Directed, Filmed and Edited by francisca Siza
4 episode series
About Ocean Memory:
Ocean Memory is a concept born in 2016 at a transdisciplinary conference of the National Academies of Science, Medicine and Engineering devoted to the Mesopelagic (or deep ocean). At that workshop, a group gathered to explore concepts around biodiversity and the microbiome came up with a question:
“Does the ocean have memory, and if so, what form does it take?”
The Ocean Memory Project, born from that early seed, seeks to bring together researchers from across disciplines in science, the humanities and the arts, as well as from diverse cultures, to explore and develop this question through a trans-disciplinary lens.
Our primary modality is to organize thematic workshops in which participants are invited to present and collaborate in a horizontal and open way. These are followed by a funding opportunity meant to support collaborative research across disciplines and cultures to explore and develop ocean memory.
About these project:
Following 5 days of a residency, two gatherings took place in the first weekend of October 2023, in Salir do Porto and in Nazaré – two sites carefully selected given their geomorphological as well as aesthetic properties. Nazaré – an interface between land as we see it and land underwater in the form of a large underwater canyon – is home to some of the world’s largest waves, largest sand particles, and various fossils. Salir do Porto is a meeting of numerous interfaces: salt water and fresh river water, mud of four varieties and a sand dune, beach and marsh. Understanding sand grain size as a memory agent of wave activity, and spacial distribution as a memory trace of the coast’s geomorphological evolution, we inhabit these sites in a durational performance-ritual, from high to low tide, and listen, learn, sense, remember.
