OCEAN / UNI bárawa pt.2

bárawa, borrowing its title from the Garifuna word for "Ocean", is a cycle of OCEAN / UNI led by Yina Jiménez Suriel and Pietro Consolandi that inquires into the topics of Caribbean worldviews, from the cultural processes of Marronage, the entanglements of underwater life with the constant movement of tectonic plates, and the connection between humans and nature. 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.

What is the role of the subconscious in connecting humans to the oceanic depths? Do islands and seamounts have agency, perhaps even a consciousness, of their own? How do the winds communicate with living beings, beyond facilitating their movements? How do tropical forests keep memories of their past? These are some of the questions that will guide the five sessions of the second semester of bárawa, moving through the Caribbean together with the underwater mountains that walk through the Ocean.

Session 1: Prologue – On the journey towards constant movement
Wednesday, February 19, 2025, 2 pm AST / 7 pm CET
Topic and keywords: Fugue, Flotation, Poetry
Guest: Wingston González, poet

Session 2: Other seas, those that rise with the mountains
Wednesday, February 26, 2025, 2pm AST / 7pm CET
Topic and keywords: Ancient Seas, Mountain building, Marine Fossils, Evolution of the Caribbean Tectonic Plate
Guests: Jonatan Alexander Bustos Sotelo, Geologist, Universidad Nacional de Colombia / Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

Session 3: On the journey to pursue languages to relate with forms of life and notions of time
Wednesday, March 5, 2025, 2pm AST / 7pm CET
Topic and keywords: Language, Interspecies relationships, Timescales, Shapes-times
Guests: Anayra Santory; Philosopher and Ecologist, University of Puerto Rico

Session 4: On perspectives of the Ocean from Abya Yala I
Wednesday, March 12, 2025, 2pm AST / 7pm CET
Topic and keywords: Aquatic epistemologies, Political resistance
Guest: Mava Juracán; Curator and Activist Bienal en Resistencia Guatemala

Session 5: On the journey towards costant movement... bárawa
Wednesday, March 19, 2025, 2pm AST / 7pm CET
Topic and keywords: An excursion through OCEAN / UNI semesters on The Current IV
Guest: Yina Jiménez Suriel in conversation with Pietro Consolandi

The program is intended for anyone eager to deepen their relations with the ecological, political, aesthetic, ethical, and scientific knowledges around the realities and futures of the Ocean. Lectures will be held in English or Spanish with direct translation between the two languages, so a good listening and speaking level of either is recommended to ensure meaningful exchange.

Participants are invited to register for the program online to receive Zoom links and session reminders. Zoom links, session information and recordings can also be found on the ocean comm/uni/ty platform. You are welcome to register in advance for more than one session. If you attend all five sessions, you will receive an official certificate of attendance upon request.

REGISTRATION FORM FOR OCEAN / UNI SESSIONS HERE

Webs of Water

TBA21–Academy, in collaboration with Tactical Tech’s “Exposing the Invisible” project and artist-researcher Federico Pérez Villoro, 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.

Taking place from March to May 2025, this program invites journalists, researchers, artists, scientists, and activists to collaboratively investigate the environmental impact of tech industries on water access. Participants will analyze the physical and geopolitical dimensions of computing infrastructures through workshops and collective mapping. The series will culminate in the creation of public knowledge resources hosted on Ocean-Archive.org, inspiring further research and action.

More information HERE.

Calypsonian Writing

Kayla Archer, a writer from Barbados, leads a writing workshop inspired by the Calypso, a Caribbean performative art that draws from the West African Griot. In Calypso, music and oratory blend in a ritual in which the public, the chorus, the Masters of Ceremony, and the Caller Calypsonian, all co-create a transformative experience via resonance of language. Born in a time of decolonial strife in which the imperial structures were coming undone, Calypso holds a major political and community-based relevance, and includes in itself an oceanic perspective.

The public activation held on February 12 will allow participants to gain an understanding of the history and methodology of Calypso. Later during the cycle, a group of scientists from SINAMOT, University of Costa Rica, will engage in an in-depth calypsonian writing experiment to translate into Calypso their scientific work on the tectonic plate movement in the Caribbean.

Call for journeys

Along with participation in the sessions, TBA21–Academy is commissioning texts to enrich the curriculum by adding other perspectives to the featured topics. We encourage applicants to be mindful of their situatedness to avoid appropriating the knowledges of other communities and instead draw connections with case studies within their own geographies.

This is a call to OCEAN / UNI participants and ocean comm/uni/ty members who find any of the topics of this coming semester especially resonant and would like to be featured with their writing on Ocean-Archive.org’s Journeys page.

See more details and directly apply via this Google Form no later than February 10, 2025.