The oceans are rising. Indicators of accelerated human activities are increasing: sea level, water temperature, acidity, algal blooms, and the depletion of fish communities and marine life. The loss of abundance and diversity has devastating effects on the services that the oceans provide to the earth, depleting their unrecognized work of carbon sequestration, climate resilience, and nutritional supply. Thinking in terms of a land-sea continuum, how can we understand the political, aesthetic, and epistemological rise of the oceans after centuries of invisibility and oblivion? What are the “waves of knowledge” specific to the oceans? What ideas and memories do the oceans hold in their depths and reanimate in response to the tremor of terrestrial ecosystems? How can we escape the silos of research and inquiry that narrow and fragment knowledge of the oceans? Asking new questions and using multiple registers of discovery can lead to a revitalization of the ways humans engage with the oceans in this precarious moment and create new avenues for restorative justice.
Oceans Rising is a companion book to the research exhibition “Territorial Agency: Oceans in Transformation,” commissioned by TBA21-Academy, an independent ocean art and science initiative operating from Ocean Space in Venice. The publication brings together forty-one thoughtful and generous contributions from ocean artists, scholars, scientists, and activists in response to the rapidly changing oceans. Writing from places of conflict and concern, the contributors respond to the magnitude and urgency of ecological devastation and, importantly, provide a multitude of narratives that strengthen our knowledge communities and engage with world-building practices from an ocean perspective.
