A Seat for the Sea is a transmedia project through which Greet Brauwers and Raf Custers want to address the exploitation of the sea in this ‘Ocean Decade’. We explore how to grasp this complex subject and translate it into imagination. How do you arouse interest in something that is invisible and intangible, yet has direct connections to our country AND planetary implications? Because when the invisible intervenes, it is high time to depict the unthinkable and show imagination that resonates with the citizens.
A Seat for the Sea introduces us to a new kind of violence, that of deep-sea mining. This extractivism is imminent. It is going after the metals in the ocean. No one can estimate its impact. Does the sea raise its voice, amid the turmoil caused by the Blue Economy ?
This work is hybrid, where different art forms interact, and transdisciplinary, a convergence between art, documentary, and science. One of the components of the project is a performance installation, ‘Beyond the dirt, in 5 selfies’. The performance takes place within an installation, with video, audio, objects, and documents. It is a multi-voiced chronicle, where immersion in sound and touch reveals the tensions between oceanic fascination and extractivist violence. The installation captures the serene sound of the ocean, but is confronted by unsettling printed words and, at regular intervals, a brutal metallic creaking. Harmony more than undermined, that’s what also awaits the seabed when excavators sink their teeth into polymetallic crusts and nodules.
Let’s descend into the half-light of a marine microcosmos and immerse ourselves in this soothing force. Let’s stay and resist in this posture for as long as we can. The rhetoric softens and justifies the colonisation of this virgin territory. This adventure deviates, at times, carried away by industry’s techno-seductive distraction. Then it quickly rejoins the organisms of the deep sea, the currents, the sediments, the long history: our fellow travellers, in their element.
