The ocean speaks

In 1992, Barcelona’s urban transformation allowed the city to reinvent its relationship with its coastal area, embracing it as its natural horizon and an iconic public space. Three decades later, Barcelona will need to rethink its relationship with the sea once again, as will every coastal city and community worldwide. 

This time we could choose to imagine that the city does not really end at the point where it meets the sea—that all that mass of water stretching between beach and sky, and all its different subaquatic realities, are also part of Barcelona. A complex, rich environment as diverse and specific as the rest of its districts and neighbourhoods. 

Like every ecosystem on Earth, the oceans are changing fast. As sea surface temperatures continue to rise, and extreme weather events impact on coastal populations living under the threat of a rise in sea level, we are starting to understand that the conflicts of the oceans will determine our future, at least to the same degree as the conflicts of the atmosphere. 

The Ocean Speaks explores the new social and ecological pacts that all those living in coastal communities—40 percent of humankind—will have to establish with their neighbours the oceans. As we recognise our physical proximity and co-dependence with a world that is right next to us, we need to establish forms of production of knowledge about the oceans that do not reproduce colonial models, and new forms of managing marine resources that leave behind the logic of extraction and embrace the idea of regeneration. 

—Jose Luis de Vicente, curator.