Komuna Maro

The notion of the ocean as a blank expanse unaffected by human culture and urbanization doesn`t align with reality. With the development of legal mechanisms and technologies for governing, monitoring, traversing, and exploiting marine spaces, the worlds seas have become increasingly interconnected with human activities. While pollution and degradation of marine habitats have been constantly intensifying, the awareness of the indispensable role the ocean plays in regulating the global ecosystem and climate has also taken hold. New materialist tendencies in the humanities coupled with emerging critical approaches to ocean governance in legal sciences provide suitable tools to address these developments. Alongside the rising interest in marine issues in various academic disciplines, the past few years have brought a series of ocean-related art projects, exhibitions, and publications, creating a fertile environment for further research in this field. Komuna Maro, which means "Common Sea" in Esperanto, is an experimental, arts-based research project focusing on networks of marine communities, technologies, and infrastructures in the North Adriatic. The objectives of the project are to uncover hidden power dynamics, create new "cartographies", and present alternative narratives for the region. The core project team (Ana Jeinic, Milica Tomic, and Ana Dana Beroš) accompanied by a group of selected artists will follow various human and non-human actors living at, near, in, and with the Adriatic Sea to document different experiences and give voice to diverse forms of knowledge about this shared habitat. Simultaneously, the researchers will engage critically with more distant scientific, geopolitical, and legal discourses and complex spatial data. In the form of open discussions and workshops, multi-lingual pamphlets, installations, exhibitions, and a participatory web platform, these different views "from below" and "from above" will be connected and overlapped to provide an alternative, multifaceted, trans- disciplinary, and multi-medial cartography of the North Adriatic. A broader goal of the project is to deploy arts-based research for promoting lasting collaborations in the pursuit of fairness, inclusivity, and sustainability in managing the marine commons. In terms of methodology, the analytical phase of the project will intertwine experimental geographic and anthropological research with participatory artistic practice. This phase will be followed by a speculative exploration of possible future scenarios, including considerations about alternative legislation for the North Adriatic region, novel forms of cultivating ocean resources, and ideas for hacking, repurposing, and commoning existing maritime technologies. The distinctiveness of the project lies in its utilization of artistic research as a means to orchestrate and document a participatory and transdisciplinary process of remapping and reimagining a shared marine space our Common Sea!