Water, Water, Everywhere

Why is the age-old practice of oceanic thinking once again rising to the surface?

- Erik Morse

'The ocean provides a model to accommodate change and unpredictability, to sway back and forth between, and ultimately to transcend, numerous disciplines,' writes curator Stefanie Hessler in her essay 'Tidalectic Curating' (2020). Proffering a radical premise for an alternative artistic practice, one that looks towards an aquatic, rather than telluric, form of posthumanism, Hessler invokes a term first coined by Barbadian writer and poet Kamau Brathwaite to describe a singular ontology linked to the ocean's tidal movements - in his words, 'the ripple and the two tide movement', which leads, above all, to a rejection of 'the notion of dialectic' (and its three-part structure of thesis, antithesis and synthesis). More importantly, Brathwaite's thinking allows for a construction of identity that moves away from traditional anchors in time and place, to propose a new, fluid form that crossed oceans and continents. It's this thesis that thinkers and curators like Hessler gravitate towards. As she says, by following the thought of Brathwaite one may find oneself immersed in a hybrid worldview... from the oceans, with their surfaces... as much as in their depths'.