🌊 The Pacific Association History has attracted plenty reknowned scholars and historians to this congressional event. With over 50+ participants in attendance, the DCC set out to carve an intervention.
🌊 DCC’s Take : Exploring extractivism and imaginaries, tracing the histories of the Pacific on blue growth, deep sea mining and the regulatory system, to the language and grammer needed to counter; queering and the multibeing in marine life, and the Caribbean response with a call to action!
📍 National University of Sāmoa
#samoa #southpacificisland #academia Pacifichistoryconference
🌍 In July, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Jamaica declared the International Day of the Deep Seabed for 1 November 2025 🌊
✨The Deep Currents Collective comes together, each member a radiant thread in a shared mission. Echoing Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite, “unity is submarine,” we draw from our collective strength that unites us across communities and the ocean.
🌊 As Hurricane Melissa ravages the Caribbean, we are reminded that the protection of our deep ocean and the safeguarding of the most vulnerable communities are inseparable in the fight against the climate crisis.
🌱 Our collective efforts are a stand for both: in kin- making with the ocean and those who depend on it 🌊💪
🆘 We encourage you to DONATE via LINK in our BIO to support grassroots initiatives that are now rebuilding the Caribbean.
#deepocean #deepsea #internationalday #deepseabed #deepseamining #deepcurrentscollective #hurricanemelissa #climatecrisis #climateaction #ocean #oceancommunity #cairbbean
🌍 Caribbean Hurricane Fund | Hurricane Melissa
🇯🇲 Jamaica has been hit with one of the strongest hurricanes in its history, and the entire Caribbean is feeling the impact.
❤️🩹 More than 40 people have lost their lives, and thousands of families have been displaced across the region. Around 1.6 million children are now at risk as communities struggle with flooding, destroyed homes, and limited access to clean water and electricity. In Jamaica, fierce winds and heavy rain tore through neighborhoods, damaging schools, hospitals, and roads. Many families are rebuilding from nothing.
🌀Hurricane Melissa is a clear sign of the climate crisis.
🌊 The Atlantic Ocean is now 1.2°C warmer, making storms stronger and more destructive.
💨 The Caribbean creates less than 1% of global emissions, yet suffers some of the worst climate impacts.
🏝️Our islands are paying the price, it is time for real climate action and care for our ocean.
We urge you to:
🪸 Rebuild communities in the region
🐋 Support and invest in grassroots fund
📚 Learn about your role in climate crisis
💙 Show sensitivity and compassion
Caribbean trusted sources for you to:
✅ DONATE via LINK in our BIO
#hurricanmelissa #caribbeanfund #ocean #climateaction #deepcurrentscollective
Caribbean Hurricane Fund
Hurricane Melissa
Donate NOW, LINK in BIO
🌀 Hurricane Melissa, now Category 5, is devastating the Caribbean region across Haiti 🇭🇹, Dominican Republic 🇩🇴 and is hurtling towards Jamaica 🇯🇲
🌊🌍 DCC stands with our Caribbean friends and communities to embrace and heal in this time. The climate crisis and ocean are intricately linked,
we urge you to:
🔹 Galvanize efforts to invest in grassroots action
🔈 Amplify support for Caribbean voices
🔖 Stay informed on the climate crisis and global imbalances
🏝️ Support through listening, sharing, showing sensitivity and valuing ocean-human relations
Together, we can create real change! 💙🌊
📸 Photo credits (c) Mekhala Dave
#climatejustice #climateaction #oceanjustice #island #caribbean #caribbeanhurricane #caribbeanhurricanerelief #reliefforhaiti #reliefforjamaica #relieffordominica
Artist Spotlight! | “Our Collective Seabed” July - August ‘25 | National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston
✨This week we are spotlighting artists Patty Chang and David Kelley who were featured in our exhibition. Filmed during their time attending the United Nations International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Kingston and traveling through Jamaica these past years, artists Patty Chang and David Kelley’s short film Stray Dog Hydrophobia (2023) traces a layered, intimate relationship with the deep sea, told through the sea itself, through the materiality and lived realities embedded in Jamaica’s alluring cultures and its people, and through the looming presence of deep ocean governance. The film follows the sea and the richness of heritage it offers on their journey across the island, sensitively mapping what might be, and how the sea may appear, or become, under complex governance turmoils.
✨ Patty Chang is an American performance artist and film director living and working in Los Angeles, California. Originally trained as a painter, Chang received her Bachelor of Arts at the University of California, San Diego. It wasn’t until she moved to New York that she became involved with the performance art scene.
✨David Kelley is an artist working with photography, video, and installation. His recent projects draw attention to the effects of global capitalism, resource extraction, and shifting physical and political landscapes. Influenced by a range of visual traditions, Kelley draws upon elements of experimental documentary, ethnography, performance, and avant-garde cinema. By working at the intersection of these strategies, he encourages an understanding of his subjects that is simultaneously direct and speculative.
📸 Courtesy of the artists, stills from Stray Dog Hydrophobia 2023
#deepcurrentscollective #deepocean #deepsea #sea #ocean #artists #films #governance #jamaica #art
Artist Spotlight!
“Our Collective Seabed” | Exhibition at National Gallery of Jamaica | July - August 2025
⚡️Earlier this year, Our Collective Seabed opened at the National Gallery of Jamaica, bringing together powerful works by international and Caribbean artists. Co-curated by the Collective, alongside Chief Curator O’Neil Lawrence and Senior Curator Monique Barnett, the exhibition explored how the arts and cultures are a bridge to the ocean and our heritage, creating forms of embedded and sensorial experiences.
✨This week, we’re revisiting Sirens (2023), a film by the UK artist Emma Critchley, which draws deep connections between humans and sea dwellers, reminding us of our submerged, ancestral ties to the ocean. Sirens is a triptych of short films where we witness an encounter between a dancer and three creatures from the deep-sea. The music and performer’s movements offer the audience a portal for connection.
⚡️Emma Critchley is an artist who uses a combination of photography, film, sound and installation to continually explore the human relationship with the underwater environment as a political, philosophical and environmental space. Her work has been shown extensively nationally and internationally in galleries and institutions including The Australian Centre of Photography, the ICA Singapore, The National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Academy, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and Tate St Ives.
🌊 As part of our continued reflection, we’ll be spotlighting one artist from the exhibition each week. Stay tuned as we dive back into this shared seabed and the stories it holds! 💭
📸 Emma Critchley, still from Sirens film triptych, 2023
#artisthighlight #artists #artisticphotography #film #ocean #deepseacollective #deepsea #deepseacreatures #deepseamining #nationalgalleryofjamaica
💥¿Hay política en el fondo del mar? - Agustín Berti y Alejandro Limpo González
🐡🦀👩🏻🔬Finalizo las expediciones en el fondo del mar y nos pareció un bueno momento para hablar sobre la política en los mares.
📲En comunicación con Alejandro Limpo González, integrante del Internacional Colectivo Corrientes Profundas, hablamos sobre la sensorización y recolección de datos del océano argentino.
🤔 ¿Quién financia la investigación del conicet en el fondo del mar?; ¿Hay soberanía bajo en las profundidades de los océanos?
🧑🏻Alejandro Limpo oriundo de España, es Licenciado en Antropología por la Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Master en Culturas Visuales Digitales por el Instituto Universitario de Lisboa.
🔊Escucha la nota completa en SoundCloud
🐟 Meet the Deep Currents Collective!
✨Alejandro Limpo González is a visual anthropologist exploring the media politics of ocean sensing. His research intersects media studies, environmental humanities, and science and technology studies to investigate the relationships between technology, ecology and culture. Currently he is a final year PhD candidate at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton (UK) in the Intelligent Oceans research program, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute (SMMI). He is also researching the Intersessional Working Group on Underwater Cultural Heritage at the International Seabed Authority.
⚡️Alejandro speaks about what Underwater Cultural Heritage means in the context of the deep seabed and how this concept is interpreted from the folds of the Law of the Sea and the International Seabed Authority’s activities.
🔈 Raise your volume to hear Alejandro!
🗯️ Leave your comments below ⬇️
#deepsea #deepseamining #heritage #commons #internationalseabedauthority #deepcurrentscollective #collective #ocean #oceangovernace #deepocean #seabed
“Our Collective Seabed”, Kingston, Jamaica | Side Event and Exhibition Highlights
On July 22nd, at the National Gallery of Jamaica, our side event brought urgent dialogues on deep sea mining to the heart of Kingston, just across from the International Seabed Authority (ISA) where negotiations were taking place.
Led by members of the Collective, Mekhala and Giulia coursed dialogues between the visual arts, culture, legal, history and scientific inquiries on deep sea mining.
✨ Member Elizabeth shared about aqua nullis and the ocean as a universal space. She explored how Caribbean arts and cultures resist Western abstract notions on its extractive histories, framing transoceanic imagination within Jamaica’s context.
✨Member Jonathan traced the history of Jamaica’s bauxite industry as one of the world’s leading producer from the 1950s and reasons for ISA’s HQ in Kingston in 1999, Jamaica, from when the UN Law of the Sea Convention came into force in 1994.
✨ Guest speaker Robyn Young, Marine Biologist, reflected on her connection to the ocean, and her duty to protect Jamaica’s human-ocean relationship.
⚡️Among the ISA delegates, locals and artists, Jamaican film maker Esther Figueroa (seen in pic 2) also attended the side event. Her films like “Fly Me to the Moon” (2019) shed light on the complex materiality of aluminium to consider how we treat our Planet Earth, relationship to consumption and changing landscapes of our material culture.
🗯️ Swipe right to see the side event highlights and Robyn’s statement! Leave a comment below, we would love to hear your thoughts! 💭
The side event and exhibition was made possible with partners National Gallery of Jamaica and TBA21. A big note of acknowledgments go to our funders Southampton Marine and Maritime University and University of Southampton.
📸 IISD/ENB | Andrés Felipe Carvajal Gómez
#deepsea #deepseamining #sideevent #exhibition #ocean #collective #seabed #deepseabed #deepcurrentscollective #internationalseabedauthority #kingston #jamaica
🐠 Meet the Deep Currents Collective!
⚡️ Dr Mekhala Dave is a lawyer and art academic based in Vienna. She is the ocean law and policy analyst/researcher at TBA21–Academy. She has a doctoral degree in contemporary art history and curatorial practice at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In her past and current legal practice, as well as through her doctoral research, she advocates for a social turn in artistic practices and explores encounters located across knowledge spheres and communities in the Global South at the intersection of activism and newly shaping ocean policy. From her lived experiences across borders, she draws inspiration and spiritual guidance from water to the questions of historicity and the search for emerging “new” relations of identity and belonging.
🪨 Mekhala describes the common heritage of (hu)mankind, the legal principle that underpins the Area and its resources of the deep seabed for the benefit of the global commons, from the architect figures of Arvid Pardo and Elizabeth Mann Borgese.
🔈 Listen to Mekhala by turning up your volume!
💬 Want to add to these ideas? Put your comments below! 👇
#deepsea #deepseabed #deepseamining #audio #deepcurrentscollective #ocean #governance #sealevel #global #collective
🪼On 22nd July at the venue of the National Gallery of Jamaica, the Collective launched its inaugural side event and exhibition “Our Collective Seabed”, adjacent to the Jamaica Conference Centre’s International Seabed Authority meetings, which took place around the corner of the Gallery these past three weeks. Khadija Stewart, our member, held the vision of the Gallery to be the ideal space for human-ocean entanglement, with arts and culture as the driving force to inspire and hold imagination within the Caribbean regional context. Thanks to the Curators and their team of the Gallery, O’Neil Lawrence and Monique Barnett, who worked hard with us, to realise this spectacular vision for the side event and exhibition.
📍The event formed panel speakers (L-R) Dr Mekhala Dave (member), Alejandro Limpo (member), Robyn Young (Marine Biologist, guest speaker), Dr Jonathan Galka (member), Alex Moore-Minott (Maroon Cultural Activist, guest speaker), Prof Elizabeth Deloughrey (member), Dr Giulia Champion (member) and Dr Susan Reid (member).
💫 Moderated by members Mekhala and Giulia, the event opened with guest speaker Alex Moore-Minott, Maroon Rights, Cultural Activist, Dancer and Healer based in Portland Jamaica. Alex opened and blessed the event, calling their ancestors and evoking spiritual kinship with water from the legacies of Maroon communities of Jamaica and histories of land displacement and colonialism.
🐟 The side event, one of a kind and rare gathering, was well attended by the ISA delegates, NGOs and drew in locals who shared with us their views and concerns of ways to be empowered through community resistance and support to one another in response to deep sea mining and for the future of ocean governance in the local context.
🌊 Over the course of next days we will bring you side event and exhibition highlights and what each of our speakers and artists in the exhibition offered for deep ocean governance.
🗯️ Swipe right to see Alex Moore-Minott’s powerful intervention and for thoughts or ideas, leave comments below ⬇️
📷 1/2 Andreas Carvajal; 3 Alex Moore-Minott
#event #deepseamining #ocean #community #gathering #indigenous #marooneights
