The sea is a territory of multiple layers: an affective archive, a space of displacement, a site of extraction, a surface of projection, and also a repository of violence. The works gathered in this station activate the ocean as a living, sensitive, and political matter — refusing its reduction to a natural resource or a touristic postcard. Here, the sea is not merely landscape, but a contested field of forces, where personal memories, collective rituals, gestures of repair, and experiences of forced displacement intersect.

The works in this exhibition summon the sea as a body in motion, at once intimate and planetary, capable of exposing the tensions between local knowledges and global systems of exploitation. In doing so, they open questions that traverse postcolonial thought, ecological critique, and feminist and queer epistemologies: how can we resist the extractivist logic that turns waters and lives into commodities? How can we reinscribe affective geographies emerging from routes of migration, trade, and diaspora? Which historical imaginaries remain to be reconstituted — or reinvented — from the ocean?

Works on display

Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka
Namazu (2023)
Hatanaka works across mythological, ecological, and psychological worlds. In this piece, she evokes the figure of the seismic catfish from Japanese mythology to explore how our emotions might be entangled with our environment. The sea becomes a vibratory, sensitive body, traversed by ancestral forces and intimate affects.

César Schofield Cardoso
Blue Womb (2023 – ongoing): There Are Many Fishing Vessels (2023) / Knots (2024)
Blue Womb is a multimedia project that reflects on the ocean in Cape Verde as a site of ongoing colonial narratives that obfuscate past and present violence and conceal cosmologies, poetics, and worldviews of fishing communities. It seeks to understand how aesthetic construction has operated throughout history as a sedative to violence on bodies and landscapes. Cardoso contrasts the rhetoric of the “blue economy” with images and gestures that reconfigure the Atlantic as a space of survival and reinvention, where memory and care prevail over extraction and oblivion.

João Pedro Vale
Scrimshaw (Sailor Jerry) (2011)
With a practice marked by queer imaginaries and social and political critique, Vale appropriates maritime aesthetics to evoke desire, exile, and memory. The presented sculpture draws on naval traditions and sailors’ tattoos, opening the sea to sensitive and dissident narratives.

Nadia Belerique (New Commission)
LOTA (2025)
This installation, comprising sculptures and film, draws from Belerique’s visit to the fish market in Ponta Delgada, where the artist transforms the conveyor belt into a scenographic device that reflects on value, repetition, and the invisibility of labor. The film choreographs gestures, bodies, and mechanical rhythms, revealing the place of unseen work within systems of economic circulation and proposing renewed attention to the infrastructures that shape our everyday lives. The installation becomes a scene into which visitors are invited to experience the theatricality of the fish market space, where the conveyor belt acts as the front stage for this daily performance.