Artistic Immersion: Towards an Oceanic Connectedness

In Glacier Elegy (2018), performance artist Jaanika Peerna uses her body in a rhythmic pattern to create lines and marks suggestive of waves. Using blocks of ice and charcoal on an expansive roll of mylar, she engages with climates of water by holding ice, marking with it, and allowing it to melt. These bodily movements are highly gestural and abstract—suggesting assemblages of oceanic materiality, its storms and disturbances, and reminding us that our own bodies always live in "complex entanglements with water" (Neimanis 2014, 17). Glacier Elegy (Swansea) (2018) also responds to the rapid depletion and melting of the polar regions and presents the subsequent possibility of mourning this and the absence or loss of more-than-human life. As the Arctic and Antarctic sea-ice coverage reaches an all-time low, Peerna's performance brings awareness to the vulnerability, discord, and disturbance of these fundamental ecosystems, whose permanent alteration affects us all. Peerna's "elegy" subsequently invites us to consider how art can create dialogue with such rapidly depleting blue ecosystems and, specifically, in what ways we might bear witness to ecological loss. If we know that humans are the active agents of climate change, ocean acidification, and multi-species extinction, how can or should art attempt to negotiate the degradation of the world's oceans which affects human and non-human life alike (Cunsolo and Landman 2017, 6)?

Peerna is a featured artist in Ephemeral Coast (www.ephemeralcoast.com), a curatorial initiative that uses the coast as a site of cultural production and explores the coastal imagination as a means of registering climate change, oceanic degradation and loss of ecosystems. Engaging with coastlines in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Ocean, a series of exhibitions and inter-disciplinary dialogues have explored how the coast in the twenty-first century could be conceived as a littoral zone interacting and transacting with an Anthropocene ocean. It frames the coast as a hybrid geography and has instigated creative interventions that consider the material and ethical sensibilities of what it means to live and coexist with water, oceanic life, and the matter of waste.

Such embodied, gendered and immersive practices as Peerna's performance, which formed a central tenet of Ephemeral Coast, interact and transact with wider contextual and theoretical threads of the burgeoning Blue Humanities. In effect, then, Ephemeral Coast has sought to foster the Blue Humanities as a means of grounding these embodied, creative practices in certain historical and critical dynamics, most notably the discourses of extinction, ecological solidarity and material transgressions which flow through the Anthropocene ocean. The ocean of the Anthropocene era, with its powerful markers of visible sea level rise and ocean acidification, has catalyzed what Elizabeth Deloughrey deems a new oceanic imaginary of a "submarine future" (2017, 32). Deloughrey's concept of the "oceanic turn" charts the recent understanding of the ocean as a cultural, multi-species ecology and, hence, as an ontological space. Violent histories of oceanic conquest as well as the (gendered) materiality of the ocean itself—its resistance to phenomenological experience and narrative—have, she argues, largely determined the omission of ontological understandings. The question of what constitutes this new oceanic imaginary, in the wake of violent anthropocentric and imperialist conquest of the sea, is fundamental to this emerging interdisciplinary initiative whose essence draws a line of inquiry between and through the environmental humanities, the arts, and ocean sciences.

How these narratives of littoral zones and the Anthropocene ocean can be shaped, and by whom, are core questions at work within the Blue Humanities. Blue Humanities scholar Steve Mentz argues that we need to pursue "dynamic narratives" and "nonstable systems" of thinking to support a post-pastoral oceanic worldview. The humanities, he argues—and, I would add, the arts—"can add ocean stories to emerging models of ecological resilience, which measure the tendency of ecosystems to tolerate disturbance after perturbation" (Mentz 2012, 588). The question follows: how can artists, educators and scientists collaborate more effectively to confront an oceanic future of sea rise level, ocean acidification, plastic pollution, dead zones—"the severe discontinuities" of the Anthropocene that, Haraway argues, makes refugees...