A new semester of TBA21–Academy’s online learning initiative focuses on the Caribbean with weekly live sessions and activations via Zoom.
OCEAN / UNI is TBA21–Academy’s online learning initiative dedicated to art, activism, and science that invites fluid thinking with the Ocean as a way to move beyond the binaries of land and sea. Aiming to complement and enhance land-based understanding of the Earth, OCEAN / UNI covers a wide range of ecological, political, aesthetic, ethical, and scientific topics around the realities and futures of the Ocean.
The spring 2025 semester of OCEAN / UNI, bárawa, is conceived by curator Yina Jiménez Suriel as part of The Current IV: Caribbean: “otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua” (other mountains, adrift beneath the waves) (2023–2025).
“If we walk along the bottom of the Caribbean Sea, we will realize that we do not inhabit islands, isthmuses, or continental lands, but a succession of mountains among waters. Fragmentation is a state of mind imposed by the colonial enterprise and its consequent nation-states in this skin of the planet,” says Jiménez Suriel. The OCEAN / UNI cycle bárawa, borrowing its title from the Garifuna word for “Ocean”, delves into the many worldviews that inhabit the Caribbean, from the cultural processes of Marronage to the entanglements of underwater life with the constant movement of tectonic plates, proposing an oceanic perspective.
After the cycle’s first semester, fall 2024, which set the historical and scientific foundation of our inquiry, the second semester looks into poetry, ecology, philosophy, and art, honing in on the role of the subconscious in connecting humans to the oceanic depths. We are interested in transcending the deterministic perspective imposed on the region since the 15th century, which narrates it as an exclusively insular context, or as a region divided into three parts—the constant in both narratives: fragmentation.
Program
OCEAN / UNI’s curriculum provides students, researchers, and the public with access to wide-ranging ideas and explorations through regular live sessions, reading groups, small-scale workshops or activations, and other online material, free and accessible to everyone on Ocean-Archive.org.
All sessions take place live online via Zoom, weekly on Wednesdays at 2pm AST / 7pm CET. The sessions of this semester are in Spanish with live translation into English.
Prologue II Session 2.1—February 19: On the journey towards constant movement
With Wingston González, poet
Keywords: Fugue, Flotation, Poetry
Session 2.2—February 26: Other seas, those that rise with the mountains
With Jonatan Alexander Bustos Sotelo, Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Keywords: Ancient Seas, Mountain building, Marine Fossils, Evolution of the Caribbean Tectonic Plate
Session 2.3—March 5: On the journey to pursue languages to relate with forms of life and notions of time
With Anayra Santory, philosopher and ecologist, University of Puerto Rico
Keywords: Language, Interspecies relationships, Timescales, Shapes-times
Session 2.4—March 12: On perspectives on the Ocean from Abya Yala
With Maya Juracán, curator and activist, Bienàl en Resistencia Guatemala
Keywords: Aquatic Epistemologies, Political Resistance
Epilogue Session 2.5—March 19: On the journey towards constant movement… bárawa
With Yina Jiménez Suriel in conversation with Pietro Consolandi
Please register for the sessions via the online form here.
Journeys publishing series: bárawa
Open call
Alongside the program, TBA21–Academy is commissioning texts to enrich the curriculum by expanding on the perspectives of the featured topics. See more details and apply via this Google Form no later than February 10, 2025.
Activations “Webs of Water”
March–May 2025
In collaboration with Tactical Tech’s Exposing the Invisible project and artist-researcher Federico Pérez Villoro, TBA21–Academy invites applications for “Webs of Water”, an online activation series exploring the relationship between technology infrastructures, freshwater scarcity and water distribution issues in the Caribbean. See more details and apply here no later than February 5, 2025.
Activations “Calypsonian Writing”
February 12, 2025
Kayla Archer leads a writing workshop inspired by the Calypso, a Caribbean performative art that draws from the West African Griot. More information on ocean comm/uni/ty.
