Culturing the Deep Sea

Patricia Esquete, holds a PhD in Marine biology. Her current position is at the University of Aveiro, Portugal, where she studies the biodiversity of various marine and freshwater ecosystems, from tropical rainforests to deep-sea. She has a broad experience participating in expeditions aiming to explore the deep ocean and has studied and described species new to science at various areas of the world, including the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Southern oceans. Currently, she focuses her research in the study of ecological aspects of deep-sea mining and co-leads the Minerals working group of the Deep Ocean Stewardship initiative. Additionally, she has a MS in Anthropology, and is interested in the intersections of knowledge systems form an anthropological perspective.

Alison Laurie Neilson is an integrated researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Social Sciences at University NOVA in Lisbon. She has graduate degrees in environmental studies, wildlife biology and comparative international development education. Her work transcends boundaries between arts/sciences, academic/non-academic and researcher/researched in knowledge creation and fisheries governance. She works on environmental justice issues in small-scale fishing communities of the Azores Islands Portugal. She conducts narrative and arts-informed research on the way sustainability is understood and used in education and fishing policy. She asks how scientists and teachers ignore the knowledge and experience of the people who spend their lives on the ocean and who depend on healthy fish populations. She looks at the way knowledge, wisdom and politics are mixed together. Alison uses arts within her practice to challenge norms within academic publishing, communications and education. This includes performance, graphic communications and creative facilitation.

TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary—based in Madrid and Vienna, with situated projects in Venice and Cordoba—is a leading international art and advocacy foundation created in 2002 by the philanthropist and collector Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza. All activity of the foundation is fundamentally driven by artists and the belief in art and culture as a carrier of social and environmental transformation and change. TBA21 is continually extending its advocacy work by sparking new collaborations across the arts, humanities and sciences, partnering with other research and educational organizations, and municipalities and communities around the world.

In 2011, TBA21 established the research center TBA21–Academy, a cultural ecosystem fostering a deeper relationship to the Ocean through the lens of art to inspire care and action. For a decade, the Academy has been an incubator for collaborative research, artistic production, and new forms of knowledge by combining art and science. In 2019, TBA21–Academy inaugurated Ocean Space in Venice, a planetary center for exhibitions, research, and public programs catalyzing critical ocean literacy through the arts, and Ocean-Archive.org, a digital organism for a living ocean; a platform in the making, an archive and framework for collaborative research.