The Next Wave

It reads like a mirage: a weathered ship sailing from afar, now moored at port. After years wandering more than 50,000 nautical miles in the Indonesian archipelago, calling at remote islands and harbours, and tracing climate fault lines, Arka Kinari arrived in Colombo for Colomboscope, Sri Lanka’s biennial contemporary art festival, before continuing westward toward the Mediterranean via India, Socotra, Sudan and Saudi Arabia. A 70-tonne working ship (named Arka from the Latin for “vessel”, and Kinari from the Sanskrit description of a half-human, half-bird musician), this is no fantasy but an entirely real “floating cultural platform” on a “voyage to explore resilience to climate change”, according to the husband-and-wife artist-musican duo behind it, Filastine & Nova.

Alongside more than 500 others, I made my way past construction sites in the newly reclaimed Port City Colombo to gather around this floating stage in late January. In the background, the container port hummed with motion. As dusk settled, the ship deck became a stage. Submerged lights cast the water in a particular glow, while the sails caught moving images in the wind. In Colombo, a few performers arrived by speedboat, wrapped in gold emergency blankets, flares streaking upward into the darkened sky. What followed was a voyage retold in sound and image: the beauty and travails of open water, the communities encountered along the way, and the extraction documented across industrial wastes.

Nova’s voice, sung mostly in Javanese and Bahasa Indonesia, was unmoored from genre, at once intimate and elemental. Contemporary electronic beats intertwined with Javanese tonalities and layered polyrhythms, inducing a slow, tidal hypnosis. Time loosened. The sensibility was unmistakably of the present, yet bent toward something older, or perhaps simply slower-moving, widened by exposure to the sea. And so it was: after setting sail in 2019, Arka Kinari was crossing the Pacific just as the Covid-19 pandemic hit. The crew found themselves stranded at sea, refused entry to one Pacific state after another. While much of the world was locked inside homes and national borders, they were caught mid-ocean—locked out of civilisation.

“Contemporary electronic beats intertwined with Javanese tonalities induce a slow, tidal hypnosis”

For one half of the duo, US musician Grey Filastine (who co-founded Seattle-based band Infernal Noise Brigade in 1999 to participate in large-scale anti-capitalist protests against the globalisation of trade), that isolation reshaped his listening. “Pop song structures now sound crass or even naively ‘pre-Covid’,” he reflected in a 2021 interview. “I now crave long-form compositions: classical (Western or Indian), Qawwali, avant-garde and minimalist composers, or noise and ambient music.” His collaborator and life partner, the Indonesian musician Nova Ruth Setyaningtyas—who grew up singing Pentecostal spirituals and Qur’anic recitations before performing Javanese gamelan and later becoming one half of the Indonesian rap duo Twin Sista—brings her own layered musical lineage to the voyage.

As an endeavour, Arka Kinari is threaded with mythos. I do not mean this disparagingly. Elemental forces propel it: solar energy from the sun, desalinated water from the sea, wind in its sails. And the ocean itself: as philosopher Gaston Bachelard suggests in The Poetics of Space (1958), water invites a certain cosmic intimacy, a reverie that expands our sense of being. There is something of that here: the ocean not as backdrop but as commons, a field that precedes and exceeds our infrastructures.

“Arka Kinari’s insistence on distance, slowness and opacity opens us up to an oceanic sublime”

What makes the whole story so compelling, for me, is how it moves beyond symbolism, and how it is not just about the romance of the sea. When Arka Kinari finally entered Indonesia in June 2020, it docked not only at festivals but at small islands and in fishing communities. Filastine & Nova’s shows were met with return performances on shore; local musicians came aboard to play and dance (documented in Laut Loud, a series of online concerts filmed onboard the Arka Kinari); workshops demonstrated solar and desalination systems. The voyage created exchanges and alliances, not just spectacle.

“The voyage created exchanges and alliances, not just spectacle”

The anarchist anthropologist David Graeber once suggested that transformative change begins by behaving as if the world we desire already exists. Arka Kinari enacts something like this. And then there is something else, something I hesitate to name, but perhaps the term is awe. Not the technological awe we are inundated with in our accelerationist age, but something different and quieter, yet no less viral in the capture of the imagination. At a time when social and algorithmic media threatens to flatten everything into endless proximity, Arka Kinari’s insistence on distance, slowness and opacity—on what exceeds our grasp—opens us up to an oceanic sublime.

Perhaps we need this precisely because the climate emergency unfolds so slowly. Data accumulates; warnings repeat; belief in the future erodes almost imperceptibly. Arka Kinari’s invocation of the sea offers not denial nor salvation, but a practice sustained by wonder, and with it, the possibility that the future remains open. —[O]

Main image: Arka Kinari arrival, Colomboscope (2026). Photo: Isira Sooriyaarachchi.