TERRITORIAL AGENCY (JOHN LALMESINO & ANN-SOFI RÖNNSKOG)

In 2020, Territorial Agency participated in that year’s Taipei Biennial with the project Oceans in Transformation (2020). The ocean is a sensorium: it records in its complex dynamics the transformations of the Earth, and it inscribes back in the dynamics of life its own cycles. The ocean is the most dynamic and sensitive component of our living planet. Today, the ocean is rapidly changing: it is registering in its circulations, habitats, and ecologies the impact of complex energy-intensive human activities. How can we become sensitive to these transformations? How can we think from and with the ocean?

Oceans in Transformation is a multi-year research project to investigate the Anthropocene ocean, in its multiple dimensions and rhythms of change. In its key concepts the Critical Zone is addressing land, yet the relations to the ocean are a key component of the complex fluxes that characterise it. One can only think of land in connection to the moving ocean.

The complex position of Taiwan amidst these transformations is traced through different trajectories. They are formed by complex overlay of remote sensing measurements of change across the oceans. The trajectories intersect the different durations and rhythms of change. When considering the ocean and land relations as trajectories, we never find a single time and space: we encounter the multiplicity of forms as they emerge, coalesce, stabilise, dissolve, intensify. We become sensible to their transformations.

Ocula 2020