Re-membering the Coast. Three Environmental Art Trails

Abstract

The shoreline, where land and sea meet, is gestational. Materially, ecologically, mythically, and politically, it is both a threshold and a generative zone of becoming. Today, however, both tourism and industrial maritime infrastructures have subdued the coast to capitalist, technological, and urban ambitions, and obscured its vitality. This has resulted in a widespread “environmental generational amnesia”: a collective forgetting of the coastline’s potentiality and of how it once appeared. Our paper examines the breakers as spaces where the will to knowledge about countering environmental amnesia actively arises. We define our method as environmental art research, combining the principles of “(collaborative) art research” and “environmental art history” into a way of knowing that unfolds as long-term embodied research on and through images and places. The surf and the surge function not only as dynamic archives of the past, but also as liminal fields revealing potential futures through iconic emergence—the organic surfacing of unanticipated dialectical images—images that provide revelations within a specific point in time during a research process, making larger environmental dynamics perceivable. This understanding advances art futurity as a praxis for creating new imaginaries through both attentive engagement with historical images and presenting embodied image-making in places. We explore three distinct case studies, yet intertwined by similar dynamics of environmental forgetting, in which we conducted extensive field research: the first situated on the Pacific Island of Pongso no Tao, then Nieuwpoort by the Belgian North Sea, and finally the Tyrrhenian coast of the Calabria region in Italy. Verbesselt draws on his freediving and underwater filmmaking around Pongso no Tao. Van Gelder identifies a sequence of naturally toned cyanotypes from Nieuwpoort in terms of “weak images”. Grillo presents a diptych of the Gioia Tauro port. At stake is the fundamental right to re-member the coast. Re-membering may be understood as re-nourishing collective memory of what once was, as well re-activation. We challenge the predominant paradigm of the coast-visiting tourist by contrasting it with the researcher embodying the sailor, diver, or dweller—an in-between positionality fostering a different will to know by means of action. Dialogues between researchers, local inhabitants, and the environments themselves are central, showing how environmental art research can engage with the coast’s socio-material “depth and volume,” following a non-flat “wet ontology”. This approach allows knowledge to emerge that attends to the more-than-human as interlocutor. Through our embodied actions, we invite humans to reconnect with the coastal environment and grant it its own right to resuscitate to vitality and natural diversity.