Ocean and Space Pollution, Artistic Practices and Indigenous Knowledges.

Introduction

What is the role of contemporary Indigenous artists, and non-Indigenous artists engaging with Indigenous peoples' knowledges, in making ocean and space pollution visible? How are Indigenous knowledges, know-how, histories, and memories mobilised to address current environmental crises?

Project Overview

Strongly grounded in anthropology and the arts, OSPAPIK is both pluri- and interdisciplinary. It offers innovative approaches to pollution, Indigenous knowledges, and the arts through its systematic focus on materiality and on the relationship that people have with waste.

Objectives

It intends to develop novel, critical, and ethnographically-informed analyses of the socio-environmental life of waste by investigating how creative and artistic expressions allow:

1. The artists themselves
2. Scientists
3. Expedition project organisers
4. Audiences

to better understand how marine ecosystems and (outer) space are impacted by pollution. It will also interrogate whether the study of arts provides means to better understand the different professional sectors and actors involved in depolluting.

Analysis Focus

The whole project is designed to rigorously analyse conjointly:

1. The motifs and patterns used by Indigenous artists and non-Indigenous artists collaborating with Indigenous people.
2. The ways these artists use ocean and outer space waste and debris as artistic material.

Contextual Significance

It focuses on the ocean and space, where pollution can be invisible to the eyes, and which are spaces that are often deemed sacred according to Indigenous cosmogonies, but have been perceived, according to dominant Western modern conceptions, as uninhabited.

Comparative Study

The project aims to study comparatively affective, professional, sensorial, and historical relationships to marine, nuclear, and space debris and waste, through an analysis of Indigenous artistic practices and non-Indigenous practices engaging with Indigenous knowledges.