Isabel Lewis: The Soul Expanding Ocean #2

Opening September 17, TBA21–Academy’s Ocean Space showcases a newly commissioned work by artist and choreographer Isabel Lewis that invites participants and visitors to dance through the ocean. 

The exhibition-performance is unveiled in the second chapter of The Soul Expanding Ocean, a series of exhibitions by Ocean Space’s 2021–2022 curator Chus Martínez. The series presents Martínez’s research, proposing that humanity approach the ocean through the lens of a new epistemological universe conceived under sensual values, a mandate of care, and the principle of love. The piece will run over the course of five consecutive weekends, every Friday and Saturday from September 17 to October 17, 2021. 

How can we learn, process trauma, and find strategies of healing together as a human community from within our broader ecological relations while maintaining our distinct differences? In a framework in which individual agency can perform again and again, instantly, with no rehearsal, with no hesitation. The oceans are full of dancers. The bodies of those inhabiting the depths are made for the fluid life, for the rhythms created by the soft touch of cold and warm waters, for the winds caressing the surfaces and molding the crests of the currents. It took long until we realized that becoming one with the ocean implies the embrace of a body—a collective body, able to move, flexible, attentive to the nameless influences of all that lies ahead for you to experience in the waters. 

The Soul Expanding Ocean #2: Isabel Lewis is an invitation to attune to our continuity with the ocean to transform and articulate a different relation. Lewis asks participants to be careful with the language about the ocean, be aware of the questions it poses and be open to unexpected findings. The ocean, then, appears in front of participants and visitors as a method, a pedagogy that leads individuals into another form of relating to nature: one that gives nature agency, one that acknowledges the differences of the lives that move and act and think and sense besides humans. Art and artists are guiding humanity into the recovery and rehabilitation of its current relation to the ocean. For this reason, a reprogramming of bodies is necessary to become more saliently cognizant of the human potential to be oceanic. Hands, skin, eyes, noses, ears, all organs need to learn to feel the ocean even when the ocean is not there yet.

In this piece—specifically created for TBA21–Academy’s Ocean Space, Venice, and the oceans—Isabel Lewis takes inspiration from Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, which is a set of dramatic techniques whose purpose is to bring to light systemic exploitation in order to discover ocean life inside us. Lewis invites participants and visitors to the church of San Lorenzo and its campo as if they are inside the waters of the oceans, the bodies taken by the currents and the voices integrated into the piece as a political component, a marker of Venice’s long traditions of choirs, communal politics, music, and sound as an identity trait. So, where better than in Ocean Space to propose a dance for an entity that always moves? 

The Soul Expanding Ocean #2: Isabel Lewis
Curated by Chus Martínez

Exhibition-performance every Friday and Saturday, 3–8pm.
Commissioned and produced by TBA21–Academy. Supported by ifa | Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.

*From August 6, all visitors must present a valid digital or paper EU Covid Certificate (Green Pass) to access Ocean Space. At the time of verification, the holder of the Certificate must provide a valid ID. More information here. 

Please see ocean-space.org in order to organize your visit according to the latest COVID-19 restrictions in Italy. 
Free entrance.