In May 2023, MedILS institute in Split hosts two ASEA residencies organized by KONTEJNER and focused on exploring and developing artistic and research concepts considering the ecologies of the sea and the marine environment. The residencies will be presented as a part of the Heard by the deep public programme happening in Split, 16 – 21st May 2023.
Fara Peluso’s (IT) Theca installation and research residency is focused on hybrid art+science knowledge production and artistic concept exploration. Her multidisciplinary research on the diatom micro-algae emphasizes the importance of their invisible existence for the maintenance of biodiversity and the life of many species – including us as human beings.
Theca is a “cyborg” sculpture, a hybrid living installation that exists through the coexistence of separate entities, their maintenance through the interaction and the sharing of information between analog and digital, organic and inorganic matter, living and non-living entities. Theca is the result of multidisciplinary research on the diatom micro-algae that the artist-designer Fara Peluso has been developing for years, focusing on their ecology and the importance of their invisible existence for the maintenance of biodiversity and the life of many species, including the human beings.
The project, supported and developed in 2022 in collaboration with PhD Giulia Ghedini, the leader of the Functional Ecology Group from the Gulbenkian Science Institute Oeiras, and Cultivamos Cultura Lisbon, is a post-human and eco-feminist artistic practice that shows how humans have always been bonded with these organisms, questioning why and when the social constructions defined human species as a separate and autonomous entity (Lynn Margulis). Peluso wants to give her work a cyborg identity because, through the philosophical work of Donna J. Haraway about human-machine and human-animal relations, she shares the idea that “a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organisms, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Donna J. Haraway).
The Theca installation proposes a new way of observing the environment by focusing on microscale organisms and their relationships with other living entities. The work questions how humans can change their “mental models” by observing symbiotic relationships and coexistences in Nature and aiming to redesign their hierarchical social constructions. Symbiotic interaction, microscales, and coexistence relationships are the keywords that Theca proposes to research in order to participate in changing the way we perceive the world instead of perpetuating the desire to change it.
Fara Peluso (IT) is a Berlin-based artist-designer who, through speculative research, plays on how to connect human beings with nature, living organisms and biological processes in a new, deeper relationship. By observing these relationships, she aims to cancel the notion that humans are the most important living organisms on earth. As an artist-designer with a strong interest in biology, Fara Peluso pursues her deep research on algae taking constant inspiration from them and enquiring into their poetry and agency through a transdisciplinary and speculative methodology. Between 2018 and 2020, Peluso has been a guest at the Institute of Biotechnology TU in Berlin as a resident artist for the project Mind the Fungi. In 2022, she spent nine months in residency at Ars Electronica, regional S+T+ARTS center in Linz, with her new collaborative project Circular Records about LP bioplastic manufacturing.
The Mutual Aid Orchestra residency research by Marko Marković and Josipa Vujević (HR) strives not only to understand the communication frequencies among Adriatic Sea animals but to create a system that could warn them about the danger in their surroundings. Artists work with concrete scientific marine data – its usage, production, and visualization – offering at the same time new, speculative, imaginative scenarios.
Mutual Aid Orchestra is an ongoing research project by Marko Marković investigating interactive communication and empathic bonding transformations as survival strategies between species in extreme living environments. Using bioacoustic methodologies in art and science is based on emotional support and mutual aid with performativity through sound, music and body movement. In this research project, artist Marko Marković and oceanographic engineer Josipa Vujević explore possibilities in interactive communication with the sea mammals in the Adriatic Sea. They will try to achieve this by creating a DIY Active Acoustic Monitoring System for movement detection and echolocators navigation directed towards intelligent sea creatures such as the bottlenose dolphin, the large whale that occasionally visits us from the Mediterranean, and the Mediterranean monk seal, an endangered species allegedly seen again in the Adriatic Sea. The research focuses on the Adriatic Sea within human-animal relationships and their living conditions influenced by today’s environmental challenges.
The project objective is to review the effect of sound/music interaction on animal behavior and its empowering potential in creative communication. It potentially reduces stress levels in noise-polluted environments affected by gas and fuel drilling, underwater construction, global tourism, boat traffic, military activities and war zones. Such extreme environmental conditions are affecting life on the planet and expanding climate change destructions of biodiversity on the land and in the sea.
Marko Marković (HR) is an artistic researcher on collective engagement in self-organized societies creating autonomous models of coexistence with performative communication strategies. He graduated from the Arts Academy in Split, University of Zadar (Psychology and Pedagogy), and holds an MA in Art & Science from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, the department where he worked as a program coordinator. From 2008 to 2018, he was the artistic director of DOPUST / Days of open performance. He was awarded the Radoslav Putar Young Visual Artist Award in 2011. From 2012 to 2014, he worked in the production of the Matthew Barney Studio in New York. Marković presented his work at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in 2016, La Biennale di Venezia – Biennale Sessions Giardini in 2019, the Moscow International Biennale for Young Art in 2016, at Kunsthalle Wien in 2023. As a project researcher in the scientific team at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz in 2022/2023, he is exploring robot-human interactions.
Josipa Vujević (HR) (b. 1978, Drniš) graduated from the University of Zagreb in Satellite Physical Geodesy and Geomatics with a focus on research technologies of the sea and the seabed. From 2004 to 2013, she undertook professional scientific studies in the Adriatic Sea and the coast at the Hydrographic Institute Split. From 2013 to 2016, she worked in the Netherlands, focusing on the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, and the Black Sea. She has been working as a freelancer on projects in the Caspian Lake, the Ionian Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean since 2017. She specialized in research on acoustic technologies to collect data on the physical and morphological properties of the sea and the seabed, observing the life of organisms and scientific methods applied in data processing and making studies.
