The notion of the ocean as a pristine, untouched expanse, isolated from human culture and urbanization, is far from reality. With the development of legal frameworks and technologies for governing, monitoring, traversing, and exploiting marine spaces, the world’s seas have become increasingly entangled into the fabric of human activity. Today, both human and non-human inhabitants of marine and coastal regions are deeply embedded in multi-scalar metabolic processes intrinsic to the capitalist mode of socio-ecological (re)production. Despite the urgency of transforming these planetary metabolic circuits, integrated, comprehensive, and transcultural forms of popular oceanic knowledge remain scarce, hindered by language barriers, disciplinary divides, and a lack of translation between institutionalized and non-institutionalized forms of knowledge. Focusing on the networks of marine communities, technologies, and infrastructures in the Northern Adriatic, the artistic research project Komuna Maro (Common Sea in Esperanto) seeks to address these gaps by uncovering hidden power structures of the maritime economy, creating new “cartographies,” and proposing alternative narratives for the region.
In terms of methodology, the project integrates experimental approaches from geography, oceanography, and anthropology with artistic practices and citizen science. Rather than generating entirely “new” expert knowledge, it aims to interweave existing scientific and non-scientific insights with lived, embodied experiences of the sea. The ultimate goal is to create a multifaceted, transnational, multilingual, accessible, and open-ended critical atlas of the Northern Adriatic. In its first phase, the core project team—working alongside selected artists and in collaboration with numerous institutional and individual partners, advisers, and regional interlocutors—will conduct extensive field research divided into two main themes: The Sea of Infrastructure and The Sea of Currents. Preliminary findings will be shared and enriched through a performative, expeditionary exhibition aboard a sailing boat, radio broadcasts and podcasts, a low-threshold conference and other discursive and visual formats.
In its final phase, the research will culminate into a comprehensive, crowd-sourced, web-based mapping project, complemented by a series of open workshops designed to develop and share skills for critically observing, mapping and narrating the ocean. What sets Komuna Maro apart is its unique approach to orchestrating and documenting a collective, transdisciplinary process of rethinking a shared marine space—our Common Sea.
Duration: October 2023 – September 2027
Funding: Program for Arts-based Research (PEEK) of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
Hosting institution: Institute of Contemporary Art (IZK), Graz University of Technology
Core project team: Ana Jeinić (principal investigator and project leader), Ana Dana Beroš (researcher and chief curator), Milica Tomić (artistic advisor)
External contributors: Ana Opalić (photography and video), Federica Pessotto and Lucia Rebolino (cartography and visual communication design), Mihael Giba (multimedia art), Matija Kralj Štefanić (sailing expedition)
Expert advisors: Panka Babukova (geospatial technologies), Katja Kalkschmied (international economics), Silvija Kipson (marine biology), Mauro Sirotnjak (infrastructure politics), Pietro Zandegiacomo Copetin (maritime logistics)
Institutional partners: Nancy Couling (Bergen Arkitekthøgskole, NO), Elizabeth Johnson (Durham University, Department of Geography, UK), Univerza v Ljubljani, Fakulteta za arhitekturo (Ljubljana, SI), TBA21-Academy/Ocean Space (Venice, IT), Drugo more (Rijeka, HR).
Additional cooperations: PINA (Koper, SI), Mediterranean Institute for Environmental Studies (Koper, SI), Marine Biology Station Piran, National Institute of Biology (Piran, SI)