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Abstract
In modernity the oceans are places of globalisation, capitalism, and climate change. Through Afrofuturist visions the seas offer aesthetic languages for aquatic transformation and fictional marine species. Afrofutures mess with temporalities of past, present and future. They afford to consider together transatlantic crossings of enslaved people with today’s migrations. The artists’ projects discussed offer new perspectives on historical and environmental changes through the recovery of Afrodiasporic subjectivities. Their re-imaginings offer different possibilities to address the environmental crisis within a global world.
Bio
Bergit Arends is a curator of contemporary art and academic with specialist research interests in art and environment in global contexts. Her monograph Photography, Ecology and Historical Change in the Anthropocene: Activating Archives (Routledge, 2024) is part of the series Photography, Place, Environment. Her doctoral research resulted among other in the award-winning publication Chrystel Lebas. Field Studies (2018).
Bergit presents and publishes widely, including ‘Unequal Earth’ (NaturKultur 2021), The Botanical City (2020), Botanical Drift (2018), Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (2018), and on decolonising natural history museums (Art in Science Museums 2019).
She has curated contemporary art projects for the natural history museums in London and Berlin. Bergit was British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, where she now teaches on tidalectics in contemporary art. She is working on new research on critical coasts and on anticipatory landscapes.