Water Resonances: Listening, Translating, Advocating
About the panel
Water teems with life, signals and patterns for us to dive in, decipher and care about. This panel brings together scientists studying aquatic life behavior, artists exploring water's flows and patterns, and advocates working to bring the importance of rivers, lakes and seas to human attention and decision-making systems.
Moderator
Camilla Colombo
Co-Founder and Artistic Director — OHME
Camilla Colombo is a curator whose practice explores the intersections between artistic enquiry and scientific research. With a background in the performing arts and in advocacy for the arts at the European level, she has worked in Italy, the UK, and Belgium, serving organisations of all sizes as well as independent artists, with a focus on multidisciplinary and multimedia productions. She has collaborated with and curated at contemporary art institutions in Belgium and abroad, such as BOZAR, iMAL, and LUMA Arles. She is co-founder and Artistic Director of Ohme (BE), an organisation investigating contemporary societal issues through transdisciplinary initiatives in arts and sciences.
Speakers
Alex Jordan
Behavioural Scientist — Max Plank Institute
Alex Jordan is an Australian marine biologist who leads the Behavioural Evolution Research Group at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour in Konstanz. He works underwater, in the oceans and lakes where fish live, and asks what their behaviour can and cannot tell us about their experience. He uses art as a bridge to the non-human world, and his collaborations with SUPERFLEX, Tomás Saraceno, Antoine Bertin and Ingo Niermann have been shown at the Venice Biennale, Desert X, The Shed and the UN Ocean Conference.
Paula Nishijima
Artist — S+T+ARTS AQUA MOTION
Paula Nishijima is a Brazilian visual artist whose research-based practice weaves together scientific perspectives, decolonial poetics, and nonhuman cosmologies. Her work explores the nonlinear temporalities and patterns of living systems – drawing connections to the human political and ethical dimensions. Her artistic research is materialized and documented through various media, such as video, games, art installations, and sculptures.
Hila Mor
Artist — S+T+ARTS AQUA MOTION
Hila considers natural pattern formations, fluid dynamics, and physical materials as programmable matter to be discovered, designed, and re-invented. At the core of Hila’s work is a vision of accessible creative tools for interactive materials that translate material dynamics into tangible human perception. Her work has been published in venues like ACM CHI and exhibited internationally. She holds a Master of Media Arts and Sciences from MIT Media Lab and a B.Des Cum Laude in Product Design from Bezalel Academy. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, she works towards accessible material interfaces that transform how we experience and interact with our daily environments.
Valentine Boccas
Head of Cultural Action — Fondation Tara Océan
Valentine Boccas is the Manager of cultural actions at the Tara Ocean foundation. For more than twenty years, the Tara Ocean foundation has been conducting scientific expeditions around the world to study marine biodiversity and the impacts of climate change and pollution. Alongside its scientific research, Tara’s expeditions have encouraged collaboration with artists through the organization of more than 50 art-science residencies to help shape a new imaginary of the Ocean.