→ I used to go to Fire Island → on Long Island, which is a queer place, a mythical place. → It’s been a gay beach since at least the 1940s. There’s a poem about it written by Frank O’Hara (“A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island”). I loved going there, the kindness of the environment, the body-positive attitude of the people. There is a deep sense of acceptance in this community which I think also comes from the ocean itself. Fire island is quite wild + sometimes you
can see deer on the beach. It’s about 3 hours by public transportation from NYC. You get the ticket directly from Penn Station which includes the train, taxi and ferry rides.

C.G. Its immensity + its calm, the calm (of surface). At least that’s how it seems to me, always, when I encounter the ocean: it is calm. It is infinitely accepting. Not acceptance in its anthropomorphic sense but literally. Not a form of kindness, but the absorption of everything that comes in contact with it.

I felt as if the sea allowed me to be there. It rang true somehow (the colors + everything) the loneliness of it.

Now, as an adult, I feel I’m just reconnecting with the sea and how it used to make me feel. There’s something unconditional to just being in the proximity of the sea.

For me, the sea is connected to a certain psychological state → that has to do with growing up and becoming a person + finding a way to be a person. Believing that I had the right to become a person. In front of the sea I experienced an infinite acceptance of who I was, or of the fact that I didn’t know who or what I was.

T.v.A. Its vastness. Its colors + smells + earthiness. In Dutch, the word I would use is urkracht → in English it means “primordial force”. An acceptance from within the power of being. I think I felt safety also because of the huge contrast between my fragility and its generosity.

I love watching the tides. My relation to the sea is defined by proximity and observation. But its not about the sea surrounding me I’m just accepted in its proximity.

In our everyday life, we have no feeling for geological time. When life appeared on the planet, everything was liquid. Becoming more solid and developing symmetry gave us the opportunity to direct our movement. We tend to think of the earth – the planet earth – as something stable + unchanging. But it is not. It is transforming constantly.

Wise/Wild
Powerful
Young
Always changing
Beautiful while she’s just being herself.
I think of her as both very playful + strong and in her element.

The wind makes the sea always different. Different waves form with north wind than with wind from the east. The north wind creates large layers of waves (i.e. wider waves) while with eastern wind, waves are shorter (i.e. narrower).

The sea is never the same, you don’t know what to expect. The sea is always different; sometimes we were very angry at the sea because we could not do our job properly.

During my childhood, the sea was a primordial dream and playground. Then when I was around 12, I started going there on my own to engage in artistic activities like sculpting the sand and driftwood into huge land art works well before I knew such art existed. Like Spiral Jetty (by Robert Smithson), I made large sand constructions on the beach that would quickly be transformed and destroyed by the daily tide water.

The first experimental films I made were made on the beach in my early teens with my parents Super 8 equipment. One film depicted a friend coming out of the sea dressed in a bed sheet as a toga and reading a book. Later on, I filmed a pig's head being thrown towards the sea off a high cliff. I also would film the sand and driftwood constructions that I made on the beach. These rather crude filmic efforts were, in a sense, a sort of mythic homage to the sea and the stories that surrounded it.

In my adulthood, I traveled to Polynesia and I spent many months hopping from island to island living with locals in small villages. I then made a long Super 8 film called Fiji View-master which used a children's toy slide viewer as a visual prop and special effect generator.

T.v.A. I was there on a writing residency. When I work on a new play, I choose to go and work by the sea, usually on an island. This is not on purpose. When I write, I do not want to be disturbed by normal life. I am not attracted to mountains nor to warm countries. I end up in places like the north of Norway or the islands of Great Britain or Newfoundland.

In fact, I do have a practice of painting the sea every day – this does open my mind. I go to the same spot on the beach in Ostend and make a polaroid image of the sea. Then I paint the polaroid. Every time I think: Puh, this is a difficult one; I don’t know if I can do it. But when I start, I don’t have that thought anymore. I conquer the fear of starting and that makes it easier to start.

Taking the photograph → is not directly connected to my artistic development → but the practice of taking the pictures and then painting them makes it valuable for me on an artistic level. It’s become a developing work of 150 little paintings.The sea has rarely been the subject of my work. But, in fact, I did make a 160 min. video of the sea, I’ve also drawn and painted the sea before; I developed a pastel technique for drawing the sea.

In the texts I’ve written, the sea has always appeared one way or another. But only for a minute or so. Seabirds, also appear regularly. On the other hand, I’ve never talked about birds of prey or of mountains. The city + the sea form a universe from which I draw.

The Belgian seaside is covered in cement. As a child I remember the boardwalk in Koksijde and how I spent → a lot of time looking at the ocean. I remember swimming with my grandmother in the sea; she would play with me in the cold waves for hours.

G.V.Actually, the sea for me is linked to childhood, even now. It has the properties to draw me back into childhood. My body becomes different – because of the gravity that is different.

I was born in Norway. The first year of my life we lived in Fyresdal → which is next to a huge lake in the middle of the forest. So I’ve (almost) lived my whole life in Ostend – except of this first year.

L.M.The ocean was always there. It was very present. It’s part of the world in which I grew up. I come from a fisherman’s family → so even though the ocean is more of a space of leisure for me, for my family it is more connected to labor.

M.B. It might be best if I start by spluttering and stammering in trying to speak about the ocean. As such vocal and abstract noises reflect my inability to satisfactorily describe the deep connections I have with the ocean going way back to my childhood. This includes the sea as well as the ocean, as the difference and connections between these two watery entities are important to recognize. You cannot have one without the other and both are intricately connected. My sea legs and my oceanic feelings combine to dance this special kind of jig.

At Half Moon Bay near where I lived in Melbourne as a kid, there’s a sunken battle ship (a relic from WW1). One can either swim or walk to the ship depending on the level of the tide. The ship is called the ‘Cerberus’ and is the name of the mythological dog that protects the doors of the underworld. This half sunken wreck protrudes from the sea and its presence connects in my memory to so many strange sea fantasies I’ve read in poetry and literature over the years, including the sea voyages described by Rabelais.

I’m an ocean baby really, as I spent the first part of my life beside the sea in suburban Australia. Mansfield’s story At the Bay connects to lots of what I remember about living beside the sea as a child. I recommend you read it and pay special attention to the way that Mansfield uses various speech styles and manners (especially by children) to evoke the spell that the sea and nature has over the diverse characters in the story.

During my childhood, the sea was a primordial dream and playground. Then when I was around 12, I started going there on my own to engage in artistic activities like sculpting the sand and driftwood into huge land art works well before I knew such art existed. Like Spiral Jetty (by Robert Smithson), I made large sand constructions on the beach that would quickly be transformed and destroyed by the daily tide water.

The great modernist Australian painter Clarice Beckett, who for many years was not well known, did a series of paintings in the 1930s of the very same beaches that I played on many years later during my childhood. Beckett’s work is quite unique, and for me, evokes many vivid visual and atmospheric impressions of my time spent on these beaches. Her painting techniques are deemed to be very innovative for the time; she used a distinctive flattened, fuzzy and abstract method of applying color in her landscapes. When I was a child of 8 or 9, my parents enrolled me in a local painting class that was held in a neighbor's house looking over the sea, and this was only attended by local women, mainly housewives. I like to think Beckett’s spirit was present in these classes somehow.

Throughout my childhood I would submerge myself in the sea according to different parts of my body. As a toddler, I was told to not go deeper than my knees and a few years later no deeper than my belly button (NAVEL NAVAL) until I was up to my neck in the water in my teens. And all the time I would spend hours snorkeling over the surface, peering down into the water upon all the various seaweed and rock formations.

Also throughout my childhood, I would use a thin circular piece of wood to skip, skid and slide over the surface of shallow water on the beach. Surfing is a popular thing to do in Australia but I never really tried it other than body surfing, which is when you use the whole body as a kind of board and are carried by the force of breaking waves. It’s a bit like flying by the force of the sea and reminds me of the flying fish that one sees in the South Pacific.

I was into rock pooling as a kid also, meaning I’d observe for hours what lives within the rock pools when the tide is out, and also during the night. One night I even discovered tiny sea worms that would explode instantly when exposed to torch light. This marine phenomena seemed to defy all reasonable explanation as I could not find information about such a sea creature ever existing. I’ve always wondered if it was only a waking sea dream.

The experience of this place retouched on the magic that the ocean had for me when I was a child. To hear the sounds of the ocean was to be in the proximity of an old and familiar habitat. Kangaroos slept right beside the house in Woodgate which was spitting or spluttering distance from the ocean. We slept to the sounds of the breaking waves.

Although I spent some of my childhood holidays by the sea → I am a very good swimmer. I spent a lot of time swimming in rivers: particularly in Cheshire, England. I have a strong relationship to water but more to fresh water than to seawater.

P.v.C. When I was young, I was a fisherman (until my 40s).

T.v.A To start, I want to say that I’m totally in love with the ocean. I’m also very afraid of it. Or, rather, I’m in awe of it. It’s the most fantastic body that exists. When I was small, it was my parents that first brought me to the sea.
(It was in Middlekerke: we had an apartment there where we used to go for the summer.)

G.V.The ocean is more mythological than the sea. When I think of the ocean → I think of the Atlantic. For me, the Atlantic is very clearly defined: it begins on the coast of France + ends at the coast of the US.

G.V.In the Atlantic Ocean there is a rifting zone. It is related to many surreal creatures. There is a friction in the tectonic plates that the water is soothing. On land, such a zone is an open lava wound. Nothing is able to live there. But in the sea, it’s where life originated.

The ocean has enormous power as an entity which has agency, that decides. The word ocean is male in Portuguese. The Atlantic is never something that is a given, that can be taken for granted. Being in relation to it is always a fight. It performs its agency quite loudly. It is not a background. It is quite a force. You don’t fuck with it, you have to check it first, you cannot just go in. Boys would do it. They would play with it and its aggressiveness. They would go in and be smashed by the waves.

Pacific verses Indian verses Atlantic

I used to spend vacation time in Martinique. I prefer the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean. Nowadays, I can play with my son + my dog in the sea → they can both swim better than me. I feel joy when I encounter the ocean now, because I experience it through my son’s eyes. The experience of weightlessness and buoyancy is what fascinates me the most.

Everyone from France going to the West Indies was telling me that the sea is beautiful. But I was looking at the Atlantic + not at the Caribbean (where you can see your feet in the water) → The sea is different and it felt like we were not talking about same thing. Also, because people talking to me about their vacations in the Caribbean where actually there for leisure. While I was seeing people working from dawn to dusk. We not only didn’t look at the same sea but also not at the same lives.

On an intellectual level, I would say the most important element is traveling:
the forced traveling of African populations , but also things circulating across the Atlantic ocean.

Imagine that you are standing on the ocean shore listening to the huge waves breaking in front of you. Looking out on the horizon, imagine that you can almost feel the shore at the other end of the Atlantic and the immensity of the body of water in between.

→ I used to go to Fire Island → on Long Island, which is a queer place, a mythical place. → It’s been a gay beach since at least the 1940s. There’s a poem about it written by Frank O’Hara (“A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island”). I loved going there, the kindness of the environment, the body-positive attitude of the people. There is a deep sense of acceptance in this community which I think also comes from the ocean itself. Fire island is quite wild + sometimes you
can see deer on the beach. It’s about 3 hours by public transportation from NYC. You get the ticket directly from Penn Station which includes the train, taxi and ferry rides.

My mother told me that my grandfather was an alcoholic and when he got drunk he became very aggressive. So the family would → escape to the shore. They had a primitive relationship to it, they considered it their savior. Moreover, they used to catch lobster and octopus to eat because those are the things that they could get on the rocks. Back then you could still find crabs on beach. My mom helped with making nets.

During my childhood, the sea was a primordial dream and playground. Then when I was around 12, I started going there on my own to engage in artistic activities like sculpting the sand and driftwood into huge land art works well before I knew such art existed. Like Spiral Jetty (by Robert Smithson), I made large sand constructions on the beach that would quickly be transformed and destroyed by the daily tide water.

The great modernist Australian painter Clarice Beckett, who for many years was not well known, did a series of paintings in the 1930s of the very same beaches that I played on many years later during my childhood. Beckett’s work is quite unique, and for me, evokes many vivid visual and atmospheric impressions of my time spent on these beaches. Her painting techniques are deemed to be very innovative for the time; she used a distinctive flattened, fuzzy and abstract method of applying color in her landscapes. When I was a child of 8 or 9, my parents enrolled me in a local painting class that was held in a neighbor's house looking over the sea, and this was only attended by local women, mainly housewives. I like to think Beckett’s spirit was present in these classes somehow.

My family would spend each Christmas holiday period camping beside the ocean beach on the coast. The family home was right on a bay beach, so we experienced both sea and ocean worlds throughout the year. These beach holidays were quite adventurous in terms of experience and activities.

At Byron Bay (in Australia), there is one beach where people drown regularly. I’d often experience a dull pain in my kidneys just before entering the ocean there. Later I found out that this type of pain comes exclusively from fear.

There is a hippie colony near this beach and I once saw a naked woman park her baby in a stroller on the beach right in front of huge breaking waves. Then she went into the wild surf with the incredible undertow, leaving the baby to watch unattended. The view from the baby’s perspective must have been profoundly impressible and primordial, witnessing her mother disappearing into the massive waves with all the sounds of the breaking waves and wind raging around her. I was the only other person on the beach which was many kilometers long.

I think of the beach as a space preparing one to think of the ocean imaginatively and metaphorically.

One of my dreams was to live on the beach and feed on fish + coconuts and I did this in the South Pacific over the time I travelled there.

→ I also spent some time in Rio de Janeiro. The beach in Rio has a very important presence. There is an openness of the city towards the beach. However, at the same time, the beaches of the city are wild zones. There is extreme poverty and inequality in the city, so there is also a lot of crime.

P.H.Well, in terms of the physical atmosphere of the city. But also economically→. Rio is a big port. In fact, in Rio there is a → blurred boundary between beach life + city life. There is an atmosphere of carefreeness + leisure and + at the same time there is a certain tension in the air because of the high crime that happens on the beach(es).

I was by myself on the beach + throwing rocks. I would just sit + watch the ripples the rocks made on the surface. I still love walking on the seashore, feeling the wind on my face + listening to the waves. I just sit + watch the horizon and what is behind the horizon. It opens up a lot of ideas about how movement occurs. From France, you can see England from across the channel. When I was in Marseille → I was thinking of Algeria when looking out into the sea. There’s a moment of connecting through the horizon.

In fact, I do have a practice of painting the sea every day – this does open my mind. I go to the same spot on the beach in Ostend and make a polaroid image of the sea. Then I paint the polaroid. Every time I think: Puh, this is a difficult one; I don’t know if I can do it. But when I start, I don’t have that thought anymore. I conquer the fear of starting and that makes it easier to start.

G.V.Actually, the sea for me is linked to childhood, even now. It has the properties to draw me back into childhood. My body becomes different – because of the gravity that is different.

G.V.Yes. That’s what I was referring to when I was telling you about the spine. It felt like a primordial communication with the sea by means of bodily perception rather than through seeing, listening, etc.

When I can sense the sand moving on my spine, its like my bones + the sand are made out of the same material. I can imagine the spine as being hollow + the sand going up and down my spine.

Everything is falling – the moment of encounter with it is linked to the possibility of death. When I’m next to the ocean, I feel like I am just part of it. I don’t have to organize anything. I sense a hollow feeling in my stomach.

I think that this feeling of complete surrender towards the ocean is closely linked to a strong desire to belong. There is an issue with belonging in there. The desire to be part of it. What I’m trying to describe is maybe an intense feeling of being grounded that arises from one’s immediate proximity to the immensity of the ocean. It’s so massive you can’t ignore it.

→ A similar feeling could be evoked once you start thinking of your back and the space that exists behind you.
→ Once you start focusing on where your skin is.

Is 7/9ths of the world ocean and sea? Is this the same proportion of water in the human body? What percentage of the body is ocean?

It’s such a power → it’s a huge thing and this gave me some kind of safety. As with every minority connecting to a majority → It gives you a sense of safety.

Now, when breathing out, bend your knees while sliding your feet on the ground towards your butt. With the breathing in, stretch your legs again on the floor. Continue this movement of the legs, following your breathing rhythm. After a while, add your arms to the movement. When breathing in, slide your arms on the ground until they reach up above your head. Breathe out and slide your hands back down next to your hips. Notice the sound that your moving body produces on the floor and how it is reminiscent of the sound of the waves breaking on the beach. You’re two at once, the human body, lying on the beach, and the ocean.
Explore those movements and rhythms and follow them in any direction they might take you.

In Portugal you can fish mainly cod and sardines. My uncle used to go out for days and days with big industrial ships to fish. I remember going with my mother to the harbor to see him when he returned.

I never knew my father → he was away a lot. I would see him for two days every eight days. So I chose to work in the school because I wanted to see my children grow up.

The encounter with the ocean brings about a silencing. A moment of stopping. You realize that you are surrounded by it and the vastness of the surrounding. It’s too loud.

1. First, one could describe it as sublime, in the classical sense (i.e. you feel very small.)
2. Secondly, is the power it has to lift you when you swim. It’s buoyancy.
There is an ecstasy of the thing that can engulf you + charm you + suddenly you become conscious of your own vulnerability.

I remember loving the feeling of touching the sea or having it around me. Back then, I was not afraid of it. But then again, my parents only took me when it was docile + warm. That was the Belgian sea, of course. It was the only sea I saw for a really long time. I had to turn 20 before seeing another sea. (This is without counting Lake Como, in Italy.)

The water: there is velvety, soft + the salt content is high. So it’s ideal for floating. Different light conditions seem to lead to different floating conditions, strangely.
Pelicans fly overhead as one floats in this tropical seascape.

This crossing was really different from taking the mailboat to Dover. I felt the wind on my face. I felt on the same level as the seagulls that were hanging out on the water surface. I didn’t even know they did that. My favorite ocean bird is the Gannet.

T.v.A. It’s like a seagull but more slender. It has a finer long beak, the back of its head is yellow. It has a thin black line around its eyes, its wings are elongated. Its the bird that can dive the deepest into the ocean. When they dive, their body turns into a a screw that penetrates the water. Gannets are also faster than seagulls.

T.v.A. Arriving is ok if the community is small enough. For example, in Fair Isle: you can only stay at the birds observatory: Breakfast, lunch + dinner are at fixed hours.

There are bird counting sessions at the observatory. There are rangers that stay there in order to count the bird population. It’s a ritual that lasts for about an hour in which the rangers sit around the table and compare the numbers of each population of birds that they counted. There are also ringed birds to identify, their migratory patterns, etc. The rings are a way for scientists to track the birds across different areas.

A lot of the islands I have visited have migratory birds passing through them. It’s nice to sit there on an island and to have the bird-world passing by and over you.

One of the most amazing things that happened to me on Fair Isle was the following: I was standing on a cliff (it was not dangerous.) I had binoculars and was looking through them at birds all around me. Suddenly, I had the feeling that I could touch the birds because I could not see the land through the binoculars, it was covered by the black edges of the viewers.

So it felt like there was just ocean + birds + me + no land. It felt like I was flying with them. It felt like there was no difference between what they were doing and what I was doing. It felt fantastic. I was too close to the cliff to walk around. I get scared really easily.

I was not using the binoculars to look at what was far away but they were blocking the physical reality instead. Because of the blackness within the binoculars. I could hear the sounds of their wings flapping It really felt as if I were amongst them.

T.v.A. I think there must have been around 20-30 birds around me. The birds are always there. I was just allowed to be close to them + they didn’t seem to bother. I went to Fair Isle two times. Now they’ve built a new bird observatory.

In the texts I’ve written, the sea has always appeared one way or another. But only for a minute or so. Seabirds, also appear regularly. On the other hand, I’ve never talked about birds of prey or of mountains. The city + the sea form a universe from which I draw.

Close your eyes and imagine that you’re standing on the edge of a cliff on a remote island. There’s a flock of seagulls flying very close to you, just off the cliff. Imagine that you’re looking at them through a pair of binoculars. Because of the black frame inside the binoculars, you cannot see the land, just the birds flying around you. You are surrounded by the sounds of the birds that appear to be almost laughing.
Your feet are firmly on the ground and still you have the feeling that you are part of the flock of seagulls and that you are flying amongst them.

→ I guess this experience made me feel empathy for people crossing the sea to come to Europe. It made me understand that the ocean is not a kind entity if you are not well prepared for it. If you fall from the boat in the middle of nowhere you are probably going to die there. Now that I know this I can empathize more with other perspectives on this.

E.R.B. I don’t remember it consciously but – I don’t know how to say it. If the water enters the body... When I was at the hospital they were taking all the water out of my lungs. If the water gets inside the lungs – the body doesn’t work anymore → its like with boats. With air → you are surrounded by it and there is a flow. It flows in and out of your body easily. But with water there is no flow: the water has to remain outside, otherwise the system doesn’t work. Its like with the law of thermodynamics → there is always the necessity of a barrier between systems.

L.J. On the boats I concentrated on what was happening around me, also because there were people around. I mostly get the stories when I’m by myself and in the water up to the knees. Cold water, preferably.

Recently I went on two sailing voyages on the North Sea from Ostende. It was with my partner’s parents who have a small yacht and they took us out for a few hours to drift on the sea in the sweltering summer heat. This was only the second time I’d ever been on such a boat and it was really a fantastic experience. Like being in a Paul Klee painting, the shape and the motion of the sails and all the other elements that go into being pushed along by the wind seem so simple yet are also so fascinatingly rich and poetic.

I always travel from Naples to Palermo on the ferry when I can. This is an absolutely fantastic voyage and one that Raymond Roussel made to his sad Sicilian end. Leaving Naples, heading towards Palermo, or returning from Palermo to Naples, this voyage evokes a great wealth of associations and anticipatory thoughts that ferment and bubble away during the overnight sea journey.

Around the Fiji islands, I travelled to many parts of the archipelago by small motor boat or canoe. Sometimes the water is so deep, that it’s bottomless. As one floats in such bottomless waters the sun shines on the body + all the while, your shadow disappears into the endless depths. This is quite an ontological and richly animated experience and beyond description once again.

Then, when I was living in Istanbul → I saw a dolphin from the boat while crossing from the Asian side to the European side.

I remember taking the mailboat from here to Dover with my mother. We used to take it every year. For shopping. The journey is about four hours each way. It was my mother’s idea of going to England. We would only go if sea was calm, of course. Before the trip, my father would look out of the window in the early morning to assess the weather.

I spent some time in the Shetland Islands in Scotland. To get from mainland Shetland to Fair Isle you either take a boat, which is called The Good Shepherd, or a plane. I became very seasick when I took that boat. That was strange because the water was calm. The waves crush the cliffs all the time so there’s an almost invisible current.

My first experiences being at the sea made me realize that I become
seasick just by looking at the waves.
There is a practical difficulty inherent in inhabiting the ocean.

Also, in my case, I am subject to seasickness. So I really have to watch out what I eat when I’m at sea

→ On the one hand, we are made of water. → But then water can also kill you in this sense, if it blocks your lungs and you cannot breathe.

E.R.B. Salt water as I experience it in relation to my body. I want to focus on 3 main things: First, the fact that you cannot drink it. And when you do drink it by accident, you choke. Also, you cannot really drink it because when you do, it makes you thirstier than before you drank it. So you will dehydrate at the end of the process.

E.R.B. I don’t remember it consciously but – I don’t know how to say it. If the water enters the body... When I was at the hospital they were taking all the water out of my lungs. If the water gets inside the lungs – the body doesn’t work anymore → its like with boats. With air → you are surrounded by it and there is a flow. It flows in and out of your body easily. But with water there is no flow: the water has to remain outside, otherwise the system doesn’t work. Its like with the law of thermodynamics → there is always the necessity of a barrier between systems.

There’s a dependency on it, from its power and immensity. There is a thing there that does something in the stomach. There’s also a very strong connection between the ocean
and colonization. Because, you see Portugal has a very long coast. The ocean is a very big resource.

Everything is falling – the moment of encounter with it is linked to the possibility of death. When I’m next to the ocean, I feel like I am just part of it. I don’t have to organize anything. I sense a hollow feeling in my stomach.

At Byron Bay (in Australia), there is one beach where people drown regularly. I’d often experience a dull pain in my kidneys just before entering the ocean there. Later I found out that this type of pain comes exclusively from fear.

During my first year in art school, I spent three weeks on an ocean cruise with my mother and sisters. There was a major breakout of the flu throughout the ship and variations of the same flu circulated around the ship so that I was constantly ill with a different range of symptoms during the entire cruise. The ship literally became, for me anyway, like Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead and which was by chance, a book I found in the ship's library. I read it locked up in my cabin only going out when we docked on a new island, and where I would stumble around with a horrible fever too weak to actually know what to do and where to go.

I spent some time in the Shetland Islands in Scotland. To get from mainland Shetland to Fair Isle you either take a boat, which is called The Good Shepherd, or a plane. I became very seasick when I took that boat. That was strange because the water was calm. The waves crush the cliffs all the time so there’s an almost invisible current.

E.R.B. Yes. But it has something to do with breathing. You cannot breathe. Breathing is the main condition that we need to survive.

I guess it’s more about accepting that death is part of life, it is not easy because in Western society death is a bit of a taboo. Also, before you are born you find yourself in a medium of water (the womb). That’s also a transformation – from being in the wet womb to suddenly breathing air.

Lay on the floor on your back, arms relaxed next to your hips, legs spread out with a small distance between them. Take your time to feel comfortable. Focus on your breath. Observe how you’re breathing in and out and how your breath deepens, slowly. Notice the rhythm of your breath and whether it is constant.

Breathe in and out very softly with your mouth. Now catch this airflow with the microphone. Experiment with how your soft breathing can turn into a whistling and vica versa.
You can do this sound also with a partner. The two breathers should face each other passing the mic between them.

Breathe in and out through your mouth. Gradually, start varying the intensity, duration and depth of your breath. Focus on its sound. You can experiment with the different possibilities of sounding. Breathe in sometimes quietly and others more loudly; sometimes breathing in with a hiss, for example. Or, initiate the breathing out with a more explosive “p”. You can experiment with the different possibilities. What does the sound of your breath remind you of? How does it compare to the sound of waves as they break on the shore?

People sometimes ask us to put something on the bottom of the sea, for example.
They have no idea how difficult this is. The practical difficulties apply mainly to activities we need to perform for scientists. Towing instruments, installing laboratory equipment onboard, access to buoys at sea with a small boat, placing and recovering moorings, taking whatever sample of bottom, water, fauna. You cannot just do those things; there are currents, animals, there is the buoyancy of the water that you have to fight.

1. First, one could describe it as sublime, in the classical sense (i.e. you feel very small.)
2. Secondly, is the power it has to lift you when you swim. It’s buoyancy.
There is an ecstasy of the thing that can engulf you + charm you + suddenly you become conscious of your own vulnerability.

I used to spend vacation time in Martinique. I prefer the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean. Nowadays, I can play with my son + my dog in the sea → they can both swim better than me. I feel joy when I encounter the ocean now, because I experience it through my son’s eyes. The experience of weightlessness and buoyancy is what fascinates me the most.

C.G. Its immensity + its calm, the calm (of surface). At least that’s how it seems to me, always, when I encounter the ocean: it is calm. It is infinitely accepting. Not acceptance in its anthropomorphic sense but literally. Not a form of kindness, but the absorption of everything that comes in contact with it.

M.B.For me, the threshold appears mostly when the ocean is still: then there is an amazing velocity. In its viscosity too, the still ocean is something else, like jelly.This transitional moment of the surface marks something that fascinates me :

When at sea, you have to figure out how to stay alive. Never start a dispute with the sea – you’ll always lose. If the weather is bad – you’ll have no more money. You make a deal with the sea, → respect the sea be very “low”/calm – don’t try to challenge it. If there is no other way, you have to do it. Let the sea do the work.

I remember loving the feeling of touching the sea or having it around me. Back then, I was not afraid of it. But then again, my parents only took me when it was docile + warm. That was the Belgian sea, of course. It was the only sea I saw for a really long time. I had to turn 20 before seeing another sea. (This is without counting Lake Como, in Italy.)

I remember taking the mailboat from here to Dover with my mother. We used to take it every year. For shopping. The journey is about four hours each way. It was my mother’s idea of going to England. We would only go if sea was calm, of course. Before the trip, my father would look out of the window in the early morning to assess the weather.

T.v.A No, the sea was always very smooth if that’s how it would start out in the mornings. Here, there are no storms in the summer.

I spent some time in the Shetland Islands in Scotland. To get from mainland Shetland to Fair Isle you either take a boat, which is called The Good Shepherd, or a plane. I became very seasick when I took that boat. That was strange because the water was calm. The waves crush the cliffs all the time so there’s an almost invisible current.

A friend in New York has recently reminded me to specifically read Hart Crane poems about the Caribbean Sea in the series called "Voyages".

My mother grew up in the West Indies. My family doesn’t know how to swim. I was “taught” how to swim in school essentially by being thrown into the swimming pool (and being left to fend for myself). When I was going there for vacations, we would have mainly picnics on the beach with my family, and I used to go into the water – but only up to my knees. I slowly taught myself to swim but swam like a “small dog” (as they say in French).

I used to spend vacation time in Martinique. I prefer the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean. Nowadays, I can play with my son + my dog in the sea → they can both swim better than me. I feel joy when I encounter the ocean now, because I experience it through my son’s eyes. The experience of weightlessness and buoyancy is what fascinates me the most.

Everyone from France going to the West Indies was telling me that the sea is beautiful. But I was looking at the Atlantic + not at the Caribbean (where you can see your feet in the water) → The sea is different and it felt like we were not talking about same thing. Also, because people talking to me about their vacations in the Caribbean where actually there for leisure. While I was seeing people working from dawn to dusk. We not only didn’t look at the same sea but also not at the same lives.

Here in Europe, we don’t have a strong relation to the elements. In Martinique, there is the
- ocean that can get mad
- the volcano that can get mad
- the wind that can get mad

Some people from the generation of my mother and before came to France from the West Indies by boat. Like the European migrants arriving at Ellis Island. And I often wonder what it would feel like to sail for days and days on the ocean without seeing the shore + then, suddenly, seeing it. You’re starting a new life somewhere new but at the same time you’re in the middle of nowhere (during the crossing).

The color of the water is green grey because of the algae. It’s very clean nonetheless. It’s cold. There are tides.

L.J. On the boats I concentrated on what was happening around me, also because there were people around. I mostly get the stories when I’m by myself and in the water up to the knees. Cold water, preferably.

Sometimes I think about the great explorations – Who did this kind of thing?
They must have been either courageous or foolish: maybe there is a thin line between the two. Many people think this – that the sea is linked with the urge to find new things + get away from it all. With the urge to see every place on earth.

There’s a dependency on it, from its power and immensity. There is a thing there that does something in the stomach. There’s also a very strong connection between the ocean
and colonization. Because, you see Portugal has a very long coast. The ocean is a very big resource.

On an intellectual level, I would say the most important element is traveling:
the forced traveling of African populations , but also things circulating across the Atlantic ocean.

P.P.Goods, people, music, ideas. It’s how the world is since 1492.

Some people from the generation of my mother and before came to France from the West Indies by boat. Like the European migrants arriving at Ellis Island. And I often wonder what it would feel like to sail for days and days on the ocean without seeing the shore + then, suddenly, seeing it. You’re starting a new life somewhere new but at the same time you’re in the middle of nowhere (during the crossing).

I began to hate the summer sea – it rang false. I hated the whole culture of sunbathing. I didn’t like the summer sun. I didn’t feel the need to colonize it or own the sea. It was fine that it was there and I was here.

The color of the water is green grey because of the algae. It’s very clean nonetheless. It’s cold. There are tides.

While traveling around the Pacific Ocean, I recall going out from the coast and finding rogue [theme:waves]] breaking in the middle of nowhere, and also places where the sea and the sky blend into each other becoming one big blue screen. Much like Derek Jarmen’s last film called Blue. Just the voice and a vast color blue: open seas and cloudless skies.

I felt as if the sea allowed me to be there. It rang true somehow (the colors + everything) the loneliness of it.

T.v.A. Its vastness. Its colors + smells + earthiness. In Dutch, the word I would use is urkracht → in English it means “primordial force”. An acceptance from within the power of being. I think I felt safety also because of the huge contrast between my fragility and its generosity.

The color of the room is like the color of the North Sea → it has another color every day: from blue to grey to brown to black.

A.C.I mean it mainly in relation to practical things: when you’re on a small boat or a ship, for example, you start realizing that it moves continuously.Things that on land one could do easily are more difficult to do on water.

All the patterns that appear upon the surface of the ocean and movement of the water itself is brought about by the wind in all its gymnastic manifestations or vibrations. Water from all the oceans and every sea is constantly moving across the world in great migratory currents replenishing and changing themselves through this exchange.

I was by myself on the beach + throwing rocks. I would just sit + watch the ripples the rocks made on the surface. I still love walking on the seashore, feeling the wind on my face + listening to the waves. I just sit + watch the horizon and what is behind the horizon. It opens up a lot of ideas about how movement occurs. From France, you can see England from across the channel. When I was in Marseille → I was thinking of Algeria when looking out into the sea. There’s a moment of connecting through the horizon.

Historians mention how ideas + cultures have been traveling around. How news of the French + English revolutions influenced the sailors. The movement within the ocean seems to suggest the futility of national boundaries.

A beam trawler uses 3.000 liters of fuel in 24 hours. A skipper gets paid 10.000 euros/month. But you have to work a lot for that money. When you’re at sea you always work. Even if you don’t work, your muscles are working to keep you straight.

→ Saying this, I think that the comfort of sailing in ships has changed enormously.
→ Now, it is a nice experience to be at sea. Seafaring, therefore, lost a bit of the mystique surrounding it, it’s not what it used to be in the past. It’s not much of a thing any more to sail on the ocean. There are cruise ships now, offering ocean crossing as an experience.

→ I guess this experience made me feel empathy for people crossing the sea to come to Europe. It made me understand that the ocean is not a kind entity if you are not well prepared for it. If you fall from the boat in the middle of nowhere you are probably going to die there. Now that I know this I can empathize more with other perspectives on this.

There’s a French film (Welcome by Philippe Lioret): about a refugee crossing the channel by swimming. The film describes the process of him getting ready for the crossing, training like mad. I don’t remember if in the end you actually see him entering the water, but I have a clear (perhaps imagined) image of him progressively getting disoriented + getting sleepy.

Some people from the generation of my mother and before came to France from the West Indies by boat. Like the European migrants arriving at Ellis Island. And I often wonder what it would feel like to sail for days and days on the ocean without seeing the shore + then, suddenly, seeing it. You’re starting a new life somewhere new but at the same time you’re in the middle of nowhere (during the crossing).

This crossing was really different from taking the mailboat to Dover. I felt the wind on my face. I felt on the same level as the seagulls that were hanging out on the water surface. I didn’t even know they did that. My favorite ocean bird is the Gannet.

→ There is enormous curiosity that drives you as a scientist.
→ Also, the desire to use this knowledge for the greater good.
For example, if you research what shrimps should eat.
→ Now, this might not look like valuable information but rather as something insignificant.
Yet it is very important politically because you can then inform the state about this so that they
can make sure that those feeding conditions are met.

My mother told me that my grandfather was an alcoholic and when he got drunk he became very aggressive. So the family would → escape to the shore. They had a primitive relationship to it, they considered it their savior. Moreover, they used to catch lobster and octopus to eat because those are the things that they could get on the rocks. Back then you could still find crabs on beach. My mom helped with making nets.

→ You have to take the weather into account continuously, for example.
→The Currents
→ There is something that inhibits you – you cannot act as you would on land. Every simple movement is more tiring.

People sometimes ask us to put something on the bottom of the sea, for example.
They have no idea how difficult this is. The practical difficulties apply mainly to activities we need to perform for scientists. Towing instruments, installing laboratory equipment onboard, access to buoys at sea with a small boat, placing and recovering moorings, taking whatever sample of bottom, water, fauna. You cannot just do those things; there are currents, animals, there is the buoyancy of the water that you have to fight.

It is important to understand how heat is transported by the ocean currents to the ice and how the changing temperature of the water influences ice melting. → How does warm water intrusion into the fjords in Greenland and under the ice shelves in Antarctica affect the outlet glaciers and ice shelves? How do the currents evolve as a result?

All the patterns that appear upon the surface of the ocean and movement of the water itself is brought about by the wind in all its gymnastic manifestations or vibrations. Water from all the oceans and every sea is constantly moving across the world in great migratory currents replenishing and changing themselves through this exchange.

Walls of 40m can form for example, because of differences in depth. The ocean pushes upwards + creates strong currents. Hence what’s marked as an "area to be avoided" on the map.

I spent some time in the Shetland Islands in Scotland. To get from mainland Shetland to Fair Isle you either take a boat, which is called The Good Shepherd, or a plane. I became very seasick when I took that boat. That was strange because the water was calm. The waves crush the cliffs all the time so there’s an almost invisible current.

Around the Fiji islands, I travelled to many parts of the archipelago by small motor boat or canoe. Sometimes the water is so deep, that it’s bottomless. As one floats in such bottomless waters the sun shines on the body + all the while, your shadow disappears into the endless depths. This is quite an ontological and richly animated experience and beyond description once again.

In Bonaire, the sea is very transparent. When swimming out into the sea, there is a point where all of a sudden the bottom of the sea deepens so abruptly, it goes from seeing the seabed clearly, to a huge black hole, without any transition, it completely disappears from view. Reaching this point left me feeling really scared. Even though it has no physical consequences for my swimming on the surface. Still, I almost did not dare to swim past this point. I felt like standing on the edge of a cliff.

P.v.C. Because of differences of sea level → the tides, - and because of the depth of the water.

Walls of 40m can form for example, because of differences in depth. The ocean pushes upwards + creates strong currents. Hence what’s marked as an "area to be avoided" on the map.

T.v.A. Power (on the one hand) – don’t want it to be the power, not the power that comes.
Approachability /friendliness. But the sea is not friendly, at least not in an anthropomorphic sense.
Completeness. So complete that it represents so many things at the same time. I think that’s what attracts me so much.
→ It’s Depth. But a depth on all levels. It resonates on multiple levels/there’s a complexity.
It’s impossible to know it. Like the spot where I take the photographs: I don’t know anything about it + I have been there 150 times. You think the sea is predictable but it’s totally not. Even though all those things are true, I don’t feel frightened by it.

I think that this feeling of complete surrender towards the ocean is closely linked to a strong desire to belong. There is an issue with belonging in there. The desire to be part of it. What I’m trying to describe is maybe an intense feeling of being grounded that arises from one’s immediate proximity to the immensity of the ocean. It’s so massive you can’t ignore it.

Notably, in both Melville and Mansfield’s writing, the ocean and the sea actually speak (this might explain my desire to start spluttering and stammering to mimic certain watery sounds). The first voice one hears in Mansfield’s story is in fact the sea, in it she writes “Ah-Aah! sounded the sleepy sea”.

I used to spend vacation time in Martinique. I prefer the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean. Nowadays, I can play with my son + my dog in the sea → they can both swim better than me. I feel joy when I encounter the ocean now, because I experience it through my son’s eyes. The experience of weightlessness and buoyancy is what fascinates me the most.

T.v.A To start, I want to say that I’m totally in love with the ocean. I’m also very afraid of it. Or, rather, I’m in awe of it. It’s the most fantastic body that exists. When I was small, it was my parents that first brought me to the sea.
(It was in Middlekerke: we had an apartment there where we used to go for the summer.)

My relation to the sea changed during puberty → now I loved it also during autumn and winter. I started loving its dark side probably because I perceived it as connecting to my dark side.

T.v.A. Power (on the one hand) – don’t want it to be the power, not the power that comes.
Approachability /friendliness. But the sea is not friendly, at least not in an anthropomorphic sense.
Completeness. So complete that it represents so many things at the same time. I think that’s what attracts me so much.
→ It’s Depth. But a depth on all levels. It resonates on multiple levels/there’s a complexity.
It’s impossible to know it. Like the spot where I take the photographs: I don’t know anything about it + I have been there 150 times. You think the sea is predictable but it’s totally not. Even though all those things are true, I don’t feel frightened by it.

G.V.I am a very good swimmer but still I prefer floating to swimming. When I float, I am taken away by the waves, losing my sense of orientation. Then at some point, I am thrown by the waves to the shore.

There’s a French film (Welcome by Philippe Lioret): about a refugee crossing the channel by swimming. The film describes the process of him getting ready for the crossing, training like mad. I don’t remember if in the end you actually see him entering the water, but I have a clear (perhaps imagined) image of him progressively getting disoriented + getting sleepy.

I was into rock pooling as a kid also, meaning I’d observe for hours what lives within the rock pools when the tide is out, and also during the night. One night I even discovered tiny sea worms that would explode instantly when exposed to torch light. This marine phenomena seemed to defy all reasonable explanation as I could not find information about such a sea creature ever existing. I’ve always wondered if it was only a waking sea dream.

It’s a very vulnerable position to be in. It’s a feeling of falling in the water + not being able to get out. You feel that you are surrounded by water + that you are just falling. You cannot do anything about it. You’re a dead body, so to speak.

→ On the one hand, we are made of water. → But then water can also kill you in this sense, if it blocks your lungs and you cannot breathe.

Before I had only seen movies → about survivors. But I had never before felt it in my body – the experience of drowning. →Even though this experience didn’t involve extreme conditions – actually we were very close to the shore and the waters were calm, but that feeling remained.

→ I guess this experience made me feel empathy for people crossing the sea to come to Europe. It made me understand that the ocean is not a kind entity if you are not well prepared for it. If you fall from the boat in the middle of nowhere you are probably going to die there. Now that I know this I can empathize more with other perspectives on this.

E.R.B. The ocean is closely related to death.The experience of death is very present in the ocean. That’s why there exist so many mythologies of the ocean. I think of death not always as something negative. I see it more as a transformation. After death, something else can emerge. It is part of a cycle. It happens in nature all the time and we also experience it in our lives. You let parts of yourself die so that you can evolve and adapt.

I guess it’s more about accepting that death is part of life, it is not easy because in Western society death is a bit of a taboo. Also, before you are born you find yourself in a medium of water (the womb). That’s also a transformation – from being in the wet womb to suddenly breathing air.

What is it like to know it so well? To know exactly where the fish are? Sometimes I think that maybe, for him, there is even the thing of dying there. Of finally surrendering to it.

Everything is falling – the moment of encounter with it is linked to the possibility of death. When I’m next to the ocean, I feel like I am just part of it. I don’t have to organize anything. I sense a hollow feeling in my stomach.

At Byron Bay (in Australia), there is one beach where people drown regularly. I’d often experience a dull pain in my kidneys just before entering the ocean there. Later I found out that this type of pain comes exclusively from fear.

I have a nephew who’s really into surfing and at 14 years of age, he saved the life of a father and his daughter who were being pulled out to sea by the undertow. And who would of very likely drowned had my nephew not brought them to shore on his surfboard. This heroic and mythological deed made the front page of the local newspaper.

On the other hand, I think of it as a place of danger, of drowning, of shark attacks.

When I was a teenager, I almost drowned. while learning to kayak. → My kayak capsized and I couldn’t get out of it. So it left me with a strong swimming anxiety. I could easily panic when in the water.

People leave the island from the age of 12 to go to school. The school in Shetland only has 12 children. Once I met an older man on Fair Isle who told me: “I came back to die here.” – it made sense. People spend their active life off the island and only go back there to die.

My mother told me that my grandfather was an alcoholic and when he got drunk he became very aggressive. So the family would → escape to the shore. They had a primitive relationship to it, they considered it their savior. Moreover, they used to catch lobster and octopus to eat because those are the things that they could get on the rocks. Back then you could still find crabs on beach. My mom helped with making nets.

It’s a very vulnerable position to be in. It’s a feeling of falling in the water + not being able to get out. You feel that you are surrounded by water + that you are just falling. You cannot do anything about it. You’re a dead body, so to speak.

→ I guess this experience made me feel empathy for people crossing the sea to come to Europe. It made me understand that the ocean is not a kind entity if you are not well prepared for it. If you fall from the boat in the middle of nowhere you are probably going to die there. Now that I know this I can empathize more with other perspectives on this.

Everything is falling – the moment of encounter with it is linked to the possibility of death. When I’m next to the ocean, I feel like I am just part of it. I don’t have to organize anything. I sense a hollow feeling in my stomach.

Elements make you feel small. Respect and fear → define one’s relation to the ocean. It's work. A fisher friend from Brittany once said that when you fall far into the ocean, knowing how to swim doesn’t change anything. Cause any way you cannot fight it.

The feeling of weightlessness that floating engenders is similar to that of jumping off an airplane – the moment just before you open your parachute. Imagine falling/floating above the void, while you listen to the whalesongs.

Now imagine that there are holes – holes in the ground.
Imagine you might fall into them.
Imagine therefore that you have to walk very carefully.

The Belgian seaside is covered in cement. As a child I remember the boardwalk in Koksijde and how I spent → a lot of time looking at the ocean. I remember swimming with my grandmother in the sea; she would play with me in the cold waves for hours.

L.M.The ocean was always there. It was very present. It’s part of the world in which I grew up. I come from a fisherman’s family → so even though the ocean is more of a space of leisure for me, for my family it is more connected to labor.

In Portugal you can fish mainly cod and sardines. My uncle used to go out for days and days with big industrial ships to fish. I remember going with my mother to the harbor to see him when he returned.

My mother told me that my grandfather was an alcoholic and when he got drunk he became very aggressive. So the family would → escape to the shore. They had a primitive relationship to it, they considered it their savior. Moreover, they used to catch lobster and octopus to eat because those are the things that they could get on the rocks. Back then you could still find crabs on beach. My mom helped with making nets.

In Portugal, swimming was very much a class thing. People only knew how to swim if they went to swimming classes. Those kinds of people, that could afford swimming classes, see the ocean as a space for leisure. But for poor people like my family, the ocean was seen as labor + not necessarily as leisure. It still is the case with some people. There is another mode of relation towards it. For poor people, it’s not just about labor but about hard labor. For some it is as if they don’t have the right to pleasure. Pleasure is located in the family for them.

My family would spend each Christmas holiday period camping beside the ocean beach on the coast. The family home was right on a bay beach, so we experienced both sea and ocean worlds throughout the year. These beach holidays were quite adventurous in terms of experience and activities.

I have a nephew who’s really into surfing and at 14 years of age, he saved the life of a father and his daughter who were being pulled out to sea by the undertow. And who would of very likely drowned had my nephew not brought them to shore on his surfboard. This heroic and mythological deed made the front page of the local newspaper.

During my first year in art school, I spent three weeks on an ocean cruise with my mother and sisters. There was a major breakout of the flu throughout the ship and variations of the same flu circulated around the ship so that I was constantly ill with a different range of symptoms during the entire cruise. The ship literally became, for me anyway, like Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead and which was by chance, a book I found in the ship's library. I read it locked up in my cabin only going out when we docked on a new island, and where I would stumble around with a horrible fever too weak to actually know what to do and where to go.

I learned to swim by trying to swim 10 strokes, one after the other, if I managed I would get a small reward from my mother.

My grandparents had a house by the sea in the Netherlands. It was in Zeeland, a part of Holland, which is → close to the sea. → We used to sit in those wooden cabins near the sea. I remember that at night, you could see little larvae that lit up in the water.

My mother → was (born on) an island but I had few connections to the ocean myself.

My mother grew up in the West Indies. My family doesn’t know how to swim. I was “taught” how to swim in school essentially by being thrown into the swimming pool (and being left to fend for myself). When I was going there for vacations, we would have mainly picnics on the beach with my family, and I used to go into the water – but only up to my knees. I slowly taught myself to swim but swam like a “small dog” (as they say in French).

About 2 years ago, my relation to the ocean became better because of my son who is 9 years old. He is learning how to swim in the swimming pool in Brussels. On the days where I pick him up, I jump into the water with him and he teaches me some basic movements of the hands and feet.

I used to spend vacation time in Martinique. I prefer the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean. Nowadays, I can play with my son + my dog in the sea → they can both swim better than me. I feel joy when I encounter the ocean now, because I experience it through my son’s eyes. The experience of weightlessness and buoyancy is what fascinates me the most.

I have fisherfolk in my family but they don’t know how to swim.

Some people from the generation of my mother and before came to France from the West Indies by boat. Like the European migrants arriving at Ellis Island. And I often wonder what it would feel like to sail for days and days on the ocean without seeing the shore + then, suddenly, seeing it. You’re starting a new life somewhere new but at the same time you’re in the middle of nowhere (during the crossing).

I never knew my father → he was away a lot. I would see him for two days every eight days. So I chose to work in the school because I wanted to see my children grow up.

In the old days, there was no connection with the shore during the journey. Our families would ask us: When do you come back? And we’d say: We don’t know yet. Because it’s not possible to plan on the sea. Because you never know what will happen. You should never say how long a journey is going to take. As a skipper, you should never show that you have negative thoughts.

But then, with experience, you start knowing how to deal with this situation.
When you’re tired, for example → it’s easier to get seasick than when you’ve had a good night’s sleep. Your whole being is heavily influenced by this space or element.
- You need training in order to be able to function and to work there. Especially in case of emergencies at sea, training is needed in order to increase chances of survival. Rescue is not so fast or as easy as on land.

There’s a French film (Welcome by Philippe Lioret): about a refugee crossing the channel by swimming. The film describes the process of him getting ready for the crossing, training like mad. I don’t remember if in the end you actually see him entering the water, but I have a clear (perhaps imagined) image of him progressively getting disoriented + getting sleepy.

As a fisherman, your life is completely free. You’re paid by the percent of the catch. The more we caught, the more money we would make. You have to be fast. You’re awake for 48 hours to work on it.

During the trip, you do not get much sleep. Every two hours the nets come up. So you can sleep for only one hour each time.

Only when the boat is in the harbor, can you sleep for six hours. Or when the ship is reaching the fishing grounds.

If you look at the sea, your view is unspoiled. This ‘sea or ocean panorama’ is to me. the only one that gives rise to a sense of infinity, adventure and expectation. The sea suggests the chance to explore → I see the horizon as something that you can never reach but you would like to get at anyway. This is linked to a certain fear of the unknown.

I used to perceive it as something related to pleasure and joy – to freedom. It was “nature” and I always associated (good, positive feelings) with it. Living in Greece was my first
encounter with it → like a big discovery of this sensation of nature + of freedom. I was living in Volos at the time + I was travelling all along the coast. At the time, I had never thought about what the ocean really means or is. I had never feared it.

Since last summer, after the accident, I’ve been very afraid to go into the sea. After the accident, I went to the sea (in Spain). This was not as traumatic as I had imagined it to be, because I was well accompanied. I was with someone who I trust very much + also because I don’t have any memory of the accident. But now I cannot swim far away from the shore anymore.

E.R.B. The ocean is in all the apocalyptic movies + fears.

After the crew are overcome with acute states of distress and fear from hearing these disembodied voices, the ship's captain provides an explanation to the source of such noises. He points out that they are sailing very near the edge of a frozen sea and that a year before in that very same spot there had been a bloody and wild sea battle where many men, women and children had been brutally killed. And accordingly, as he explains it, all the frightful noises of the battle had been frozen in the cold sea air and were now a year later beginning to thaw, and this was what Pantagruel and his comrades were now starting to hear.

At Byron Bay (in Australia), there is one beach where people drown regularly. I’d often experience a dull pain in my kidneys just before entering the ocean there. Later I found out that this type of pain comes exclusively from fear.

In Bonaire, the sea is very transparent. When swimming out into the sea, there is a point where all of a sudden the bottom of the sea deepens so abruptly, it goes from seeing the seabed clearly, to a huge black hole, without any transition, it completely disappears from view. Reaching this point left me . Even though it has no physical consequences for my swimming on the surface. Still, I almost did not dare to swim past this point. I felt like standing on the edge of a cliff.

When I was a teenager, I almost drowned. while learning to kayak. → My kayak capsized and I couldn’t get out of it. So it left me with a strong swimming anxiety. I could easily panic when in the water.

Elements make you feel small. Respect and fear → define one’s relation to the ocean. It's work. A fisher friend from Brittany once said that when you fall far into the ocean, knowing how to swim doesn’t change anything. Cause any way you cannot fight it.

P.P.My personal, intuitive relation to it is defined by fear + fascination. I love to walk on the seashore with my dog: its a form of meditation for me.

In the old days, there was no connection with the shore during the journey. Our families would ask us: When do you come back? And we’d say: We don’t know yet. Because it’s not possible to plan on the sea. Because you never know what will happen. You should never say how long a journey is going to take. As a skipper, you should never show that you have negative thoughts.

T.v.A To start, I want to say that I’m totally in love with the ocean. I’m also very afraid of it. Or, rather, I’m in awe of it. It’s the most fantastic body that exists. When I was small, it was my parents that first brought me to the sea.
(It was in Middlekerke: we had an apartment there where we used to go for the summer.)

Even when the sea is at its wildest etc. It will always be frightening only if you try to contain it. If the rocks were not there, it would just keep on rolling. If you don’t fence it in it will keep on rolling, it won’t attack. Eventually, the rocks will have to go.

So it felt like there was just ocean + birds + me + no land. It felt like I was flying with them. It felt like there was no difference between what they were doing and what I was doing. It felt fantastic. I was too close to the cliff to walk around. I get scared really easily.

In fact, I do have a practice of painting the sea every day – this does open my mind. I go to the same spot on the beach in Ostend and make a polaroid image of the sea. Then I paint the polaroid. Every time I think: Puh, this is a difficult one; I don’t know if I can do it. But when I start, I don’t have that thought anymore. I conquer the fear of starting and that makes it easier to start.

E.R.B. Not really. Only my idealized, superficial image of what the ocean is disappeared.
What appeared was more of a feeling of being so small in that vastness.

L.M. Feeling so small, an acute sense of disarmament. The feeling that I can just disappear, I am not important. In front of the ocean, forget about it, you are nothing.

1. First, one could describe it as sublime, in the classical sense (i.e. you feel very small.)
2. Secondly, is the power it has to lift you when you swim. It’s buoyancy.
There is an ecstasy of the thing that can engulf you + charm you + suddenly you become conscious of your own vulnerability.

Elements make you feel small. Respect and fear → define one’s relation to the ocean. It's work. A fisher friend from Brittany once said that when you fall far into the ocean, knowing how to swim doesn’t change anything. Cause any way you cannot fight it.

Then I started studying biology → initially without a plan or any particular expectations (I had no specific interest in marine species). There I had the opportunity to work on/with fish.
And I took it. During the studies → my relationship to the sea became more complicated. I discovered that the sea is a more complex space than I initially thought it to be.

Fish is precious. There is a lot of respect for the space they inhabit. There is almost a religious aspect to my family’s relationship with the ocean: → they want to be protected by it. The ocean has a sacred element to it.

In Portugal you can fish mainly cod and sardines. My uncle used to go out for days and days with big industrial ships to fish. I remember going with my mother to the harbor to see him when he returned.

What is it like to know it so well? To know exactly where the fish are? Sometimes I think that maybe, for him, there is even the thing of dying there. Of finally surrendering to it.

Also throughout my childhood, I would use a thin circular piece of wood to skip, skid and slide over the surface of shallow water on the beach. Surfing is a popular thing to do in Australia but I never really tried it other than body surfing, which is when you use the whole body as a kind of board and are carried by the force of breaking waves. It’s a bit like flying by the force of the sea and reminds me of the flying fish that one sees in the South Pacific.

Six days at sea, you can catch up to → 15.000 kilos of fish, on average. Mainly trout and sole: as they are the fish that live on the bottom of the sea. Each trip lasts about six days, then you unload the fish, for example, in England + they come back on a truck. Then the boat sails again.

L.M.The ocean was always there. It was very present. It’s part of the world in which I grew up. I come from a fisherman’s family → so even though the ocean is more of a space of leisure for me, for my family it is more connected to labor.

L.M. That’s what I meant when I said that the ocean is precious. → My uncle still goes to the rocks on top of the ocean to fish. The rocks are very dangerous and sharp and steep – and he’s 70. Fishing is a very unfair business. My uncle is often staying on the rocks with his fishing rod until 4 am. And I often wonder, what is his relationship to the ocean, actually?

I have fisherfolk in my family but they don’t know how to swim.

P.P. I agree that swimming is a class thing. For fisherfolk, the ocean is work, → you don’t necessarily enjoy going there. Whenever we were going to the seashore for leisure → we would do a picnic.

Elements make you feel small. Respect and fear → define one’s relation to the ocean. It's work. A fisher friend from Brittany once said that when you fall far into the ocean, knowing how to swim doesn’t change anything. Cause any way you cannot fight it.

P.v.C. When I was young, I was a fisherman (until my 40s).

As a fisherman, your life is completely free. You’re paid by the percent of the catch. The more we caught, the more money we would make. You have to be fast. You’re awake for 48 hours to work on it.

As a fisherman, you’re not only responsible for the catch but you also have to repair the nets when they are damaged. It’s a lot of work to fix the nets but you are not paid for it. There are different kinds of nets – trawling nets are used on beam trawlers.

The reason we use beam trawlers is: we’ve used them for generations. People therefore have the know-how to use them very well. Especially on dirty -rocky- grounds. The Dutch don’t go there. Only the Belgians go there → and fishing a lot of different kinds of fish.

A fisherman is the only professional hunter in the world. There’s nothing more important in the world than having – and providing – food. Nowadays there are lots of laws and quotas regulating the fishing industry. Before things were more free.

I also have a huge collection of books on whale fishery in the 16, 17 and 18th centuries. Or on the exploration of pole-regions by boat. Those themes appear a lot in my work as points of reference of how human behavior develops. No idea why.

There is a paradox inherent in the combination → of salt + water: they have the opposite effect on the human body. But salt water also enables floating.

I have strong experiences → in the Mediterranean, particularly in (France). I am a very good floater. When you are floating, the sand on the bottom of the sea is moving with the waves. I always could sense the sand on my spine.

G.V.I am a very good swimmer but still I prefer floating to swimming. When I float, I am taken away by the waves, losing my sense of orientation. Then at some point, I am thrown by the waves to the shore.

I once made a performance on floating. It was called “How to make your own dead sea”. Essentially, I had to put 23 kg of salt in my bathtub. Then the salt lifted me. How can salt change gravity? It’s a super complicated formula that was discovered by Archimedes. You first have to calculate your volume. Then you put the right amount of salt in your bathtub.

There are also large ice shelves in Antarctica → which are extensions of the ice sheet that are floating on the water. They can be several hundred meters thick.

As the world’s underbelly, full of unknown potential and forces. Floating: in the ocean is such an anti-gravitational experience. The older one gets, the ocean isn’t as attractive as it used to be, but as a counter to the force and effect of gravity, of aging and falling down in fact, the ocean still offers much. Though it’s more something of the past.

The water: there is velvety, soft + the salt content is high. So it’s ideal for floating. Different light conditions seem to lead to different floating conditions, strangely.
Pelicans fly overhead as one floats in this tropical seascape.

Around the Fiji islands, I travelled to many parts of the archipelago by small motor boat or canoe. Sometimes the water is so deep, that it’s bottomless. As one floats in such bottomless waters the sun shines on the body + all the while, your shadow disappears into the endless depths. This is quite an ontological and richly animated experience and beyond description once again.

Imagine that you are floating on the water's surface. While floating, and with your eyes closed, imagine you're listening to the songs of whales below you.

I used to perceive it as something related to pleasure and joy – to freedom. It was “nature” and I always associated (good, positive feelings) with it. Living in Greece was my first
encounter with it → like a big discovery of this sensation of nature + of freedom. I was living in Volos at the time + I was travelling all along the coast. At the time, I had never thought about what the ocean really means or is. I had never feared it.

L.J. I like that it’s wild and free and so beautiful. It takes the place that it needs. It’s very powerful. I think of the ocean as a very powerful + strong woman. I have great respect for her. She’s amazing. She’s full of life. She’s Untamable (→ that includes all of it.) I would like to be like her:

I love beach holidays: I just spent a few days in La Gomera.:Swimming in the sea there gave me a certain feeling of liberation.

When I am swimming in the ocean I get the feeling of being in infinity something that just goes on+on. The ocean is undividable. It’s not just your complete freedom of movement within this body of water, but also that there is literally no border to it. The particles that are touching you could have been somewhere else only two days before. The ocean gives me a notion of holism.

As a fisherman, your life is completely free. You’re paid by the percent of the catch. The more we caught, the more money we would make. You have to be fast. You’re awake for 48 hours to work on it.

T.v.A. Well, that’s more complicated. It’s more about well being. Because of the well-being, I feel freer with my thoughts.

In our everyday life, we have no feeling for geological time. When life appeared on the planet, everything was liquid. Becoming more solid and developing symmetry gave us the opportunity to direct our movement. We tend to think of the earth – the planet earth – as something stable + unchanging. But it is not. It is transforming constantly.

For example, the last glacial maximum was a period 18,000 years ago with much larger ice sheets than what we have today. As there is limited data from that time, we can use a model to create a physically consistent description of the climatic conditions and ice sheet state at that time. The model solves the equations at discrete points on the grid.

I am a modeler. I make and use computer models of different parts of the Earth system. My research focus now is primarily on glaciers + ice sheets. Because I worked with models → there was no real need for me to actually, physically, go to the ocean. There is often a disconnect: between the scientists that do the observations in the field + the modelers. I use the data that they provide to improve and validate the models.

It is important to understand how heat is transported by the ocean currents to the ice and how the changing temperature of the water influences ice melting. → How does warm water intrusion into the fjords in Greenland and under the ice shelves in Antarctica affect the outlet glaciers and ice shelves? How do the currents evolve as a result?

A glacier might move at around 1 cm per minute. Within the sound of the legs rubbing against the floor, you might be able to hear a low rumble – the friction of the ice moving against stone, occasional thuds of blocks of ice hitting against each other and the occasional note singing out, ice scraping against ice.

And something happens to me every time I am close to water. I see it and feel drawn to it. I walk to it and enter it and start walking through the water. Inside the water my creativity explodes. I start making up a story in my head. Mostly I’m speaking it to myself while I’m making it. I am imagining this story in the moment. It’s like meditating I guess. I walk through the water and I feel the water flowing between my legs – and its like I’m in a trance.

The ocean has enormous power as an entity which has agency, that decides. The word ocean is male in Portuguese. The Atlantic is never something that is a given, that can be taken for granted. Being in relation to it is always a fight. It performs its agency quite loudly. It is not a background. It is quite a force. You don’t fuck with it, you have to check it first, you cannot just go in. Boys would do it. They would play with it and its aggressiveness. They would go in and be smashed by the waves.

The nostalgia I am talking about is cultural nostalgia. Culturally, I think there is this longing (towards the ocean). A longing to be swallowed by it. The ocean suggests a (possible) disappearance of the human being(s) into it. You see people going into it , far out into it, + you don’t know if and when they are going to come out. You get the sense that you are going in to an environment that makes you vulnerable.

Throughout my childhood I would submerge myself in the sea according to different parts of my body. As a toddler, I was told to not go deeper than my knees and a few years later no deeper than my belly button (NAVEL NAVAL) until I was up to my neck in the water in my teens. And all the time I would spend hours snorkeling over the surface, peering down into the water upon all the various seaweed and rock formations.

There’s a French film (Welcome by Philippe Lioret): about a refugee crossing the channel by swimming. The film describes the process of him getting ready for the crossing, training like mad. I don’t remember if in the end you actually see him entering the water, but I have a clear (perhaps imagined) image of him progressively getting disoriented + getting sleepy.

My mother grew up in the West Indies. My family doesn’t know how to swim. I was “taught” how to swim in school essentially by being thrown into the swimming pool (and being left to fend for myself). When I was going there for vacations, we would have mainly picnics on the beach with my family, and I used to go into the water – but only up to my knees. I slowly taught myself to swim but swam like a “small dog” (as they say in French).

The ocean is seen as something difficult. It provides you with food but you have to pay for it. You have to work hard in order to get something from it.

In Portugal, swimming was very much a class thing. People only knew how to swim if they went to swimming classes. Those kinds of people, that could afford swimming classes, see the ocean as a space for leisure. But for poor people like my family, the ocean was seen as labor + not necessarily as leisure. It still is the case with some people. There is another mode of relation towards it. For poor people, it’s not just about labor but about hard labor. For some it is as if they don’t have the right to pleasure. Pleasure is located in the family for them.

P.P. I agree that swimming is a class thing. For fisherfolk, the ocean is work, → you don’t necessarily enjoy going there. Whenever we were going to the seashore for leisure → we would do a picnic.

Everyone from France going to the West Indies was telling me that the sea is beautiful. But I was looking at the Atlantic + not at the Caribbean (where you can see your feet in the water) → The sea is different and it felt like we were not talking about same thing. Also, because people talking to me about their vacations in the Caribbean where actually there for leisure. While I was seeing people working from dawn to dusk. We not only didn’t look at the same sea but also not at the same lives.

As a fisherman, you’re not only responsible for the catch but you also have to repair the nets when they are damaged. It’s a lot of work to fix the nets but you are not paid for it. There are different kinds of nets – trawling nets are used on beam trawlers.

A beam trawler uses 3.000 liters of fuel in 24 hours. A skipper gets paid 10.000 euros/month. But you have to work a lot for that money. When you’re at sea you always work. Even if you don’t work, your muscles are working to keep you straight.

Just being on the ship is work. Humans are not made to live on the sea – we are made to live on the shore. We’re handicapped at sea.

Teaching is not less stressful than fishing. Because your mind is always working. Even when you leave the school, your mind is still working. You also have to deal with all kinds of difficult children that are stealing, or even violent, etc. You encounter different intelects and everyday is a challenge. They are often rebellious + aggressive children. But I was always “straight” + honest with them.

A.C.Well, I think it is its Infinity → The possibility for a completely undisturbed view. This is something that many people would say, I think.
– I have a curiosity for what is over the horizon.

I was by myself on the beach + throwing rocks. I would just sit + watch the ripples the rocks made on the surface. I still love walking on the seashore, feeling the wind on my face + listening to the waves. I just sit + watch the horizon and what is behind the horizon. It opens up a lot of ideas about how movement occurs. From France, you can see England from across the channel. When I was in Marseille → I was thinking of Algeria when looking out into the sea. There’s a moment of connecting through the horizon.

Imagine that you are standing on the ocean shore listening to the huge waves breaking in front of you. Looking out on the horizon, imagine that you can almost feel the shore at the other end of the Atlantic and the immensity of the body of water in between.

Take a mechanical pencil and a piece of paper. Approximately 1/3 of the page from the top, begin drawing a horizontal line from one side of the page to the other. Continue the line from right to left, left to right all the way to the bottom of the page, without picking up the tip of the pencil from the paper... The lines can be close to each other, gradually forming a horizon in front of you. Continue as long as you travel. With your ear, zoom in on the sound of the drawing.

The Belgian seaside is covered in cement. As a child I remember the boardwalk in Koksijde and how I spent → a lot of time looking at the ocean. I remember swimming with my grandmother in the sea; she would play with me in the cold waves for hours.

I start improvising a story that goes on and on and on until someone takes me out of the water.

If there are rocks, it’s great cause the water is flowing with force and I like to climb over the rocks and stuff. On and on I walk through the water. With the water up to my knees.

L.M. That’s what I meant when I said that the ocean is precious. → My uncle still goes to the rocks on top of the ocean to fish. The rocks are very dangerous and sharp and steep – and he’s 70. Fishing is a very unfair business. My uncle is often staying on the rocks with his fishing rod until 4 am. And I often wonder, what is his relationship to the ocean, actually?

Throughout my childhood I would submerge myself in the sea according to different parts of my body. As a toddler, I was told to not go deeper than my knees and a few years later no deeper than my belly button (NAVEL NAVAL) until I was up to my neck in the water in my teens. And all the time I would spend hours snorkeling over the surface, peering down into the water upon all the various seaweed and rock formations.

I used to spend a lot of time on piers looking at the sea. I had no boat and did not find it necessary to have one. For me, the sea was just a place of separation from the boredom of suburbia/of civilization. I approached it as a hermitage, a place of retreat and of endless discovery.

I was into rock pooling as a kid also, meaning I’d observe for hours what lives within the rock pools when the tide is out, and also during the night. One night I even discovered tiny sea worms that would explode instantly when exposed to torch light. This marine phenomena seemed to defy all reasonable explanation as I could not find information about such a sea creature ever existing. I’ve always wondered if it was only a waking sea dream.

Some people from the generation of my mother and before came to France from the West Indies by boat. Like the European migrants arriving at Ellis Island. And I often wonder what it would feel like to sail for days and days on the ocean without seeing the shore + then, suddenly, seeing it. You’re starting a new life somewhere new but at the same time you’re in the middle of nowhere (during the crossing).

The Belgian seaside is covered in cement. As a child I remember the boardwalk in Koksijde and how I spent → a lot of time looking at the ocean. I remember swimming with my grandmother in the sea; she would play with me in the cold waves for hours.

I remember attending a lecture → at the aquarium in the Tiergarten in Berlin. I saw jellyfish swimming in one of the basins – they looked science fiction! Jellyfish are such interesting creatures; their bodies are 99% water and they are very ancient. They have existed ever since the beginning of the world.

In Portugal you can fish mainly cod and sardines. My uncle used to go out for days and days with big industrial ships to fish. I remember going with my mother to the harbor to see him when he returned.

I remember seeing the ocean as an unapproachable monster. The thing with swimming is: I swim badly. My uncle does not know how to swim. Only the boys would risk it, entering the ocean without knowing how to swim.

I’m an ocean baby really, as I spent the first part of my life beside the sea in suburban Australia. Mansfield’s story At the Bay connects to lots of what I remember about living beside the sea as a child. I recommend you read it and pay special attention to the way that Mansfield uses various speech styles and manners (especially by children) to evoke the spell that the sea and nature has over the diverse characters in the story.

The experience of being on the ship, the sounds, smells, vibrations and all the amazing sensory elements that the ocean offered filtered through my state of illness and fever. This all delivered a series of very beautiful histrionic and poetic impressions. For instance, I remember sitting in a muddy paddock in British Samoa and watching through feverish eyes, and with the sound of the sea in the background, a local funeral party under some trees that included the slaughtering of a pig.

The farm had a hill on it. We had about 50 sheep. I remember one stormy night, when my parents and I had gone out, the river overflowed and flooded the meadow where the sheep were grazing. When we came back in the middle of the night, we found all the sheep crammed on this one tiny hill and surrounded by water. I remember having to carry them, one by one, from the hill to the house across the water. It was in the Midlands.

My grandparents had a house by the sea in the Netherlands. It was in Zeeland, a part of Holland, which is → close to the sea. → We used to sit in those wooden cabins near the sea. I remember that at night, you could see little larvae that lit up in the water.

In many places we “live with our backs to the water,” → I remember people saying this about many cities in Turkey.

I remember loving the feeling of touching the sea or having it around me. Back then, I was not afraid of it. But then again, my parents only took me when it was docile + warm. That was the Belgian sea, of course. It was the only sea I saw for a really long time. I had to turn 20 before seeing another sea. (This is without counting Lake Como, in Italy.)

I remember taking the mailboat from here to Dover with my mother. We used to take it every year. For shopping. The journey is about four hours each way. It was my mother’s idea of going to England. We would only go if sea was calm, of course. Before the trip, my father would look out of the window in the early morning to assess the weather.

H.G. You could say that, but as they flow to the margins they can get in contact with the ocean. The ice sheet in → Greenland is predominately land-based. But its outlet glaciers can have a strong interaction with the ocean. The ocean is melting the ice from underneath + the side. In contrast → a large part of the Antarctic ice sheet is grounded below sea-level, meaning that the ice is in contact with ocean water.

It is important to understand how heat is transported by the ocean currents to the ice and how the changing temperature of the water influences ice melting. → How does warm water intrusion into the fjords in Greenland and under the ice shelves in Antarctica affect the outlet glaciers and ice shelves? How do the currents evolve as a result?

After the crew are overcome with acute states of distress and fear from hearing these disembodied voices, the ship's captain provides an explanation to the source of such noises. He points out that they are sailing very near the edge of a frozen sea and that a year before in that very same spot there had been a bloody and wild sea battle where many men, women and children had been brutally killed. And accordingly, as he explains it, all the frightful noises of the battle had been frozen in the cold sea air and were now a year later beginning to thaw, and this was what Pantagruel and his comrades were now starting to hear.

C.G. Its immensity + its calm, the calm (of surface). At least that’s how it seems to me, always, when I encounter the ocean: it is calm. It is infinitely accepting. Not acceptance in its anthropomorphic sense but literally. Not a form of kindness, but the absorption of everything that comes in contact with it.

E.R.B. Not really. Only my idealized, superficial image of what the ocean is disappeared.
What appeared was more of a feeling of being so small in that vastness.

There’s a dependency on it, from its power and immensity. There is a thing there that does something in the stomach. There’s also a very strong connection between the ocean
and colonization. Because, you see Portugal has a very long coast. The ocean is a very big resource.

I think that this feeling of complete surrender towards the ocean is closely linked to a strong desire to belong. There is an issue with belonging in there. The desire to be part of it. What I’m trying to describe is maybe an intense feeling of being grounded that arises from one’s immediate proximity to the immensity of the ocean. It’s so massive you can’t ignore it.

The encounter with the ocean brings about a silencing. A moment of stopping. You realize that you are surrounded by it and the vastness of the surrounding. It’s too loud.

It’s such a power → it’s a huge thing and this gave me some kind of safety. As with every minority connecting to a majority → It gives you a sense of safety.

T.v.A. Its vastness. Its colors + smells + earthiness. In Dutch, the word I would use is urkracht → in English it means “primordial force”. An acceptance from within the power of being. I think I felt safety also because of the huge contrast between my fragility and its generosity.

During my studies, my interest + fascination for the sea grew. For me, the ocean is still a sea → I am always in proximity to the coast. I have never been on a ship that distanced itself more than a day’s sail away from land.

L.J. Until now, I’ve spent my whole life near the sea or near water.

L.M.The ocean was always there. It was very present. It’s part of the world in which I grew up. I come from a fisherman’s family → so even though the ocean is more of a space of leisure for me, for my family it is more connected to labor.

Everything is falling – the moment of encounter with it is linked to the possibility of death. When I’m next to the ocean, I feel like I am just part of it. I don’t have to organize anything. I sense a hollow feeling in my stomach.

I think that this feeling of complete surrender towards the ocean is closely linked to a strong desire to belong. There is an issue with belonging in there. The desire to be part of it. What I’m trying to describe is maybe an intense feeling of being grounded that arises from one’s immediate proximity to the immensity of the ocean. It’s so massive you can’t ignore it.

I’m an ocean baby really, as I spent the first part of my life beside the sea in suburban Australia. Mansfield’s story At the Bay connects to lots of what I remember about living beside the sea as a child. I recommend you read it and pay special attention to the way that Mansfield uses various speech styles and manners (especially by children) to evoke the spell that the sea and nature has over the diverse characters in the story.

The experience of this place retouched on the magic that the ocean had for me when I was a child. To hear the sounds of the ocean was to be of an old and familiar habitat. Kangaroos slept right beside the house in Woodgate which was spitting or spluttering distance from the ocean. We slept to the sounds of the breaking waves.

Now, as an adult, I feel I’m just reconnecting with the sea and how it used to make me feel. There’s something unconditional to just being in the proximity of the sea.

T.v.A. I think there must have been around 20-30 birds around me. The birds are always there. I was just allowed to be close to them + they didn’t seem to bother. I went to Fair Isle two times. Now they’ve built a new bird observatory.

I love watching the tides. My relation to the sea is defined by proximity and observation. But its not about the sea surrounding me I’m just accepted in its proximity.

A.C.Well, I think it is its Infinity → The possibility for a completely undisturbed view. This is something that many people would say, I think.
– I have a curiosity for what is over the horizon.

If you look at the sea, your view is unspoiled. This ‘sea or ocean panorama’ is to me. the only one that gives rise to a sense of infinity, adventure and expectation. The sea suggests the chance to explore → I see the horizon as something that you can never reach but you would like to get at anyway. This is linked to a certain fear of the unknown.

I first experienced the Pacific in California, in San Francisco and in Big Sur.
It feels infinite.

When I am swimming in the ocean I get the feeling of being in infinity something that just goes on+on. The ocean is undividable. It’s not just your complete freedom of movement within this body of water, but also that there is literally no border to it. The particles that are touching you could have been somewhere else only two days before. The ocean gives me a notion of holism.

Turn the paper on the other side. Filling the page as much as possible, draw an 8 on its side– the sign of Infinity. Do this continuously. You can choose the pace of Infinity. Increase the speed of your drawing or slow down according to how your hand and ears feel. You could do this infinite times. What’s the sound of your infinity?

Then later, when I was living in Manhattan → I always felt it had a particular energy because it is an island. As if the place was energized by the omnipresence of water.

→ I used to go to Fire Island → on Long Island, which is a queer place, a mythical place. → It’s been a gay beach since at least the 1940s. There’s a poem about it written by Frank O’Hara (“A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island”). I loved going there, the kindness of the environment, the body-positive attitude of the people. There is a deep sense of acceptance in this community which I think also comes from the ocean itself. Fire island is quite wild + sometimes you
can see deer on the beach. It’s about 3 hours by public transportation from NYC. You get the ticket directly from Penn Station which includes the train, taxi and ferry rides.

I love maps + I am obsessively drawing sea monsters. The birth of an island is seen as the appearance of a sea monster. If a volcano is next to the sea → the lava goes into the water + the land actually expands. My whole relationship to the ocean at the moment is closely linked to my work with volcanoes.

In my adulthood, I traveled to Polynesia and I spent many months hopping from island to island living with locals in small villages. I then made a long Super 8 film called Fiji View-master which used a children's toy slide viewer as a visual prop and special effect generator.

Around the Fiji islands, I travelled to many parts of the archipelago by small motor boat or canoe. Sometimes the water is so deep, that it’s bottomless. As one floats in such bottomless waters the sun shines on the body + all the while, your shadow disappears into the endless depths. This is quite an ontological and richly animated experience and beyond description once again.

I love beach holidays: I just spent a few days in La Gomera.:Swimming in the sea there gave me a certain feeling of liberation.

In Bonaire, the sea is very transparent. When swimming out into the sea, there is a point where all of a sudden the bottom of the sea deepens so abruptly, it goes from seeing the seabed clearly, to a huge black hole, without any transition, it completely disappears from view. Reaching this point left me feeling really scared. Even though it has no physical consequences for my swimming on the surface. Still, I almost did not dare to swim past this point. I felt like standing on the edge of a cliff.

My mother → was (born on) an island but I had few connections to the ocean myself.

Like in the Orkneys → which is an island group above Scotland. On one of the islands is the Old man of Hoy which is, essentially, just a very tall and long rock surrounded by water. A car commercial was shot there, for which the car had to be flown on the rock by a helicopter. The driver had to climb into the car from a hole underneath it because there was no space on the rock to enter the car from the side.

I spent some time in the Shetland Islands in Scotland. To get from mainland Shetland to Fair Isle you either take a boat, which is called The Good Shepherd, or a plane. I became very seasick when I took that boat. That was strange because the water was calm. The waves crush the cliffs all the time so there’s an almost invisible current.

T.v.A. When you’re in a place like Fair Isle, wildlife is just there, it’s a part of where you are.

T.v.A. I was there on a writing residency. When I work on a new play, I choose to go and work by the sea, usually on an island. This is not on purpose. When I write, I do not want to be disturbed by normal life. I am not attracted to mountains nor to warm countries. I end up in places like the north of Norway or the islands of Great Britain or Newfoundland.

T.v.A. Arriving is ok if the community is small enough. For example, in Fair Isle: you can only stay at the birds observatory: Breakfast, lunch + dinner are at fixed hours.

A lot of the islands I have visited have migratory birds passing through them. It’s nice to sit there on an island and to have the bird-world passing by and over you.

There are around 30 people on Fair Isle. When you meet someone they ask: Are you a bird person? or an island person?

People leave the island from the age of 12 to go to school. The school in Shetland only has 12 children. Once I met an older man on Fair Isle who told me: “I came back to die here.” – it made sense. People spend their active life off the island and only go back there to die.

On Fair Isle, the sheep belong to everybody. Once a year, all the sheep are gathered up → the non-productive ones need to be slaughtered. But they cannot be slaughtered on the island. So all the sheep go on to The Good Shepherd – first alive and then dead. Everybody on the island gets a number and according to that they are allotted a (dead) sheep.

One of the most amazing things that happened to me on Fair Isle was the following: I was standing on a cliff (it was not dangerous.) I had binoculars and was looking through them at birds all around me. Suddenly, I had the feeling that I could touch the birds because I could not see the land through the binoculars, it was covered by the black edges of the viewers.

G.V.Actually, the sea for me is linked to childhood, even now. It has the properties to draw me back into childhood. My body becomes different – because of the gravity that is different.

The ocean is related to losing control. When I’m on earth the gravity holds everything in place. It is the lack of gravity that makes all the difference between the ocean and the earth.

As the world’s underbelly, full of unknown potential and forces. Floating: in the ocean is such an anti-gravitational experience. The older one gets, the ocean isn’t as attractive as it used to be, but as a counter to the force and effect of gravity, of aging and falling down in fact, the ocean still offers much. Though it’s more something of the past.

The feeling of weightlessness that floating engenders is similar to that of jumping off an airplane – the moment just before you open your parachute. Imagine falling/floating above the void, while you listen to the whalesongs.

I’m mainly going there on holiday. I enjoy swimming.

L.M.The ocean was always there. It was very present. It’s part of the world in which I grew up. I come from a fisherman’s family → so even though the ocean is more of a space of leisure for me, for my family it is more connected to labor.

In Portugal, swimming was very much a class thing. People only knew how to swim if they went to swimming classes. Those kinds of people, that could afford swimming classes, see the ocean as a space for leisure. But for poor people like my family, the ocean was seen as labor + not necessarily as leisure. It still is the case with some people. There is another mode of relation towards it. For poor people, it’s not just about labor but about hard labor. For some it is as if they don’t have the right to pleasure. Pleasure is located in the family for them.

Although I spent some of my childhood holidays by the sea → I am a very good swimmer. I spent a lot of time swimming in rivers: particularly in Cheshire, England. I have a strong relationship to water but more to fresh water than to seawater.

P.H.Well, in terms of the physical atmosphere of the city. But also economically→. Rio is a big port. In fact, in Rio there is a → blurred boundary between beach life + city life. There is an atmosphere of carefreeness + leisure and + at the same time there is a certain tension in the air because of the high crime that happens on the beach(es).

I love beach holidays: I just spent a few days in La Gomera.:Swimming in the sea there gave me a certain feeling of liberation.

My mother grew up in the West Indies. My family doesn’t know how to swim. I was “taught” how to swim in school essentially by being thrown into the swimming pool (and being left to fend for myself). When I was going there for vacations, we would have mainly picnics on the beach with my family, and I used to go into the water – but only up to my knees. I slowly taught myself to swim but swam like a “small dog” (as they say in French).

I used to spend vacation time in Martinique. I prefer the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean. Nowadays, I can play with my son + my dog in the sea → they can both swim better than me. I feel joy when I encounter the ocean now, because I experience it through my son’s eyes. The experience of weightlessness and buoyancy is what fascinates me the most.

P.P. I agree that swimming is a class thing. For fisherfolk, the ocean is work, → you don’t necessarily enjoy going there. Whenever we were going to the seashore for leisure → we would do a picnic.

Everyone from France going to the West Indies was telling me that the sea is beautiful. But I was looking at the Atlantic + not at the Caribbean (where you can see your feet in the water) → The sea is different and it felt like we were not talking about same thing. Also, because people talking to me about their vacations in the Caribbean where actually there for leisure. While I was seeing people working from dawn to dusk. We not only didn’t look at the same sea but also not at the same lives.

When you’re far out in the ocean you experience the weather, the isolation
→ if I could get the opportunity to do such a trip, I would do it.

If there wouldn’t have been people there with me when it happened, I wouldn’t have survived. If you are alone and something like this happens to you, you have less of a chance at surviving. That is why you need to approach the ocean accompanied. Otherwise, you can feel the loneliness and this feeling is very strong, I had never experienced it before like this.

M.M.Then the beach was more of a solitary place for you?

I felt as if the sea allowed me to be there. It rang true somehow (the colors + everything) the loneliness of it.

If you look at the sea, your view is unspoiled. This ‘sea or ocean panorama’ is to me. the only one that gives rise to a sense of infinity, adventure and expectation. The sea suggests the chance to explore → I see the horizon as something that you can never reach but you would like to get at anyway. This is linked to a certain fear of the unknown.

The Belgian seaside is covered in cement. As a child I remember the boardwalk in Koksijde and how I spent → a lot of time looking at the ocean. I remember swimming with my grandmother in the sea; she would play with me in the cold waves for hours.

I used to spend a lot of time on piers looking at the sea. I had no boat and did not find it necessary to have one. For me, the sea was just a place of separation from the boredom of suburbia/of civilization. I approached it as a hermitage, a place of retreat and of endless discovery.

I was by myself on the beach + throwing rocks. I would just sit + watch the ripples the rocks made on the surface. I still love walking on the seashore, feeling the wind on my face + listening to the waves. I just sit + watch the horizon and what is behind the horizon. It opens up a lot of ideas about how movement occurs. From France, you can see England from across the channel. When I was in Marseille → I was thinking of Algeria when looking out into the sea. There’s a moment of connecting through the horizon.

I love watching the tides. My relation to the sea is defined by proximity and observation. But its not about the sea surrounding me I’m just accepted in its proximity.

I love maps + I am obsessively drawing sea monsters. The birth of an island is seen as the appearance of a sea monster. If a volcano is next to the sea → the lava goes into the water + the land actually expands. My whole relationship to the ocean at the moment is closely linked to my work with volcanoes.

Walls of 40m can form for example, because of differences in depth. The ocean pushes upwards + creates strong currents. Hence what’s marked as an "area to be avoided" on the map.

Once in Byron Bay, I was in a bar overlooking the beach with a friend, who at the time had a problem with alcohol so we were only drinking soft drinks. At one moment, we both glanced out of the large windows in front of the bar towards the sea and about fifty meters away saw the huge tail of a whale coming out of the water in what seemed like slow motion. It then hit the water's surface with a huge splash and disappeared. We were instantly intoxicated by the utterly unexpected circumstances of such an oceanic vision.

Then, when I was living in Istanbul → I saw a dolphin from the boat while crossing from the Asian side to the European side.

Imagine that you are floating on the water's surface. While floating, and with your eyes closed, imagine you're listening to the songs of whales below you.

My own experiences are situated in the Mediterranean. The ocean for me implies → history. A deep history. Initially, all the continents were together. Bit by bit, they got separated and one day the strait of Gibraltar was formed, and in 40 years the water came through and filled the Mediterranean.

I was always put off by the opacity of the North Sea. In the Mediterranean → you can see the little things floating around.

I love maps + I am obsessively drawing sea monsters. The birth of an island is seen as the appearance of a sea monster. If a volcano is next to the sea → the lava goes into the water + the land actually expands. My whole relationship to the ocean at the moment is closely linked to my work with volcanoes.

G.V.In the Atlantic Ocean there is a rifting zone. It is related to many surreal creatures. There is a friction in the tectonic plates that the water is soothing. On land, such a zone is an open lava wound. Nothing is able to live there. But in the sea, it’s where life originated.

I remember seeing the ocean as an unapproachable monster. The thing with swimming is: I swim badly. My uncle does not know how to swim. Only the boys would risk it, entering the ocean without knowing how to swim.

I was into rock pooling as a kid also, meaning I’d observe for hours what lives within the rock pools when the tide is out, and also during the night. One night I even discovered tiny sea worms that would explode instantly when exposed to torch light. This marine phenomena seemed to defy all reasonable explanation as I could not find information about such a sea creature ever existing. I’ve always wondered if it was only a waking sea dream.

E.R.B. The ocean is closely related to death.The experience of death is very present in the ocean. That’s why there exist so many mythologies of the ocean. I think of death not always as something negative. I see it more as a transformation. After death, something else can emerge. It is part of a cycle. It happens in nature all the time and we also experience it in our lives. You let parts of yourself die so that you can evolve and adapt.

G.V.The ocean is more mythological than the sea. When I think of the ocean → I think of the Atlantic. For me, the Atlantic is very clearly defined: it begins on the coast of France + ends at the coast of the US.

A friend told me a story about a YouTube video. Apparently, there is a pregnant woman + old man that both enter into the water. The woman then comes out without the baby + then, much later, the man comes out with the baby in his arms. It’s like a mythological story.

Fantasies about the ocean are timeless – let me recall just one from 500 years ago, and that’s from Francois Rabelais The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Throughout this book, there’s mention of many sea voyages to strange and far-flung islands. For instance, in the last part of the book during one such a sea voyage, the ships crew were, I quote: “Feasting and speechifying and telling nice little stories, Pantagruel suddenly jumped to his feet and took a look around him. ‘Can you hear something comrades?’ he asked. ‘I seem to hear people talking in the air. But I can’t see anything. Listen”.

At Half Moon Bay near where I lived in Melbourne as a kid, there’s a sunken battle ship (a relic from WW1). One can either swim or walk to the ship depending on the level of the tide. The ship is called the ‘Cerberus’ and is the name of the mythological dog that protects the doors of the underworld. This half sunken wreck protrudes from the sea and its presence connects in my memory to so many strange sea fantasies I’ve read in poetry and literature over the years, including the sea voyages described by Rabelais.

The first experimental films I made were made on the beach in my early teens with my parents Super 8 equipment. One film depicted a friend coming out of the sea dressed in a bed sheet as a toga and reading a book. Later on, I filmed a pig's head being thrown towards the sea off a high cliff. I also would film the sand and driftwood constructions that I made on the beach. These rather crude filmic efforts were, in a sense, a sort of mythic homage to the sea and the stories that surrounded it.

I have a nephew who’s really into surfing and at 14 years of age, he saved the life of a father and his daughter who were being pulled out to sea by the undertow. And who would of very likely drowned had my nephew not brought them to shore on his surfboard. This heroic and mythological deed made the front page of the local newspaper.

My mother told me that my grandfather was an alcoholic and when he got drunk he became very aggressive. So the family would → escape to the shore. They had a primitive relationship to it, they considered it their savior. Moreover, they used to catch lobster and octopus to eat because those are the things that they could get on the rocks. Back then you could still find crabs on beach. My mom helped with making nets.

As a fisherman, you’re not only responsible for the catch but you also have to repair the nets when they are damaged. It’s a lot of work to fix the nets but you are not paid for it. There are different kinds of nets – trawling nets are used on beam trawlers.

As a fisherman, you’re not only responsible for the catch but you also have to repair the nets when they are damaged. It’s a lot of work to fix the nets but you are not paid for it. There are different kinds of nets – trawling nets are used on beam trawlers.

The nets should be well protected. Otherwise, they are damaged within hours. There are systems of chains to prevent big rocks from tearing the nets.

All nets are industrially produced, you buy a piece of net + then you “make” them yourself, fitting them in the trawler. You need extra material for reparation. They are made out of very strong nylon → 10 mm. You repair them with your bare hands.

There’s a system to measure the power of the net → if there’s a lot of tension, you know they are full.

I was always put off by the opacity of the North Sea. In the Mediterranean → you can see the little things floating around.

Recently I went on two sailing voyages on the North Sea from Ostende. It was with my partner’s parents who have a small yacht and they took us out for a few hours to drift on the sea in the sweltering summer heat. This was only the second time I’d ever been on such a boat and it was really a fantastic experience. Like being in a Paul Klee painting, the shape and the motion of the sails and all the other elements that go into being pushed along by the wind seem so simple yet are also so fascinatingly rich and poetic.

P.v.C. I want to say from the start, that I have never been on the ocean. I have only been on
the North Sea, the East Sea and the West Coast of Scotland. Even though it is said that when you can sail on the North Sea, you can sail everywhere.

C.G. Its immensity + its calm, the calm (of surface). At least that’s how it seems to me, always, when I encounter the ocean: it is calm. It is infinitely accepting. Not acceptance in its anthropomorphic sense but literally. Not a form of kindness, but the absorption of everything that comes in contact with it.

T.v.A Yes, as a friend (even though one should not anthropomorphize it). It gave me a normalcy when I most needed it.

T.v.A. Power (on the one hand) – don’t want it to be the power, not the power that comes.
Approachability /friendliness. But the sea is not friendly, at least not in an anthropomorphic sense.
Completeness. So complete that it represents so many things at the same time. I think that’s what attracts me so much.
→ It’s Depth. But a depth on all levels. It resonates on multiple levels/there’s a complexity.
It’s impossible to know it. Like the spot where I take the photographs: I don’t know anything about it + I have been there 150 times. You think the sea is predictable but it’s totally not. Even though all those things are true, I don’t feel frightened by it.

A friend told me a story about a YouTube video. Apparently, there is a pregnant woman + old man that both enter into the water. The woman then comes out without the baby + then, much later, the man comes out with the baby in his arms. It’s like a mythological story.

I’m an ocean baby really, as I spent the first part of my life beside the sea in suburban Australia. Mansfield’s story At the Bay connects to lots of what I remember about living beside the sea as a child. I recommend you read it and pay special attention to the way that Mansfield uses various speech styles and manners (especially by children) to evoke the spell that the sea and nature has over the diverse characters in the story.

There is a hippie colony near this beach and I once saw a naked woman park her baby in a stroller on the beach right in front of huge breaking waves. Then she went into the wild surf with the incredible undertow, leaving the baby to watch unattended. The view from the baby’s perspective must have been profoundly impressible and primordial, witnessing her mother disappearing into the massive waves with all the sounds of the breaking waves and wind raging around her. I was the only other person on the beach which was many kilometers long.

There’s a dependency on it, from its power and immensity. There is a thing there that does something in the stomach. There’s also a very strong connection between the ocean
and colonization. Because, you see Portugal has a very long coast. The ocean is a very big resource.

M.M. On the small Greek island where I often spend the summer, the inhabitants fish a lot. Even if it’s not their profession, they mostly have their wooden boats and when they can they go out to fish. Sometimes also for multiple days. And now with the crisis and their jobs becoming more and more precarious, they consider expensive seafood, like Calamari, to be almost like → gold. They freeze it and know, that if they happen to lose their job, they can always sell it and live off it. Is there a similar sense of dependency and security with respect to the sea and its creatures in Portugal?

As a fisherman, your life is completely free. You’re paid by the percent of the catch. The more we caught, the more money we would make. You have to be fast. You’re awake for 48 hours to work on it.

Six days at sea, you can catch up to → 15.000 kilos of fish, on average. Mainly trout and sole: as they are the fish that live on the bottom of the sea. Each trip lasts about six days, then you unload the fish, for example, in England + they come back on a truck. Then the boat sails again.

A beam trawler uses 3.000 liters of fuel in 24 hours. A skipper gets paid 10.000 euros/month. But you have to work a lot for that money. When you’re at sea you always work. Even if you don’t work, your muscles are working to keep you straight.

A fisherman is the only professional hunter in the world. There’s nothing more important in the world than having – and providing – food. Nowadays there are lots of laws and quotas regulating the fishing industry. Before things were more free.

I first experienced the Pacific in California, in San Francisco and in Big Sur.
It feels infinite.

Like lots of kids, I was strongly influenced by reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s sea adventure novel Treasure Island. Later on in life, I even went to visit Stevenson’s house in Samoa that is overlooking the Pacific ocean.

While traveling around the Pacific Ocean, I recall going out from the coast and finding rogue [theme:waves]] breaking in the middle of nowhere, and also places where the sea and the sky blend into each other becoming one big blue screen. Much like Derek Jarmen’s last film called Blue. Just the voice and a vast color blue: open seas and cloudless skies.

One of my dreams was to live on the beach and feed on fish + coconuts and I did this in the South Pacific over the time I travelled there.

Pacific verses Indian verses Atlantic

There is a nostalgic aspect to it as well, I think → it holds the possibility of erasing everything. You feel very helpless when you are around it or in front of it.

The nostalgia I am talking about is cultural nostalgia. Culturally, I think there is this longing (towards the ocean). A longing to be swallowed by it. The ocean suggests a (possible) disappearance of the human being(s) into it. You see people going into it , far out into it, + you don’t know if and when they are going to come out. You get the sense that you are going in to an environment that makes you vulnerable.

L.M. Feeling so small, an acute sense of disarmament. The feeling that I can just disappear, I am not important. In front of the ocean, forget about it, you are nothing.

There is a hippie colony near this beach and I once saw a naked woman park her baby in a stroller on the beach right in front of huge breaking waves. Then she went into the wild surf with the incredible undertow, leaving the baby to watch unattended. The view from the baby’s perspective must have been profoundly impressible and primordial, witnessing her mother disappearing into the massive waves with all the sounds of the breaking waves and wind raging around her. I was the only other person on the beach which was many kilometers long.

Around the Fiji islands, I travelled to many parts of the archipelago by small motor boat or canoe. Sometimes the water is so deep, that it’s bottomless. As one floats in such bottomless waters the sun shines on the body + all the while, your shadow disappears into the endless depths. This is quite an ontological and richly animated experience and beyond description once again.

L.J. I like that it’s wild and free and so beautiful. It takes the place that it needs. It’s very powerful. I think of the ocean as a very powerful + strong woman. I have great respect for her. She’s amazing. She’s full of life. She’s Untamable (→ that includes all of it.) I would like to be like her:

Wise/Wild
Powerful
Young
Always changing
Beautiful while she’s just being herself.
I think of her as both very playful + strong and in her element.

The ocean has enormous power as an entity which has agency, that decides. The word ocean is male in Portuguese. The Atlantic is never something that is a given, that can be taken for granted. Being in relation to it is always a fight. It performs its agency quite loudly. It is not a background. It is quite a force. You don’t fuck with it, you have to check it first, you cannot just go in. Boys would do it. They would play with it and its aggressiveness. They would go in and be smashed by the waves.

The ocean has enormous power as an entity which has agency, that decides. The word ocean is male in Portuguese. The Atlantic is never something that is a given, that can be taken for granted. Being in relation to it is always a fight. It performs its agency quite loudly. It is not a background. It is quite a force. You don’t fuck with it, you have to check it first, you cannot just go in. Boys would do it. They would play with it and its aggressiveness. They would go in and be smashed by the waves.

On the back beach of Byron Bay, the undertow, or pull of the tide, is so extreme that when you stand up to your knees in the water, it feels as if some giant is pulling one's legs out from under with incredible force.

P.H.I would like to mention the power of the ocean. A power that has different facets:

It’s such a power → it’s a huge thing and this gave me some kind of safety. As with every minority connecting to a majority → It gives you a sense of safety.

T.v.A. Its vastness. Its colors + smells + earthiness. In Dutch, the word I would use is urkracht → in English it means “primordial force”. An acceptance from within the power of being. I think I felt safety also because of the huge contrast between my fragility and its generosity.

T.v.A. Power (on the one hand) – don’t want it to be the power, not the power that comes.
Approachability /friendliness. But the sea is not friendly, at least not in an anthropomorphic sense.
Completeness. So complete that it represents so many things at the same time. I think that’s what attracts me so much.
→ It’s Depth. But a depth on all levels. It resonates on multiple levels/there’s a complexity.
It’s impossible to know it. Like the spot where I take the photographs: I don’t know anything about it + I have been there 150 times. You think the sea is predictable but it’s totally not. Even though all those things are true, I don’t feel frightened by it.

Fish is precious. There is a lot of respect for the space they inhabit. There is almost a religious aspect to my family’s relationship with the ocean: → they want to be protected by it. The ocean has a sacred element to it.

It’s such a power → it’s a huge thing and this gave me some kind of safety. As with every minority connecting to a majority → It gives you a sense of safety.

L.J. I like that it’s wild and free and so beautiful. It takes the place that it needs. It’s very powerful. I think of the ocean as a very powerful + strong woman. I have great respect for her. She’s amazing. She’s full of life. She’s Untamable (→ that includes all of it.) I would like to be like her:

Fish is precious. There is a lot of respect for the space they inhabit. There is almost a religious aspect to my family’s relationship with the ocean: → they want to be protected by it. The ocean has a sacred element to it.

The ocean has enormous power as an entity which has agency, that decides. The word ocean is male in Portuguese. The Atlantic is never something that is a given, that can be taken for granted. Being in relation to it is always a fight. It performs its agency quite loudly. It is not a background. It is quite a force. You don’t fuck with it, you have to check it first, you cannot just go in. Boys would do it. They would play with it and its aggressiveness. They would go in and be smashed by the waves.

Elements make you feel small. Respect and fear → define one’s relation to the ocean. It's work. A fisher friend from Brittany once said that when you fall far into the ocean, knowing how to swim doesn’t change anything. Cause any way you cannot fight it.

When at sea, you have to figure out how to stay alive. Never start a dispute with the sea – you’ll always lose. If the weather is bad – you’ll have no more money. You make a deal with the sea, → respect the sea be very “low”/calm – don’t try to challenge it. If there is no other way, you have to do it. Let the sea do the work.

That’s your space
That’s my space and that’s good.
It’s an interaction of respect.

It will outlast us. and then it will take over the world again. And if it doesn’t wipe out human societies, it will transform them in such a profound way that they will be nothing like what they are now.

Ice moves to lower regions of the ice sheet and towards the margins where it melts or flows into the sea. So the ice flows into the ocean as water or as ice. There, it can cause a rise in sea level.

H.G.The interaction between the ocean + the ice sheets. → The biggest uncertainty concerning future changes in sea level is related to how the ocean would influence the ice sheets, especially under the current conditions of global climate change.

I was there visiting the Esalen Institute, a New Agey place built right on the cliffs of the ocean. Esalen was founded in the 1960s, inspired by the work of Abraham Maslow and others, as an experiment with spirituality + psychology. I think the 5Rhythms technique was invented there.
The place has an incredible appeal. It just feels right. And although it has turned into a business, this feeling cannot be reduced to the people that make money from it.

If there are rocks, it’s great cause the water is flowing with force and I like to climb over the rocks and stuff. On and on I walk through the water. With the water up to my knees.

L.M. That’s what I meant when I said that the ocean is precious. → My uncle still goes to the rocks on top of the ocean to fish. The rocks are very dangerous and sharp and steep – and he’s 70. Fishing is a very unfair business. My uncle is often staying on the rocks with his fishing rod until 4 am. And I often wonder, what is his relationship to the ocean, actually?

My mother told me that my grandfather was an alcoholic and when he got drunk he became very aggressive. So the family would → escape to the shore. They had a primitive relationship to it, they considered it their savior. Moreover, they used to catch lobster and octopus to eat because those are the things that they could get on the rocks. Back then you could still find crabs on beach. My mom helped with making nets.

Throughout my childhood I would submerge myself in the sea according to different parts of my body. As a toddler, I was told to not go deeper than my knees and a few years later no deeper than my belly button (NAVEL NAVAL) until I was up to my neck in the water in my teens. And all the time I would spend hours snorkeling over the surface, peering down into the water upon all the various seaweed and .

Everything was magnified on the ocean, the waves, the tides, the rock pools, the cloudscapes, the acoustics, the invigorating flights of fantasy, etc.

I was into rock pooling as a kid also, meaning I’d observe for hours what lives within the rock pools when the tide is out, and also during the night. One night I even discovered tiny sea worms that would explode instantly when exposed to torch light. This marine phenomena seemed to defy all reasonable explanation as I could not find information about such a sea creature ever existing. I’ve always wondered if it was only a waking sea dream.

I was by myself on the beach + throwing rocks. I would just sit + watch the ripples the rocks made on the surface. I still love walking on the seashore, feeling the wind on my face + listening to the waves. I just sit + watch the horizon and what is behind the horizon. It opens up a lot of ideas about how movement occurs. From France, you can see England from across the channel. When I was in Marseille → I was thinking of Algeria when looking out into the sea. There’s a moment of connecting through the horizon.

The nets should be well protected. Otherwise, they are damaged within hours. There are systems of chains to prevent big rocks from tearing the nets.

Even when the sea is at its wildest etc. It will always be frightening only if you try to contain it. If the rocks were not there, it would just keep on rolling. If you don’t fence it in it will keep on rolling, it won’t attack. Eventually, the rocks will have to go.

Like in the Orkneys → which is an island group above Scotland. On one of the islands is the Old man of Hoy which is, essentially, just a very tall and long rock surrounded by water. A car commercial was shot there, for which the car had to be flown on the rock by a helicopter. The driver had to climb into the car from a hole underneath it because there was no space on the rock to enter the car from the side.

I spent some time in the Shetland Islands in Scotland. To get from mainland Shetland to Fair Isle you either take a boat, which is called The Good Shepherd, or a plane. I became very seasick when I took that boat. That was strange because the water was calm. The waves crush the cliffs all the time so there’s an almost invisible current.

One of the most amazing things that happened to me on Fair Isle was the following: I was standing on a cliff (it was not dangerous.) I had binoculars and was looking through them at birds all around me. Suddenly, I had the feeling that I could touch the birds because I could not see the land through the binoculars, it was covered by the black edges of the viewers.

So it felt like there was just ocean + birds + me + no land. It felt like I was flying with them. It felt like there was no difference between what they were doing and what I was doing. It felt fantastic. I was too close to the cliff to walk around. I get scared really easily.

T.v.A.I would say it's more the smell of rocks.

I once made a performance on floating. It was called “How to make your own dead sea”. Essentially, I had to put 23 kg of salt in my bathtub. Then the salt lifted me. How can salt change gravity? It’s a super complicated formula that was discovered by Archimedes. You first have to calculate your volume. Then you put the right amount of salt in your bathtub.

The water: there is velvety, soft + the salt content is high. So it’s ideal for floating. Different light conditions seem to lead to different floating conditions, strangely.
Pelicans fly overhead as one floats in this tropical seascape.

V.Z. Salt is what makes the sea into something that can be eaten - potentially. It is the taste of the sea. It is what stays on the skin, on the furniture, on the walls, on the bed sheets after the water has dried.

I have strong experiences → in the Mediterranean, particularly in (France). I am a very good floater. When you are floating, the sand on the bottom of the sea is moving with the waves. I always could sense the sand on my spine.

When I can sense the sand moving on my spine, its like my bones + the sand are made out of the same material. I can imagine the spine as being hollow + the sand going up and down my spine.

During my childhood, the sea was a primordial dream and playground. Then when I was around 12, I started going there on my own to engage in artistic activities like sculpting the sand and driftwood into huge land art works well before I knew such art existed. Like Spiral Jetty (by Robert Smithson), I made large sand constructions on the beach that would quickly be transformed and destroyed by the daily tide water.

The first experimental films I made were made on the beach in my early teens with my parents Super 8 equipment. One film depicted a friend coming out of the sea dressed in a bed sheet as a toga and reading a book. Later on, I filmed a pig's head being thrown towards the sea off a high cliff. I also would film the sand and driftwood constructions that I made on the beach. These rather crude filmic efforts were, in a sense, a sort of mythic homage to the sea and the stories that surrounded it.

If you're two, the second person stands close to the first, without blocking their movement. Take some sand in your hand and carefully sprinkle it on the person's hands and feet, making a circle around their body. You can take your time for this. Once in a while, take a break from the sand to play the sound of the foghorn, as in the recording above.

Take some sand and mix it with a bit of water until it becomes muddy, but not too watery. Place some wet sand on the side the other person's neck, or any other body part that you choose together. Blow softly on the sand until it's dry. The sensation of the sand on the neck is very similar to that of salt on skin after the water has dried.

Position yourself in front of a table.
Pour some sand on its surface.
Place your palms on the table surface.
Slowly start moving your hands in circles, moving the sand with you.
Focus on the sound this movement produces.
Try summoning the sound of a wave: start silently, building up to a loud turn (or visa versa).
Repeat as often as you want, adding variations to the hand movements, rhythm and sound qualities.

→ Saying this, I think that the comfort of sailing in ships has changed enormously.
→ Now, it is a nice experience to be at sea. Seafaring, therefore, lost a bit of the mystique surrounding it, it’s not what it used to be in the past. It’s not much of a thing any more to sail on the ocean. There are cruise ships now, offering ocean crossing as an experience.

A.C.I mean it mainly in relation to practical things: when you’re on a small boat or a ship, for example, you start realizing that it moves continuously.Things that on land one could do easily are more difficult to do on water.

My professional relationship to the ocean is a relation of a researcher to a subject of scientific interest, so I’m treating it as such. Some people have a strong relationship to the system they are studying, others don’t. My work did not necessarily bring me close to the ocean. You get to know the ocean better when you are doing field work, e.g. on a research ship.

In Portugal you can fish mainly cod and sardines. My uncle used to go out for days and days with big industrial ships to fish. I remember going with my mother to the harbor to see him when he returned.

Fantasies about the ocean are timeless – let me recall just one from 500 years ago, and that’s from Francois Rabelais The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Throughout this book, there’s mention of many sea voyages to strange and far-flung islands. For instance, in the last part of the book during one such a sea voyage, the ships crew were, I quote: “Feasting and speechifying and telling nice little stories, Pantagruel suddenly jumped to his feet and took a look around him. ‘Can you hear something comrades?’ he asked. ‘I seem to hear people talking in the air. But I can’t see anything. Listen”.

At Half Moon Bay near where I lived in Melbourne as a kid, there’s a sunken battle ship (a relic from WW1). One can either swim or walk to the ship depending on the level of the tide. The ship is called the ‘Cerberus’ and is the name of the mythological dog that protects the doors of the underworld. This half sunken wreck protrudes from the sea and its presence connects in my memory to so many strange sea fantasies I’ve read in poetry and literature over the years, including the sea voyages described by Rabelais.

During my first year in art school, I spent three weeks on an ocean cruise with my mother and sisters. There was a major breakout of the flu throughout the ship and variations of the same flu circulated around the ship so that I was constantly ill with a different range of symptoms during the entire cruise. The ship literally became, for me anyway, like Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead and which was by chance, a book I found in the ship's library. I read it locked up in my cabin only going out when we docked on a new island, and where I would stumble around with a horrible fever too weak to actually know what to do and where to go.

The experience of being on the ship, the sounds, smells, vibrations and all the amazing sensory elements that the ocean offered filtered through my state of illness and fever. This all delivered a series of very beautiful histrionic and poetic impressions. For instance, I remember sitting in a muddy paddock in British Samoa and watching through feverish eyes, and with the sound of the sea in the background, a local funeral party under some trees that included the slaughtering of a pig.

There are huge cruise ships arriving in the Bosporus, they have a special mooring area, a zone, which is closed off to people of the city. Those huge ships are like skyscrapers. I learned to love and hate Istanbul. Especially now → so many people are in jail... Things to love were especially people, but currently, it is a very dark place to be.

Some people from the generation of my mother and before came to France from the West Indies by boat. Like the European migrants arriving at Ellis Island. And I often wonder what it would feel like to sail for days and days on the ocean without seeing the shore + then, suddenly, seeing it. You’re starting a new life somewhere new but at the same time you’re in the middle of nowhere (during the crossing).

The reason we use beam trawlers is: we’ve used them for generations. People therefore have the know-how to use them very well. Especially on dirty -rocky- grounds. The Dutch don’t go there. Only the Belgians go there → and fishing a lot of different kinds of fish.

A beam trawler uses 3.000 liters of fuel in 24 hours. A skipper gets paid 10.000 euros/month. But you have to work a lot for that money. When you’re at sea you always work. Even if you don’t work, your muscles are working to keep you straight.

Just being on the ship is work. Humans are not made to live on the sea – we are made to live on the shore. We’re handicapped at sea.

Only when the boat is in the harbor, can you sleep for six hours. Or when the ship is reaching the fishing grounds.

P.v.C. Twinriggers are safer. The Dutch use electricity fishing. But it kills the sea fauna.

Since last summer, after the accident, I’ve been very afraid to go into the sea. After the accident, I went to the sea (in Spain). This was not as traumatic as I had imagined it to be, because I was well accompanied. I was with someone who I trust very much + also because I don’t have any memory of the accident. But now I cannot swim far away from the shore anymore.

Before I had only seen movies → about survivors. But I had never before felt it in my body – the experience of drowning. →Even though this experience didn’t involve extreme conditions – actually we were very close to the shore and the waters were calm, but that feeling remained.

G.V.I am a very good swimmer but still I prefer floating to swimming. When I float, I am taken away by the waves, losing my sense of orientation. Then at some point, I am thrown by the waves to the shore.

My mother told me that my grandfather was an alcoholic and when he got drunk he became very aggressive. So the family would → escape to the shore. They had a primitive relationship to it, they considered it their savior. Moreover, they used to catch lobster and octopus to eat because those are the things that they could get on the rocks. Back then you could still find crabs on beach. My mom helped with making nets.

P.P.My personal, intuitive relation to it is defined by fear + fascination. I love to walk on the seashore with my dog: its a form of meditation for me.

Some people from the generation of my mother and before came to France from the West Indies by boat. Like the European migrants arriving at Ellis Island. And I often wonder what it would feel like to sail for days and days on the ocean without seeing the shore + then, suddenly, seeing it. You’re starting a new life somewhere new but at the same time you’re in the middle of nowhere (during the crossing).

Just being on the ship is work. Humans are not made to live on the sea – we are made to live on the shore. We’re handicapped at sea.

To be at sea was always an adventure because you’d never know what was going to happen. You would be on the ship with six other people. When we would come back on shore, we would have a special feeling of accomplishment. If someone was in trouble, the others would help to get him out of trouble. Now its more difficult.

In the old days, there was no connection with the shore during the journey. Our families would ask us: When do you come back? And we’d say: We don’t know yet. Because it’s not possible to plan on the sea. Because you never know what will happen. You should never say how long a journey is going to take. As a skipper, you should never show that you have negative thoughts.

H.G. No I don’t think so. But there’s a huge sound when the ice breaks off when a glacier calves.

The ocean has enormous power as an entity which has agency, that decides. The word ocean is male in Portuguese. The Atlantic is never something that is a given, that can be taken for granted. Being in relation to it is always a fight. It performs its agency quite loudly. It is not a background. It is quite a force. You don’t fuck with it, you have to check it first, you cannot just go in. Boys would do it. They would play with it and its aggressiveness. They would go in and be smashed by the waves.

The encounter with the ocean brings about a silencing. A moment of stopping. You realize that you are surrounded by it and the vastness of the surrounding. It’s too loud.

Notably, in both Melville and Mansfield’s writing, the ocean and the sea actually speak (this might explain my desire to start spluttering and stammering to mimic certain watery sounds). The first voice one hears in Mansfield’s story is in fact the sea, in it she writes “Ah-Aah! sounded the sleepy sea”.

This is also true in life, as the sea and the ocean generate sounds that seem like words and phrases. It is really the case when one spends long periods of time listening to the waves and all the other variations of splashing, roaring, thrashing, whistling, spraying noises produced or accompanied by the ocean and the wind. Really the wind and the ocean go hand in hand.

Fantasies about the ocean are timeless – let me recall just one from 500 years ago, and that’s from Francois Rabelais The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Throughout this book, there’s mention of many sea voyages to strange and far-flung islands. For instance, in the last part of the book during one such a sea voyage, the ships crew were, I quote: “Feasting and speechifying and telling nice little stories, Pantagruel suddenly jumped to his feet and took a look around him. ‘Can you hear something comrades?’ he asked. ‘I seem to hear people talking in the air. But I can’t see anything. Listen”.

After the crew are overcome with acute states of distress and fear from hearing these disembodied voices, the ship's captain provides an explanation to the source of such noises. He points out that they are sailing very near the edge of a frozen sea and that a year before in that very same spot there had been a bloody and wild sea battle where many men, women and children had been brutally killed. And accordingly, as he explains it, all the frightful noises of the battle had been frozen in the cold sea air and were now a year later beginning to thaw, and this was what Pantagruel and his comrades were now starting to hear.

Rabelais then provides a wonderful description of the crew grabbing handfuls of frozen voices and noises from the sea air and throwing them on the ship's deck, these frozen words he states, “looked like crystallized sweets of different colors”. And then the frozen words would melt as they were warmed by the hands of the crew and then could be heard fully but were all not understandable as they were of ‘a barbarous language’.

One beautiful exception to this incomprehensibility was when one frozen word melted and “made a noise like a chestnut that had been thrown on the embers without being pricked”. For it was assumed that this was the noise of a cannon shot during the battle. Rabelais then gives a phonetic rendition of the noises as they thaw: "Hin, hin, hin, hin his, tick. Tock, crack, brededin, brededac, frr, frrr, frrr, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, tracc, tracc, trr, trr, trrr, trrrrr, trrrrrr, on, on, on, on, on, ouououououon, Gog, Magog and goodness knows what other barbarous sounds". This is in fact an onomatopoetic type sound poem based upon the blood curdling noises of a sea battle. Also, Rabelais has turned the sea and its extreme weather conditions into one giant recording device for transmitting sounds and voices across time itself.

Everything was magnified on the ocean, the waves, the tides, the rock pools, the cloudscapes, the acoustics, the invigorating flights of fantasy, etc.

There is a hippie colony near this beach and I once saw a naked woman park her baby in a stroller on the beach right in front of huge breaking waves. Then she went into the wild surf with the incredible undertow, leaving the baby to watch unattended. The view from the baby’s perspective must have been profoundly impressible and primordial, witnessing her mother disappearing into the massive waves with all the sounds of the breaking waves and wind raging around her. I was the only other person on the beach which was many kilometers long.

The experience of being on the ship, the sounds, smells, vibrations and all the amazing sensory elements that the ocean offered filtered through my state of illness and fever. This all delivered a series of very beautiful histrionic and poetic impressions. For instance, I remember sitting in a muddy paddock in British Samoa and watching through feverish eyes, and with the sound of the sea in the background, a local funeral party under some trees that included the slaughtering of a pig.

The experience of this place retouched on the magic that the ocean had for me when I was a child. To hear the sounds of the ocean was to be in the proximity of an old and familiar habitat. Kangaroos slept right beside the house in Woodgate which was spitting or spluttering distance from the ocean. We slept to the sounds of the breaking waves.

The experience of this place retouched on the magic that the ocean had for me when I was a child. To hear the sounds of the ocean was to be in the proximity of an old and familiar habitat. Kangaroos slept right beside the house in Woodgate which was spitting or spluttering distance from the ocean. We slept to the sounds of the breaking waves.

I was not using the binoculars to look at what was far away but they were blocking the physical reality instead. Because of the blackness within the binoculars. I could hear the sounds of their wings flapping It really felt as if I were amongst them.

A glacier might move at around 1 cm per minute. Within the sound of the legs rubbing against the floor, you might be able to hear a low rumble – the friction of the ice moving against stone, occasional thuds of blocks of ice hitting against each other and the occasional note singing out, ice scraping against ice.

Turn the paper on the other side. Filling the page as much as possible, draw an 8 on its side– the sign of Infinity. Do this continuously. You can choose the pace of Infinity. Increase the speed of your drawing or slow down according to how your hand and ears feel. You could do this infinite times. What’s the sound of your infinity?

Carefully move the microphone into the carafe. When you point the mic towards the water, feedback is produced. You can control its volume and pitch by moving the mic up and down. Try to keep the sound as steady as possible. Be careful not to push the microphone into the water.

Use your voice to produce a high-pitched sound with your soft pallet. Try a sound that's loud and penetrating, as laughing can sometimes be. It can be produced at different pitches and in different colors, shifting registers from a “hahahah” to a “heheheheh” or even a very high-pitched “hihihihih”. You can play with those different possibilities or repeat already used sounds. In case of multiple voices, relate your sound to those of the others.

Breathe in and out through your mouth. Gradually, start varying the intensity, duration and depth of your breath. Focus on its sound. You can experiment with the different possibilities of sounding. Breathe in sometimes quietly and others more loudly; sometimes breathing in with a hiss, for example. Or, initiate the breathing out with a more explosive “p”. You can experiment with the different possibilities. What does the sound of your breath remind you of? How does it compare to the sound of waves as they break on the shore?

Position yourself in front of a table.
Pour some sand on its surface.
Place your palms on the table surface.
Slowly start moving your hands in circles, moving the sand with you.
Focus on the sound this movement produces.
Try summoning the sound of a wave: start silently, building up to a loud turn (or visa versa).
Repeat as often as you want, adding variations to the hand movements, rhythm and sound qualities.

A friend told me a story about a YouTube video. Apparently, there is a pregnant woman + old man that both enter into the water. The woman then comes out without the baby + then, much later, the man comes out with the baby in his arms. It’s like a mythological story.

And something happens to me every time I am close to water. I see it and feel drawn to it. I walk to it and enter it and start walking through the water. Inside the water my creativity explodes. I start making up a story in my head. Mostly I’m speaking it to myself while I’m making it. I am imagining this story in the moment. It’s like meditating I guess. I walk through the water and I feel the water flowing between my legs – and its like I’m in a trance.

M.M. How do stories appear?

There’s the ocean of Melville’s Moby Dick and the sea in the story At The Bay by Katherine Mansfield. One is an oceanic and gigantic yarn full of fury and intensity and the other, a very stripped back story as fragile and as nuanced as can be. These two quite different literary works exemplify the different kind of connections I’ve had with these two watery worlds. When I mention the ocean I am also thinking about the sea and visa versa, and I hope the differences, but also connections, between these two entities are not overlooked.

Fantasies about the ocean are timeless – let me recall just one from 500 years ago, and that’s from Francois Rabelais The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Throughout this book, there’s mention of many sea voyages to strange and far-flung islands. For instance, in the last part of the book during one such a sea voyage, the ships crew were, I quote: “Feasting and speechifying and telling nice little stories, Pantagruel suddenly jumped to his feet and took a look around him. ‘Can you hear something comrades?’ he asked. ‘I seem to hear people talking in the air. But I can’t see anything. Listen”.

I’m an ocean baby really, as I spent the first part of my life beside the sea in suburban Australia. Mansfield’s story At the Bay connects to lots of what I remember about living beside the sea as a child. I recommend you read it and pay special attention to the way that Mansfield uses various speech styles and manners (especially by children) to evoke the spell that the sea and nature has over the diverse characters in the story.

There is a hippie colony near this beach and I once saw a naked woman park her baby in a stroller on the beach right in front of huge breaking waves. Then she went into the wild surf with the incredible undertow, leaving the baby to watch unattended. The view from the baby’s perspective must have been profoundly impressible and primordial, witnessing her mother disappearing into the massive waves with all the sounds of the breaking waves and wind raging around her. I was the only other person on the beach which was many kilometers long.

One of the most amazing things that happened to me on Fair Isle was the following: I was standing on a cliff (it was not dangerous.) I had binoculars and was looking through them at birds all around me. Suddenly, I had the feeling that I could touch the birds because I could not see the land through the binoculars, it was covered by the black edges of the viewers.

I have discovered different ways of opening my mind. For example, I read the Daily Telegraph. It’s not the best newspaper if you need information. But it has the best short stories. The best reports on the weird + the wonderful. So when I work on something, I cut out different things from the Daily Telegraph + glue it in a book → this works better for me.

C.G. Its immensity + its calm, the calm (of surface). At least that’s how it seems to me, always, when I encounter the ocean: it is calm. It is infinitely accepting. Not acceptance in its anthropomorphic sense but literally. Not a form of kindness, but the absorption of everything that comes in contact with it.

All the patterns that appear upon the surface of the ocean and movement of the water itself is brought about by the wind in all its gymnastic manifestations or vibrations. Water from all the oceans and every sea is constantly moving across the world in great migratory currents replenishing and changing themselves through this exchange.

What is visible in terms of the surface of the ocean remains endlessly fascinating, whereas there’s all that is unseen lurking beyond this visibility or below the water’s surface and which ignites so many fantasies and imaginings.

Throughout my childhood I would submerge myself in the sea according to different parts of my body. As a toddler, I was told to not go deeper than my knees and a few years later no deeper than my belly button (NAVEL NAVAL) until I was up to my neck in the water in my teens. And all the time I would spend hours snorkeling over the surface, peering down into the water upon all the various seaweed and rock formations.

Once in Byron Bay, I was in a bar overlooking the beach with a friend, who at the time had a problem with alcohol so we were only drinking soft drinks. At one moment, we both glanced out of the large windows in front of the bar towards the sea and about fifty meters away saw the huge tail of a whale coming out of the water in what seemed like slow motion. It then hit the water's surface with a huge splash and disappeared. We were instantly intoxicated by the utterly unexpected circumstances of such an oceanic vision.

M.B.For me, the threshold appears mostly when the ocean is still: then there is an amazing velocity. In its viscosity too, the still ocean is something else, like jelly.This transitional moment of the surface marks something that fascinates me :

Being above the surface
and below the surface simultaneously.

In Bonaire, the sea is very transparent. When swimming out into the sea, there is a point where all of a sudden the bottom of the sea deepens so abruptly, it goes from seeing the seabed clearly, to a huge black hole, without any transition, it completely disappears from view. Reaching this point left me feeling really scared. Even though it has no physical consequences for my swimming on the surface. Still, I almost did not dare to swim past this point. I felt like standing on the edge of a cliff.

I was by myself on the beach + throwing rocks. I would just sit + watch the ripples the rocks made on the surface. I still love walking on the seashore, feeling the wind on my face + listening to the waves. I just sit + watch the horizon and what is behind the horizon. It opens up a lot of ideas about how movement occurs. From France, you can see England from across the channel. When I was in Marseille → I was thinking of Algeria when looking out into the sea. There’s a moment of connecting through the horizon.

Imagine that you are floating on the water's surface. While floating, and with your eyes closed, imagine you're listening to the songs of whales below you.

The Belgian seaside is covered in cement. As a child I remember the boardwalk in Koksijde and how I spent → a lot of time looking at the ocean. I remember swimming with my grandmother in the sea; she would play with me in the cold waves for hours.

We are not meant to be in the ocean. It is an alien medium for us. We cannot exist there. To be able to be there we have to be able to swim or we have to use something that is external to our bodies. Going to the ocean is like going to the moon.

Since last summer, after the accident, I’ve been very afraid to go into the sea. After the accident, I went to the sea (in Spain). This was not as traumatic as I had imagined it to be, because I was well accompanied. I was with someone who I trust very much + also because I don’t have any memory of the accident. But now I cannot swim far away from the shore anymore.

G.V.I am a very good swimmer but still I prefer floating to swimming. When I float, I am taken away by the waves, losing my sense of orientation. Then at some point, I am thrown by the waves to the shore.

I’m mainly going there on holiday. I enjoy swimming.

I remember seeing the ocean as an unapproachable monster. The thing with swimming is: I swim badly. My uncle does not know how to swim. Only the boys would risk it, entering the ocean without knowing how to swim.

Still, my partner and I recently stayed for a few weeks in a place called Woodgate, a small sea resort in Queensland, Australia. This is an amazing place; we were swimming all the time.

I swim in the Indian ocean whenever I visit India as it always delivers very special impressions and experiences. It’s always a joy to watch Indians of all sorts interact and respond to this ocean. They externalize their emotions in tune with the action of the waves and the wind in beautifully subtle and uniquely theatrical or dance like ways.

Although I spent some of my childhood holidays by the sea → I am a very good swimmer. I spent a lot of time swimming in rivers: particularly in Cheshire, England. I have a strong relationship to water but more to fresh water than to seawater.

I learned to swim by trying to swim 10 strokes, one after the other, if I managed I would get a small reward from my mother.

I love beach holidays: I just spent a few days in La Gomera.:Swimming in the sea there gave me a certain feeling of liberation.

In Bonaire, the sea is very transparent. When swimming out into the sea, there is a point where all of a sudden the bottom of the sea deepens so abruptly, it goes from seeing the seabed clearly, to a huge black hole, without any transition, it completely disappears from view. Reaching this point left me feeling really scared. Even though it has no physical consequences for my swimming on the surface. Still, I almost did not dare to swim past this point. I felt like standing on the edge of a cliff.

When I am swimming in the ocean I get the feeling of being in infinity something that just goes on+on. The ocean is undividable. It’s not just your complete freedom of movement within this body of water, but also that there is literally no border to it. The particles that are touching you could have been somewhere else only two days before. The ocean gives me a notion of holism.

1. First, one could describe it as sublime, in the classical sense (i.e. you feel very small.)
2. Secondly, is the power it has to lift you when you swim. It’s buoyancy.
There is an ecstasy of the thing that can engulf you + charm you + suddenly you become conscious of your own vulnerability.

There’s a French film (Welcome by Philippe Lioret): about a refugee crossing the channel by swimming. The film describes the process of him getting ready for the crossing, training like mad. I don’t remember if in the end you actually see him entering the water, but I have a clear (perhaps imagined) image of him progressively getting disoriented + getting sleepy.

My mother grew up in the West Indies. My family doesn’t know how to swim. I was “taught” how to swim in school essentially by being thrown into the swimming pool (and being left to fend for myself). When I was going there for vacations, we would have mainly picnics on the beach with my family, and I used to go into the water – but only up to my knees. I slowly taught myself to swim but swam like a “small dog” (as they say in French).

About 2 years ago, my relation to the ocean became better because of my son who is 9 years old. He is learning how to swim in the swimming pool in Brussels. On the days where I pick him up, I jump into the water with him and he teaches me some basic movements of the hands and feet.

I have fisherfolk in my family but they don’t know how to swim.

P.P. I agree that swimming is a class thing. For fisherfolk, the ocean is work, → you don’t necessarily enjoy going there. Whenever we were going to the seashore for leisure → we would do a picnic.

Elements make you feel small. Respect and fear → define one’s relation to the ocean. It's work. A fisher friend from Brittany once said that when you fall far into the ocean, knowing how to swim doesn’t change anything. Cause any way you cannot fight it.

The color of the water is green grey because of the algae. It’s very clean nonetheless. It’s cold. There are tides.

Everything was magnified on the ocean, the waves, the tides, the rock pools, the cloudscapes, the acoustics, the invigorating flights of fantasy, etc.

On the back beach of Byron Bay, the undertow, or pull of the tide, is so extreme that when you stand up to your knees in the water, it feels as if some giant is pulling one's legs out from under with incredible force.

I was into rock pooling as a kid also, meaning I’d observe for hours what lives within the rock pools when the tide is out, and also during the night. One night I even discovered tiny sea worms that would explode instantly when exposed to torch light. This marine phenomena seemed to defy all reasonable explanation as I could not find information about such a sea creature ever existing. I’ve always wondered if it was only a waking sea dream.

P.v.C. Because of differences of sea level → the tides, - and because of the depth of the water.

I love watching the tides. My relation to the sea is defined by proximity and observation. But its not about the sea surrounding me I’m just accepted in its proximity.

→ Saying this, I think that the comfort of sailing in ships has changed enormously.
→ Now, it is a nice experience to be at sea. Seafaring, therefore, lost a bit of the mystique surrounding it, it’s not what it used to be in the past. It’s not much of a thing any more to sail on the ocean. There are cruise ships now, offering ocean crossing as an experience.

M.M.Do you travel a lot?

Fantasies about the ocean are timeless – let me recall just one from 500 years ago, and that’s from Francois Rabelais The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Throughout this book, there’s mention of many sea voyages to strange and far-flung islands. For instance, in the last part of the book during one such a sea voyage, the ships crew were, I quote: “Feasting and speechifying and telling nice little stories, Pantagruel suddenly jumped to his feet and took a look around him. ‘Can you hear something comrades?’ he asked. ‘I seem to hear people talking in the air. But I can’t see anything. Listen”.

While traveling around the Pacific Ocean, I recall going out from the coast and finding rogue [theme:waves]] breaking in the middle of nowhere, and also places where the sea and the sky blend into each other becoming one big blue screen. Much like Derek Jarmen’s last film called Blue. Just the voice and a vast color blue: open seas and cloudless skies.

Recently I went on two sailing voyages on the North Sea from Ostende. It was with my partner’s parents who have a small yacht and they took us out for a few hours to drift on the sea in the sweltering summer heat. This was only the second time I’d ever been on such a boat and it was really a fantastic experience. Like being in a Paul Klee painting, the shape and the motion of the sails and all the other elements that go into being pushed along by the wind seem so simple yet are also so fascinatingly rich and poetic.

I always travel from Naples to Palermo on the ferry when I can. This is an absolutely fantastic voyage and one that Raymond Roussel made to his sad Sicilian end. Leaving Naples, heading towards Palermo, or returning from Palermo to Naples, this voyage evokes a great wealth of associations and anticipatory thoughts that ferment and bubble away during the overnight sea journey.

Around the Fiji islands, I travelled to many parts of the archipelago by small motor boat or canoe. Sometimes the water is so deep, that it’s bottomless. As one floats in such bottomless waters the sun shines on the body + all the while, your shadow disappears into the endless depths. This is quite an ontological and richly animated experience and beyond description once again.

On an intellectual level, I would say the most important element is traveling:
the forced traveling of African populations , but also things circulating across the Atlantic ocean.

Historians mention how ideas + cultures have been traveling around. How news of the French + English revolutions influenced the sailors. The movement within the ocean seems to suggest the futility of national boundaries.

If you look at the sea, your view is unspoiled. This ‘sea or ocean panorama’ is to me. the only one that gives rise to a sense of infinity, adventure and expectation. The sea suggests the chance to explore → I see the horizon as something that you can never reach but you would like to get at anyway. This is linked to a certain fear of the unknown.

I wonder sometimes if the fact that the ocean is so unknown makes us not take care of it. We treat it as if it were a hole. Where you can throw all the trash. I read somewhere – I don’t remember exactly where – that the ocean is known less than the moon.

There is this quality of invisibility about the ocean that’s really special. The invisibility of the wind, for instance, matches and points to the invisibility of what’s below the surface of the ocean. All these qualities have an enormously captivating presence that is wielded in mysterious ways in the ocean. It actually makes me quite aphasic and dumbstruck when I try to describe all this, and hence my wish to splutter and stammer when speaking about it.

What is visible in terms of the surface of the ocean remains endlessly fascinating, whereas there’s all that is unseen lurking beyond this visibility or below the water’s surface and which ignites so many fantasies and imaginings.

As the world’s underbelly, full of unknown potential and forces. Floating: in the ocean is such an anti-gravitational experience. The older one gets, the ocean isn’t as attractive as it used to be, but as a counter to the force and effect of gravity, of aging and falling down in fact, the ocean still offers much. Though it’s more something of the past.

In the old days, there was no connection with the shore during the journey. Our families would ask us: When do you come back? And we’d say: We don’t know yet. Because it’s not possible to plan on the sea. Because you never know what will happen. You should never say how long a journey is going to take. As a skipper, you should never show that you have negative thoughts.

T.v.A. Power (on the one hand) – don’t want it to be the power, not the power that comes.
Approachability /friendliness. But the sea is not friendly, at least not in an anthropomorphic sense.
Completeness. So complete that it represents so many things at the same time. I think that’s what attracts me so much.
→ It’s Depth. But a depth on all levels. It resonates on multiple levels/there’s a complexity.
It’s impossible to know it. Like the spot where I take the photographs: I don’t know anything about it + I have been there 150 times. You think the sea is predictable but it’s totally not. Even though all those things are true, I don’t feel frightened by it.

The sea is never the same, you don’t know what to expect. The sea is always different; sometimes we were very angry at the sea because we could not do our job properly.

To be at sea was always an adventure because you’d never know what was going to happen. You would be on the ship with six other people. When we would come back on shore, we would have a special feeling of accomplishment. If someone was in trouble, the others would help to get him out of trouble. Now its more difficult.

Humans are very vulnerable at sea. There’s huge Unpredictability: every time there is something that you don’t expect. That’s why the skipper is next to God.

T.v.A. Power (on the one hand) – don’t want it to be the power, not the power that comes.
Approachability /friendliness. But the sea is not friendly, at least not in an anthropomorphic sense.
Completeness. So complete that it represents so many things at the same time. I think that’s what attracts me so much.
→ It’s Depth. But a depth on all levels. It resonates on multiple levels/there’s a complexity.
It’s impossible to know it. Like the spot where I take the photographs: I don’t know anything about it + I have been there 150 times. You think the sea is predictable but it’s totally not. Even though all those things are true, I don’t feel frightened by it.

It’s a very vulnerable position to be in. It’s a feeling of falling in the water + not being able to get out. You feel that you are surrounded by water + that you are just falling. You cannot do anything about it. You’re a dead body, so to speak.

There is a nostalgic aspect to it as well, I think → it holds the possibility of erasing everything. You feel very helpless when you are around it or in front of it.

The nostalgia I am talking about is cultural nostalgia. Culturally, I think there is this longing (towards the ocean). A longing to be swallowed by it. The ocean suggests a (possible) disappearance of the human being(s) into it. You see people going into it , far out into it, + you don’t know if and when they are going to come out. You get the sense that you are going in to an environment that makes you vulnerable.

1. First, one could describe it as sublime, in the classical sense (i.e. you feel very small.)
2. Secondly, is the power it has to lift you when you swim. It’s buoyancy.
There is an ecstasy of the thing that can engulf you + charm you + suddenly you become conscious of your own vulnerability.

Humans are very vulnerable at sea. There’s huge Unpredictability: every time there is something that you don’t expect. That’s why the skipper is next to God.

T.v.A. Its vastness. Its colors + smells + earthiness. In Dutch, the word I would use is urkracht → in English it means “primordial force”. An acceptance from within the power of being. I think I felt safety also because of the huge contrast between my fragility and its generosity.

The Belgian seaside is covered in cement. As a child I remember the boardwalk in Koksijde and how I spent → a lot of time looking at the ocean. I remember swimming with my grandmother in the sea; she would play with me in the cold waves for hours.

G.V.I am a very good swimmer but still I prefer floating to swimming. When I float, I am taken away by the waves, losing my sense of orientation. Then at some point, I am thrown by the waves to the shore.

The ocean has enormous power as an entity which has agency, that decides. The word ocean is male in Portuguese. The Atlantic is never something that is a given, that can be taken for granted. Being in relation to it is always a fight. It performs its agency quite loudly. It is not a background. It is quite a force. You don’t fuck with it, you have to check it first, you cannot just go in. Boys would do it. They would play with it and its aggressiveness. They would go in and be smashed by the waves.

This is also true in life, as the sea and the ocean generate sounds that seem like words and phrases. It is really the case when one spends long periods of time listening to the waves and all the other variations of splashing, roaring, thrashing, whistling, spraying noises produced or accompanied by the ocean and the wind. Really the wind and the ocean go hand in hand.

Everything was magnified on the ocean, the waves, the tides, the rock pools, the cloudscapes, the acoustics, the invigorating flights of fantasy, etc.

There is a hippie colony near this beach and I once saw a naked woman park her baby in a stroller on the beach right in front of huge breaking waves. Then she went into the wild surf with the incredible undertow, leaving the baby to watch unattended. The view from the baby’s perspective must have been profoundly impressible and primordial, witnessing her mother disappearing into the massive waves with all the sounds of the breaking waves and wind raging around her. I was the only other person on the beach which was many kilometers long.

The experience of this place retouched on the magic that the ocean had for me when I was a child. To hear the sounds of the ocean was to be in the proximity of an old and familiar habitat. Kangaroos slept right beside the house in Woodgate which was spitting or spluttering distance from the ocean. We slept to the sounds of the breaking waves.

I was by myself on the beach + throwing rocks. I would just sit + watch the ripples the rocks made on the surface. I still love walking on the seashore, feeling the wind on my face + listening to the waves. I just sit + watch the horizon and what is behind the horizon. It opens up a lot of ideas about how movement occurs. From France, you can see England from across the channel. When I was in Marseille → I was thinking of Algeria when looking out into the sea. There’s a moment of connecting through the horizon.

The wind makes the sea always different. Different waves form with north wind than with wind from the east. The north wind creates large layers of waves (i.e. wider waves) while with eastern wind, waves are shorter (i.e. narrower).

Or, like the “Azure Window” in Malta, a limestone arch that crumbled a few years ago because of a huge storm. The waves slowly eat away the land. No human-constructed structure will hold. → Especially off the west coast of England where the Channel meets the ocean the sea is very wild.

I spent some time in the Shetland Islands in Scotland. To get from mainland Shetland to Fair Isle you either take a boat, which is called The Good Shepherd, or a plane. I became very seasick when I took that boat. That was strange because the water was calm. The waves crush the cliffs all the time so there’s an almost invisible current.

Imagine that you are standing on the ocean shore listening to the huge waves breaking in front of you. Looking out on the horizon, imagine that you can almost feel the shore at the other end of the Atlantic and the immensity of the body of water in between.

Breathe in and out through your mouth. Gradually, start varying the intensity, duration and depth of your breath. Focus on its sound. You can experiment with the different possibilities of sounding. Breathe in sometimes quietly and others more loudly; sometimes breathing in with a hiss, for example. Or, initiate the breathing out with a more explosive “p”. You can experiment with the different possibilities. What does the sound of your breath remind you of? How does it compare to the sound of waves as they break on the shore?

Position yourself in front of a table.
Pour some sand on its surface.
Place your palms on the table surface.
Slowly start moving your hands in circles, moving the sand with you.
Focus on the sound this movement produces.
Try summoning the sound of a wave: start silently, building up to a loud turn (or visa versa).
Repeat as often as you want, adding variations to the hand movements, rhythm and sound qualities.

The sea is a human-unfriendly place.
It is hostile and an uncomfortable place to be
→ You need a tool that enables you to be there; if there were no boats you could not access it.

We are not meant to be in the ocean. It is an alien medium for us. We cannot exist there. To be able to be there we have to be able to swim or we have to use something that is external to our bodies. Going to the ocean is like going to the moon.

Just being on the ship is work. Humans are not made to live on the sea – we are made to live on the shore. We’re handicapped at sea.

When you’re far out in the ocean you experience the weather, the isolation
→ if I could get the opportunity to do such a trip, I would do it.

→ You have to take the weather into account continuously, for example.
→The Currents
→ There is something that inhibits you – you cannot act as you would on land. Every simple movement is more tiring.

One beautiful exception to this incomprehensibility was when one frozen word melted and “made a noise like a chestnut that had been thrown on the embers without being pricked”. For it was assumed that this was the noise of a cannon shot during the battle. Rabelais then gives a phonetic rendition of the noises as they thaw: "Hin, hin, hin, hin his, tick. Tock, crack, brededin, brededac, frr, frrr, frrr, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, tracc, tracc, trr, trr, trrr, trrrrr, trrrrrr, on, on, on, on, on, ouououououon, Gog, Magog and goodness knows what other barbarous sounds". This is in fact an onomatopoetic type sound poem based upon the blood curdling noises of a sea battle. Also, Rabelais has turned the sea and its extreme weather conditions into one giant recording device for transmitting sounds and voices across time itself.

Here in Europe, we don’t have a strong relation to the elements. In Martinique, there is the
- ocean that can get mad
- the volcano that can get mad
- the wind that can get mad

When at sea, you have to figure out how to stay alive. Never start a dispute with the sea – you’ll always lose. If the weather is bad – you’ll have no more money. You make a deal with the sea, → respect the sea be very “low”/calm – don’t try to challenge it. If there is no other way, you have to do it. Let the sea do the work.

I remember taking the mailboat from here to Dover with my mother. We used to take it every year. For shopping. The journey is about four hours each way. It was my mother’s idea of going to England. We would only go if sea was calm, of course. Before the trip, my father would look out of the window in the early morning to assess the weather.

Imagine that you’re lying on the beach with your back on the wet sand. It’s winter and there is a storm. The sand, carried by the wind, is traveling and brushing over your hands and feet.

L.J. I like that it’s wild and free and so beautiful. It takes the place that it needs. It’s very powerful. I think of the ocean as a very powerful + strong woman. I have great respect for her. She’s amazing. She’s full of life. She’s Untamable (→ that includes all of it.) I would like to be like her:

Wise/Wild
Powerful
Young
Always changing
Beautiful while she’s just being herself.
I think of her as both very playful + strong and in her element.

There is a hippie colony near this beach and I once saw a naked woman park her baby in a stroller on the beach right in front of huge breaking waves. Then she went into the wild surf with the incredible undertow, leaving the baby to watch unattended. The view from the baby’s perspective must have been profoundly impressible and primordial, witnessing her mother disappearing into the massive waves with all the sounds of the breaking waves and wind raging around her. I was the only other person on the beach which was many kilometers long.

→ I also spent some time in Rio de Janeiro. The beach in Rio has a very important presence. There is an openness of the city towards the beach. However, at the same time, the beaches of the city are wild zones. There is extreme poverty and inequality in the city, so there is also a lot of crime.

Even when the sea is at its wildest etc. It will always be frightening only if you try to contain it. If the rocks were not there, it would just keep on rolling. If you don’t fence it in it will keep on rolling, it won’t attack. Eventually, the rocks will have to go.

Or, like the “Azure Window” in Malta, a limestone arch that crumbled a few years ago because of a huge storm. The waves slowly eat away the land. No human-constructed structure will hold. → Especially off the west coast of England where the Channel meets the ocean the sea is very wild.

All the patterns that appear upon the surface of the ocean and movement of the water itself is brought about by the wind in all its gymnastic manifestations or vibrations. Water from all the oceans and every sea is constantly moving across the world in great migratory currents replenishing and changing themselves through this exchange.

This is also true in life, as the sea and the ocean generate sounds that seem like words and phrases. It is really the case when one spends long periods of time listening to the waves and all the other variations of splashing, roaring, thrashing, whistling, spraying noises produced or accompanied by the ocean and the wind. Really the wind and the ocean go hand in hand.

There is a hippie colony near this beach and I once saw a naked woman park her baby in a stroller on the beach right in front of huge breaking waves. Then she went into the wild surf with the incredible undertow, leaving the baby to watch unattended. The view from the baby’s perspective must have been profoundly impressible and primordial, witnessing her mother disappearing into the massive waves with all the sounds of the breaking waves and wind raging around her. I was the only other person on the beach which was many kilometers long.

Here in Europe, we don’t have a strong relation to the elements. In Martinique, there is the
- ocean that can get mad
- the volcano that can get mad
- the wind that can get mad

I was by myself on the beach + throwing rocks. I would just sit + watch the ripples the rocks made on the surface. I still love walking on the seashore, feeling the wind on my face + listening to the waves. I just sit + watch the horizon and what is behind the horizon. It opens up a lot of ideas about how movement occurs. From France, you can see England from across the channel. When I was in Marseille → I was thinking of Algeria when looking out into the sea. There’s a moment of connecting through the horizon.

The wind makes the sea always different. Different waves form with north wind than with wind from the east. The north wind creates large layers of waves (i.e. wider waves) while with eastern wind, waves are shorter (i.e. narrower).

This crossing was really different from taking the mailboat to Dover. I felt the wind on my face. I felt on the same level as the seagulls that were hanging out on the water surface. I didn’t even know they did that. My favorite ocean bird is the Gannet.