We affirm ourselves as the center of evolution by saving it from our own destruction. Our new heroism is to keep things, at best, as bad as they are. What does good even mean? We are the joke of evolution—and nobody’s laughing. Listen to Chus Martínez in conversation with marine scientist Skye Morét and writer Ingo Niermann.

Science has to generate output. Art has to cater to an audience. Could art and science join forces to free science from definite outputs and art from definite audiences? Or would art then also be measured by its outcome and science by its audience? Listen to Chus Martínez in conversation with artists Julieta Aranda, Marco Roso, and Elena Mazzi.

“The first episode Oceanizing History, emerged from a conversation with professor and curator Greg Dvorak. Author of the book Coral and Concrete: Remembering Kwajalein Atoll Between Japan, America, and the Marshall Islands (2018), Greg teaches at Waseda University in Tokyo and researches the postcolonial histories of Japan and the USA in Oceania. His work is related to his personal biography, spending part of his childhood on a US military base in Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The meeting with Greg took place in mid-April 2020, when the global lockdown was already becoming a new normal. He was in Tokyo ...

The third episode of the Corona Under the Ocean chapter, featuring anthropology professor Cynthia Chou, is dedicated to the Orang Suku Laut, a nomadic community from the Malay world sea in Southeast Asia. Thanks to more than three decades of research, Cynthia Chou’s work brings us closer to the worldview and life practices of the Orang Suku Laut, for whom humans are just another element among the many creatures that inhabit oceans and land. Continually moved by the tides, their ancestral relationship with the environment not only puts many aspects of modern societies into question, but shows that another kind ...

The eighth episode, with professor and anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli, begins with her idea of axioms of existence, which put in crisis the abstract and universalist condition of Western philosophy. The ocean is not far from Western epistemologies and ontologies. In fact, it is totally entangled in them thanks to their intimate—and strategically invisible—relationship with colonial history and violence. The notion of geontopower, coined by Povinelli, critically revises the Foucauldian notion of biopower. The fictional but real frontier between life and non-life is a political frontier in continuous expansion, even beyond Earth. This podcast is the result of a conversation between ...

The seventh episode, with curator Camila Marambio is an approach to Tierra del Fuego from her personal experience with a part of the world with which she has a strong emotional connection. As she states, Tierra del Fuego, “despite its remoteness, is the center of the world”. Karokynka is the name by which this area of the world is known by the native Selk’nam people, a culture that still survives in its descendants despite its official death by the modern state of Chile. The fact of proclaiming as dead, a culture that is still very much alive, is part of ...

The fifth episode of the Corona Under the Ocean series, featuring feminist philosopher Astrida Neimanis, puts into practice one of the author’s methodologies: “thinking with water.” As a material, water not only enables a relational ontology when thinking about the reality that bodies inhabit and produce, but also allows for an understanding of feminism that transcends the human and incorporates a planetary and intersectional scale where race, class, and gender are in constant intra-action. This podcast is the result of a conversation between Astrida Neimanis and Sonia Fernández Pan, where the Covid-19 pandemic was also a constant, an atmospheric condition ...

The sixth episode, with writer, lecturer, and curator Filipa Ramos is an approach to cinema from the ocean and to the ocean from cinema. Beyond the production of underwater images, there is a political relationship between cinema and the underwater world. As vision devices, the projection room and the tank or aquarium are related in their production of the fiction of a safe environment for the human being. Moreover, there are aquatic creatures capable of producing cinematic images, allowing an expansion of the concept of cinema beyond its own history and human history. This podcast is the result of a ...

The fourth episode of the Corona Under the Ocean series, with agent of healing and artist Tabita Rezaire, is dedicated to the memory of water and its existence in flow within bodies. Water has Memory is the result of an intimate, personal, and mostly unscripted conversation between Tabita Rezaire and Sonia Fernandez Pan. It even includes environmental elements, such as rain, showing how words, feelings, and ideas are also part of the flow of life that circulates through bodies. The great connecting element of this conversation is water, understood beyond its usual contexts to think through connections and interactions including ...

This episode, featuring marine biologist Marah J. Hardt, is dedicated to the vitalism and resilience of the ocean. Outlining her personal journey as a researcher, Marah J. Hardt provides a propositional critique of our relationship with the maritime environment, present but not always visible on a global scale. Understanding ocean research as a necessarily interdisciplinary practice, her scientific practice highlights the importance of storytelling as a tool for dissemination of ideas. In We are Ocean Life, she not only reminds us that all forms of life, including human life, come from the ocean, but also brings us closer to the ...

Our nature inclines us to listen to stories, not to lists, charts, and equations. To change our mind, we need a compelling narrative that turns obstacles into challenges and chances into hopes. The role of art is to foster that transformation, but also to spoil it wherever it’s lame. Listen to Chus Martínez in conversation with artists Lena Maria Thüring and Teresa Solar.

We tried to free ourselves from nature but exploited it to the point of self-destruction. Nature seems to have brought us back, but we actually never left. We just forgot about nature—including our very own. Listen to Chus Martínez, head of the Art Institute in Basel, Markus Reymann, director of TBA21–Academy, and marine scientist Skye Morét.