What is the sea made of?

Of tears, the kind that heal.

– Luisa Robledo

In Tarifa, in the south of Spain, there is a place where the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean meet.
The first time I visited Tarifa, in December 2022, I was told that at the place where the waters meet, there is a moment where each sea is perceptibly different from the other.

Each sea with its own particular tonalities, densities and salinities.
It is a difference that, although noticeable, lasts a very short time.

The flow of the waters quickly coheres these particularities together; in an instant, the two water masses merge.
A coalition forms after the collision.

The image stuck in my mind and six months later, following an intuition, I revisited Tarifa.
All my life I have felt close to the waters of both oceans.

In Tarifa I was interested in offering a tribute to this particular space~time and it’s intertwined stories.

Guided by the question of how to honour a space~time of divergent coexistence, I invited Paz Ramos Reyes and Fernando José Harris Pedro Francisco, from Capoeira Cadiz, to co-create a tribute to the encounters of these waters, and its multiple stories of resistance and re-existance.

We became interested in opening a communication channel between bodies of water and human bodies as an experimental decoding and recoding of the collision and coalition of the waves; a kind of translation between corpoliteracies and aqualiteracies. We wove a dialogue of waves, words and movements: they responded with movements to an interview I formulated insitu.

Mediterranean, Atlantic, Collision, Coalition is a video essay that explores the meeting point of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean in Tarifa, Spain, and reflects on the specificities of each sea, their brief perceptible differences and the formation of a coalition after their collision. The video essay contemplates the poetics of this encounter and delves into the stories, both joyful and violent, that reside in its waters.

We are looking forward to delivering this tribute to the region where it was conceived and to that end we are planning a first public screening of it in 2024 in Cadiz, very close to the meeting of these waves. Date and place to be confirmed.

*Corpoliteracies is a term by Cameroonian curator Bonaventure Soh Benej Ndikung in which he describes the body as a platform and medium that produces, stores and disseminates knowledge.
**Aqualiteracies is a terminology I have been developing around the ability to think-feel with waters as hybrid data carriers in different temporalities in relation to different bodies, in their chemical and physical environments, in relation to public policies and to different belief systems and intergenerational affects that is woven around them. https://www.aqualiteracies.net/
***re-existence is a terminology that decolonial thinker Arturo Escobar describes as the conception of new worlds that render the previous ones obsolete.

VIDEO UPON REQUEST