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Flickering Shores, Sea Imaginaries, this year’s edition of the Sea Art Festival, is inviting us to rethink our relationship with the sea, referring to the beauty but at the same time, the fragility of our shores, and exploring alternative frameworks and visions for engaging with the ocean and marine environments.
The sea is deeply embedded in our lives and capitalist society, a vital source for our survival, but also a vast industry we exploit for food, medicines, energy, minerals, trading, travel and so on. But increased human activity, from extensive cruise tourism, shipping and overfishing to nuclear testing, pollution and deep-sea mining have been plaguing the sea, having a huge impact on marine ecosystems and habitats.
Instead of viewing the sea from the coast as a divided and abstract surface for moving around commodities, Flickering Shores, Sea Imaginaries reminds us that we are part of this body of water. This year's Sea Art Festival aims to explore new relationships with the sea and its ecologies, enabling spaces for cooperation, collective visions and synergies as a call to resistance and restoration.
SUPERFLEX was founded in 1993 by Jakob Fenger, Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, and Rasmus Rosengren Nielsen. Conceived as an expanded collective, SUPERFLEX has consistently worked with a wide variety of collaborators, from gardeners to engineers to audience members. Engaging with alternative models for the creation of a social and economic organization, works have taken the form of energy systems, beverages, sculptures, copies, hypnosis sessions, infrastructure, paintings, plant nurseries, contracts, and public spaces. SUPERFLEX has been developing a new kind of urbanism that includes the perspectives of plants and animals, with the ultimate goal of moving society towards interspecies living. For SUPERFLEX, the best ideas might just come from fish.
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Lab C works with the keywords “plant,” “region,” and “art.” Lab C, a collaborative duo made up of Mira Park (Forest Curator) and Changpa (Art Director), studies the experience they had in one particular place in the past after carefully observing one single part of Busan’s mountains and surrounding sea over a long period of time. They have presented curatorial programs such as Time to Ramble, Time to Ramble: The Sea, and Cosmos in One Square Meter by curating viewers’ experiences.
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Félix Blume is a sound artist and engineer using sound as a basic material in sound pieces, videos, actions, and installations. His work is focused on listening and inviting viewers to a different perception of their surroundings. His process is often collaborative, working with communities and using public space as the context within which he explores and presents his works. Blume has participated in international festivals and exhibitions such as Thailand Biennale, Tsonami Arte Sonoro, CTM Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, LOOP Barcelona, The Belluard Bollwerk, and Sonic Acts.
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Mongjoo Son creates her Swing Pavilion series with broken pieces, fishing nets, and fishing gear floating on the sea. She shows viewers high, wide-ranging installations on an extraordinary scale with a dramatic sense of space. Her work presents a place for rest and play, where people can fully enjoy it through activities.
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Cho Eun-Phil uses blue as her main sculptural element to transform everyday materials into extraordinary and surreal spaces. With Cho, her blue is not just a color of physical materials; for her, each and every material is changed to blue and transformed into an illusionary space and a space of meaning. Her installations are a fundamental experiment about site-specificity and a challenge to it. These spaces allow not only the viewer but also the artist herself to experience unfamiliar moments. Recently, Cho has been working on a residency at Clayarch Gimhae Museum, with a particular interest in plant forms that change over time. She will be exhibiting at the Hangang Sculpture Project this year and at the Ichihara Lakeside Museum in Japan next year.
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With philosophy at its core, Shailesh’s work contemplates the world at large by examining existing knowledge, systems, traditions, rituals, metaphysics, and philosophy itself through methods of science, technology, and artistic intervention. With a diverse visual vocabulary, he attempts to interweave philosophical connections between disparate observations, thoughts, moods, feelings – the internal world – and objects, machines, landscapes, phenomenons – the outer world.
As part of his learning in a Gurukul (Traditional Indian knowledge system or school), he was exposed to mythological scriptures and Tarka Shastra - a process to analyze the source of knowledge and its verification through the art of debate. The play between the external beauty or functionality of a form/object, its inner meaning, extended connotations, and the consequential critical analysis of the object is what is embodied in the Tarka Shastra which also informs his artistic practice. He thereby combines this knowledge with scientific methods and machinery of the modern world that concerns contemporary human needs, roles, and responsibilities.
Samudra Manthan addresses the same by navigating, visualizing, and creating a kinetic sculpture of a rotating mountain that constantly churns the seawater contained in a tank. By taking reference from an Indian mythological story of the same name, the work mentions a churning process through which the world and all the living beings emerged, but also emerged nectar and poison. The story begins with the Devas (deities) forming an alliance with the Asuras (demons) to jointly churn the ocean for the nectar of immortality to be shared, assuring diplomacy and equality. The churning of the ocean was an elaborate process for which Mount Mandara (Name of a mountain) was used as a churning rod, and Vasuki the King of Serpents became the churning rope. As the process is gone through and the nectar is successfully obtained, it is deceptively consumed by the devas / deities whereas the poison is left for the demons.
This mythological tale of aspirations is visualized in the context of today’s world in the kinetic project, Samudra Manthan: Churning of the Ocean. Although the nectar is desired by all, the poison shall inevitably be consumed too. The yearning to achieve immortality in the story is also symbolic and metaphorically profound in relation to contemporary issues.
The vastness of the ocean and its unlimited potential has been a reservoir of resources for humankind since ages. In current times, it is considered one of the most valuable natural resources that provide us with; food, fuel, energy, medicine, minerals, gems, and other materials. This extraction process often includes drilling the seabed in order to extract the crude oil, reverberating the core of the mythological story. Here in the project, the nectar and poison are metaphorically perceived as consequences of our constant efforts in the consumption industry. Samudra Manthan: Churning of the Ocean is an attempt to examine the polarizing impacts of extraction of resources by contemplating the construction, deconstruction, and consumption of resources and thoughts in current times. In this process, Shailesh uses technology to reflect upon his thoughts and give them a new meaning that eventually unfolds the socio-political hierarchy.
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Thousands of white threads traverse the length of the building of a now abandoned church hall, the Old Ilgwang Church, close to Icheon Bridge. Once a Methodist prayer center, and briefly a missionary school, only to become again a place for prayer, the building has had many lives and housed different communities, people and stories.
The vacant building is transformed another time with the site responsive installation And to Flounder in this Sea is Sweet to Me. The threads, emitting from a church light source, extend along the whole empty space towards the two windows at the far end wall of the building, and the outdoor terrace. Shono, responds to this space of multilayered narratives with a complex but at the same time delicate, tangible and light structure.
The structure that inhabits the building transforms throughout the day with the changing of the natural light reflecting the passage of the day from light to soft dark.
Playing with concepts of light as a metaphor for vision, this is a call for journeys, travel, introspection, dreams, and wonder. The white threads in horizontal lines - characteristic of Shono’s work - seem to multiply as hand drawn lines, from a single point reaching out to almost hug the windows.
One can step into this form, which purposefully orients the auspice outwards through the windows and towards the direction of the sea. The threads, thin strands of perception, are expanding the artwork's dimensions from the physical to the experiential, inviting us to imagine.
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While our oceans already face a huge amount of stress from climate change, plastic pollution, oil spills and over fishing, how can proposals for sea floating dwellings be sustainable or non-threatening to marine ecosystems?
Seasteading, the concept of creating dwellings floating at sea, colonizing oceans and bypassing territories controlled by governments, has been around for a long time. Floating structures anchored in international waters, beyond the "territorial sea" of any country, have included refitted oil platforms, modified cruise ships, or custom-built floating islands and structures to name a few.
Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Daniel Keller’s film The Seasteaders documents the first Seasteading conference in Tahiti, talking with Seasteading evangelists like controversial author Joe Quirk and Seasteading Institute executive director Randolph Hencken to get firsthand accounts of the Seasteader’s beliefs and visions for an aquatic future. While much remains to be worked out, not least of all the fundamental problem of the place of “shesteaders,” the Seasteaders hope they can float on changing tides as they colonize the world’s waters.
Founded in 2008 by former Google software engineer Patri Friedman with financial backing by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, the Seasteading Institute envisions a fluid world, where governments are selected in an open market and climate change can be “hacked.” Seeing rule by the majority as ineffective and oppressive, the Seasteaders propose a libertarian future of floating micro-governments, where user-citizens can detach and rejoin at will and law looks less like constitutions and more like software. To implement their plan for a nautical future, the Seasteaders have begun working with the government of French Polynesia to build the first floating islands in a special economic zone off the coast of Tahiti, after facing large-scale public opposition in Honduras.
Seasteading evangelists, in a similar way to Silicon Valley techno solutionists, are presenting the society as a system that can be modified, managed or controlled. A group of entrepreneurs proposes to create new markets and worlds that fit their needs for a rules-free society. But while these initiatives present floating societies as solutions to housing needs, environmental challenges or a way to escape badly governed nations, how can we know for sure that these sea structures are more than tax avoidance bubbles or extravagant retreats for the rich?
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Just over 40 years ago, most houses in Korea were earthen houses. Before the Saemaul Movement - the political initiative launched in the 1970s to modernize the rural South Korean economy - demolished all the houses, the walls and ceilings of both tiled and thatched houses were all finished with soil mixed with rice straw and reeds. In these houses people communicated between the thin layers made of window paper, which functioned like windows today. In any country, town or city, traditional houses are constructed using materials easily found within their local surroundings. In Korea, such materials were soil, wood, stone, and rice straw.
Jazoo Yang has been interested in traditional Korean hanok and thatched houses and has been researching archives and other relevant sources about the rapidly disappearing earthen houses. During her research, she found out that there had been a type of dwelling in Busan using seaweed as a construction material. Many refugees, who moved to Busan during the Korean War in the 1950s, had to build temporary and quick shelters using materials that they could easily find within their local proximity. Therefore, during the war, instead of rice straw, one of the ingredients of traditional earthen houses, they mixed seaweed, the material easiest to obtain on the beach, with soil to build a house.
The artist, as part of an ongoing research, has been exploring the earthen houses made of seaweed remnants of which can be found in seaside refugee villages, including Yeongdo, Busan, in order to examine and understand the architectural and construction techniques of refugees, especially the methods of using seaweed and soil as building materials.
In her installation for the Sea Art Festival 2023, Bricks from the Sea, as in other of her artworks, Jazoo Yang incorporates these methods of using soil and seaweed into the construction of her work itself, bringing back to life a now-forgotten, but ingenious and creative frugal innovation.
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It is said that during the Goryeo Dynasty (918 — 1392), Koreans discovered that whales would eat seaweed after giving birth to recover their strength, and it became a custom to feed seaweed soup to mothers. Even today, on birthdays, along with the congratulatory wishes, the question follows, "Did you eat seaweed soup?" It is the first dish cooked when a new life is born and invokes care, affection, and dedication in the Korean psyche.
In Gijang, this tradition is even stronger: According to research by Gijang County, when a child is born in the region, seaweed soup is served to the family on the ceremonial table every day for a week and every week for a month, to wish for the child’s health and well-being and give strength back to the mother after giving birth.
This installation and studio creates a special place for the seaweed that shaped the local cultures, next to Halmae Shrine and Halbae Shrine, an acknowledgement of a community’s multispecies entanglements and relations. It is a kind of ‘seaweed shrine’.
The artists exploring this natural resource aim at healing the damage that has already been caused and, in a synergic system, produce a material to be used on land with a low impact. However, it is crucial not to view seaweed as another resource to be extracted. In imagining future possibilities, Julia Lohmann and Kayoung Kim take on a regenerative mindset, rather than an exploitative one. The organism is seen as an embedded part of the ecosystem, and it is considered in all its life cycle. Through interdisciplinary, hands-on, creative and holistic approaches the “Seaweed Shrine” showcases new ways of engaging with a local organism and to explore its potential to restore and create.
As members of the Department of Seaweed - an interdisciplinary group dedicated to exploring the cultural, environmental, and sustainable aspects of seaweed and kelp, founded by Julia Lohmann - the artists delve into the vibrant stories of the people in the area, where seaweed and kelp play a significant part in their lives. It explores their relationship with the resources they obtain from nature and the material and psychological impact it has on their daily lives.
The collected materials, exhibited alongside the kelp sculptures, create an immersive experience that allows the public to engage with local stories and evoke a range of emotions.
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