and mental limits.
The video as a medium allows me to get closer to a living form that seems to question itself at every moment, where documentary and fiction are inextricably intertwined.
The work looks at the relationships that making entertains with the sea. Left to Their Own Fate is an action performed on three initiatory journeys to various places on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea (Strait of Gibraltar/Tunis, Carthage, Djerba/Trieste and Istria). While travelling, the character silently reads all three volumes of the complete text of Homer’s Odyssey, considered one of the founding poems of European civilisation”.
ANNA RAIMONDO
Italian artist, she hasparticipated in several international exhibitions including: the solo shows "Fronte Nazionale Naso Partenopeo" at Albumarte in 2020 (Roma, IT); "Nada que declarar" at Matienzo in 2019 (Buenos Aires, AR); "Seremos serias de la manera más alegre" at CASO — Casa del Bicentenario in 2018 (Buenos Aires, AR); "New boundaries of the wellness of vagynal ecosystem" at TEA Museum in 2018 (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, ES), etc.
“My "Mediterranean", It is a form of belonging in which I identify with: a common past, a complex present and a multiple coexistence of cultures.
I work with video because of its possibility to evoke the alive and fluid components of life.
There is my voice, a woman voice, repeating "Mediterraneo" while a glass in slowly filled of water. In this process while my voice goes underwater, the word looses its contours. There is not a message, but an empathetic invitation to immerge in the video and to get a personal lecture of it”.
FERMÍN JIMÉNEZ LANDA
Fermin Spanish multi media artist Fermín Jiménez Landa participated in shows such as: When Animals Talked to Humans, Travesía Cuatro, Madrid (2018), MANIFESTA 11, Zurich (2016); Out of the blue, CA2M, (2013), 08001, Nogueras Blanchard (2010), JULIO 5, Centro Cultural de España, Sao Paulo (2010).
His work The history of Apnea investigate sea sponges as organisms and the history of fishing for them as well as folklore and traditions which formed around these fishing activities.
The artist leads spectators to the island of Dodecanese which was a famous world center for sponge fishing. A sponge fisherman has a mixture of courage, pride, a kind of madness and disregard for risk. The divers descended naked held on to a large heavy stone to elevate a very light substance. Approximately half of the divers lost their lives or were paralyzed when raised from depth.
«My Video is An atypical documentary film made up of content filmed in IMEDMar UCV laboratory and in other places around the Mediterranean Sea, as well as archive footage. the video is about ecology, logic of extractivism of the last centuries, the sculptural, spatial, botanical and social function of sponges and also about our respiratory function and the ability to resist. A body of work will emerge from the interest in the Mediterranean sea and in the islands as a utopian place. A centripetal and centrifugal force at the same time guides us to relate antagonistic themes that are joined by a fine but tenacious thread».
YANN TOMA
Both artist and researcher, Yann Toma is the lifelong President of Ouest-Lumière and an artist-observer at the UN where he serves as artist in residence. By salvaging material from the former electric power company Ouest-Lumière in the early 1990s, he appropriated a symbolic network, an industrial infrastructure which he turned into his research territory and the very essence of his artistic practice. He focuses on collaborations with industrials, political scientists and philosophers.
The project “In the eyes of the turtle” places Yann Toma's creation in the new trajectory of the work. After the Plant-Being, which he links to several botanical gardens around the world, he summons the Turtle-Being, who views the world with more slowness, more instinct, a certain sense of foresight and wisdom. Here, the turtle is envisioned as the embodiment of artistic energy. The artist envisages solutions, including light filters to improve the turtles' gaze as well as the deployment of an ability to reach the nesting beaches. To feel the world and its effrangements through the strength of the turtle increases the potentialities of the artistic act in contact with populations and natural environments.
The aim of the work is to raise awareness among the population by involving them, mainly children, in a participatory process. Each of participants will have experienced an existential reflection on the future of turtles. This work also aims to promote the resolution of a conflit between turtles and people.
VOLKAN ASLAN
Volkan Aslan (Ankara, 1982) studied Painting at Mersin University Faculty of Fine Arts.
Home Sweet Home” is a video installation comprised of three separate channels placed side by side. An average-sized fisherman’s boat is floating across the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul. It has a poorly built shanty-type house on top of it. These sorts of structures are very common in the slums of large cities which have an influx of people having to move from their native land in order to pursue a better life due to racial or ethnic issues, economic and political reasons, genocide, war, as well as a myriad of other causes. The video is a kind of moment of silence to commemorate the people who have had to make this journey throughout history.
Aslan’s three-channel video Home Sweet Home (2017) was shown at 15th Istanbul Biennial commissioned by Biennial curators Elmgreen & Dragset.
XENIA DRANYSH
Graduated from Moscow State Stroganov Academy of Design and Applied Arts, Specialty in Art Ceramics.Works and lives in Moscow. Member of the Creative Union of Artists of Russia. Section - Recent Trends. Participant of The 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. MMOMA, Moscow and The 4th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow. Works are in the MMOMA collection and private collections.
“For me who was born in big city and far from sea, feelings about sea, about Mediterranean comparable with feelings about dream, about something exiting, about breathtaking wonderful energy and wide open eyes looking at the stripe of horizon far away, where once a day the shining sun disappears. It’s a lot of fantasies about mythological creatures, mermaids and life under water. It’s shimmering water and sounds of waves, it’s deep breathing, and it’s like disappearing in nature, it is a loss and simultaneously discovery of myself.
Video art is one of my mediums, because I often feel myself like detached from myself as i had in my inner settings view from outside, I love to feel myself like hero, object or independent image, I like to use my body as a self-sufficient “SIGN” or “FORM” in space, to feel it like instrument of expression. Also in my experience about 10 years of work as a model and it helped me a lot in expanding my creative expression in new forms.
My work “SNAKE” is about feeling my inner nature, about fighting with my main fear at that moment, about accepting myself and my wishes, my feelings. It’s like a jump in total fear with trying to understand where it comes from. It’s about the decisiveness of actions and readiness for a new life. My work is very meditative and connected with nature, connected with time, with my thinking process”.
