Name: ‘Safarnama,’ 2020 by TBA21 on st_age
Duration: 23 min 20 s

In this podcast, artist and researcher Susana Jiménez Carmona talks with scientists Claudio Barría, a marine biologist, and Michel André, a bioacoustician. Both are involved to different degrees in the artistic production and research project ruido ê by Silvia Zayas, an audiovisual and performing artist—a fragment of the film ruido ê can be seen on this same platform. Some issues raised by or arising during the development of this project are addressed here by Barría and André, including interspecific coexistence in coastal cities, encounters with elusive electric rays, the effects of anthropogenic noise on living creatures and marine ecosystems, and collaborations between disparate humans.

Text by Susana Jimenéz Carmona

Credits:
Conducted by Susana Jimenez Carmona
Contributors: Michel André and Claudio Barria

Tan lejos tan cerca, ruido (So far so close, noise)

Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, Fana Fraser is currently a U.S. based contemporary dance artist who explores the nature and essence of things within a framework of exploratory embodiment. Her short film, nesting (2023), was filmed both in and near water, at the intersection of physical and philosophical constructs of borders, urgency, and care. It enjoins us to consider the environment, our responsibilities, and our humanity, and, although the film was shot on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, it evokes a feeling of Caribbean consciousness and reality. 
 
Three artists who live and work in the Caribbean region—dance practitioners Sonja Dumas (host) and neila ebankhs, from Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica respectively, as well as Trinidad and Tobago poet Shivanee Ramlochan—examine the work in the context of the Caribbean’s relationship to its environment, the ache of its past, and musings on its future.

Sonja Dumas

Credits:
Contributors: Shivanee Ramlochan and neila ebankhs
Conducted by Sonja Dumas

Of History, Habitat, and The Shore: Framing a Caribbean Discourse around Fana Fraser’s “nesting”

For video podcast in sign language please visit st_age website on the following link: https://www.stage.tba21.org/detail/ocean-for-all

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Abecedarium. The Ocean in Sign Language is the name of a multi-year educational and participatory project in collaboration with ENS, Ente Nazionale Sordi (Italian Deaf Agency), and CNR ISMAR, Institute of Marine Sciences.

The main idea of the project is to create an eco-glossary in sign language, beginning with Italian sign language, before moving to other countries and international signs related to the marine world and the climate emergency. The ocean covers almost the entire Earth, and all human lives depend on the ocean—from the air we breathe to the food we eat to what we wear. Yet the ocean is also endangered because of the great impact of human activities. 

To be able to care for the Ocean it is absolutely fundamental that everybody has access to artistic content and scientific knowledge without exclusion. We all need to be involved in safeguarding the planet, and everyone must have the information and tools required to access it. 

‘Abecedarium, The Ocean in Sign Language’ proposes a vision of an ocean sea as an open access for all to information. This is an engaging and inspirational ocean, where different expressions and experiences converge, and are also translated into tangible manifestations related to contemporary culture.  

Art, in the values it expresses, can be an effective means of social development to achieve this change. Building the possibility of interpreting our history together through training activities, and creating new forms of expression for new situations, for new worlds, means opening up to new areas of cultural growth, thereby guaranteeing processes of democracy, equity, exchange, and cultural interaction between the various components of society.

Contributors: Angela Pomaro and Mirko Santoro
Conducted by Valeria Bottalico

Ocean for all. Art for the development of a sign language eco-glossary

With the rise of artificial intelligence, a new frontier emerges in human cognition and experience. Concepts such as consciousness and creativity are constantly redefined by algorithms and code performances. Extraction, manipulation, and radicalization are some of the intensified side effects of applying computational techniques to traditional media. Can adopting radical transparency, decentralization, and the inclusion of non-human perspectives help us steer this new media toward becoming a productive force of sustainability and regeneration? 
One of the central topics of this episode is the concept of deep fakes, an emergent technology with profound societal implications. The episode further delves into its intricacies through a podcast hosted by Marta Peirano, a journalist specializing in technology and power, who is joined by researcher specializing in deep fakes Henry Ajder and human rights advocate and technologist Sam Gregory. Together, they offer invaluable perspectives on the opportunities and challenges posed by synthetic media. 

Credits:
Contributors: Henry Ajder and Sam Gregory
Conducted by Marta Peirano

Decoding Deep Fakes: AI, Ethics, and the Power of Media

A sound piece tracing the textures and toxicities of air.

Invoking the presence of jinns to explore the textures and toxicities of air, Safarnama (2020) activates natural and sacred worlds to pay attention to the intimacy of toxic colonialisms. Borrowing its name from and referencing the history of travel literature produced in the Islamic world, Safarnama traces the journey of a jinn traveling through the emerging, extractive infrastructures of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. We turn to these otherworldly beings of air and fire to disrupt colonial protocols of seeing and knowing, to rewire our experiential modes, and to stretch open the possibility of witnessing at a time of heightened policing and repression. The jinn that we seek challenges the state project of erasure. Subsisting below the threshold of official state narratives, the jinn attunes us to the entanglements between sacred, human and ecological worlds. 

Artwork credits:

Saraab (Omer Wasim and Shahana Rajani)
Safarnama, 2020
Sound piece, 2020
23 min 20 sec
Sound design and audio mixing by Mudassir Sheikh
Music played by Taj Mohammad and Abdul Hameed Baloch
Commissioned and produced by KHOJ International Artists' Association and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) for st_age

The narration in Safarnama references the following sources: Anand Taneja, Jinnealogy: Time, Islam and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (Delhi: Stanford University Press, 2018); Nishat Awan and Zahra Hussain, “Conflicting Material Imaginaries,” New Silk Roads, e-flux (January 2020), online; David Abrams, “The Remembering and Forgetting of the Air,” Storytellers before Dawn: An Anthology, eds. Juddha Su and Mi You (2018); an interview conducted by Dr. Hasan Ali Khan who generously shared it with us; and Robert Lebling, Legends of the Fire Spirits (New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2010).

‘Safarnama,’ 2020

TBA21 on st_age is TBA21’s research and commissioning digital space. Based on long-term relationships of trust, it reaches out to bring a multiplicity of voices and contexts into conversation, supporting artist’s needs throughout both research and practice. 

TBA21 on st_age focuses on environmental and social contemporary artistic practices, and presents video, animation, sound, and text works, as well as projects specifically designed to be experienced online. These are accompanied by a series of contextual materials, which make both the work and the research behind it accessible to a broader audience. These materials include artist-curator conversations, editorial podcasts, research clusters, and calls to actions, as well as the backst_age series, which connects the different projects through conversations, video glossaries, and curated views. All featured works remain the property of the artists and authors.

‘Safarnama,’ 2020

TBA21 on st_age

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