ART4SEA Melting Art, Creativity and Marine Sciences is starting!

Tuesday, 14 March 2023

ART4SEA project, supported by the European Education and Culture Agency through the Creative Europe program and coordinated by 3D Research, officially kicked off on March 1st. 


ART4SEA Melting Art, Creativity and Marine Sciences to foster Ocean Literacy in the Mediterranean area officially kicked off on March 1st.
The project is supported by the European Education and Culture Agency (EACEA) through the Creative Europe program and adopts an interdisciplinary and participatory approach. The project’s coordinator is 3D Research, and the other beneficiaries are IWorld (World Association for the Preservation and Enhancement of Humanity) and the Sebastiano Tusa Foundation in Palermo, the Greek company Atlantis Consulting, Divers Alert Network Europe Foundation in Malta, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Spain, and the municipality of Vlora in Albania.

The consortium, led by Fabio Bruno and Marco Cozza, aims at combining art, creativity, science, and technology to raise public awareness toward greater respect for the marine environment. Ocean health is an urgent issue, the focus of the UN's most recent actions. The decade 2021-2030 has been proclaimed the Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, and a few days ago, the UN, after nearly two decades of negotiations, reached a historic agreement on the High Seas Treaty for the protection of waters beyond national jurisdiction and the sustainable management of ocean resources.

ART4SEA will mix and match modes of co-production, mentoring, and in-person and distance training, striking an appropriate balance between the need to have physical interactions and the need to reduce travel that is costly in terms of carbon footprint.

Twenty-four international artists will be selected through an open call and trained on ocean conservation, sustainable practices in art and digital technologies. Three small islands in the Mediterranean, Ustica in Italy, Alonissos in Greece and Gozo in Malta, will then host a distributed residency program, where artists will be inspired by the beautiful natural environments, ancient maritime traditions and direct relationships with locals to create born-digital and material artworks.

The material artworks will be integrated into the seascapes, natural and architectural landscapes of the islands, thus creating an outdoor and underwater museum that could characterize Ustica, Alonissos and Gozo as beacons of ocean conservation, and will be shown to the public at three exhibitions enlivened by workshops and other participatory initiatives. In order to involve the largest number of people and maximize public awareness and engagement, a virtual exhibition – usable both on the web and in the metaverse – will also be produced. The virtual exhibition will host the born-digital and digitized material artworks and will be housed both on the three islands and in the Vision Multimedia Center in Vlora, Albania.

ART4SEA will conclude with a grand event in Ustica, during which the old part of the island will be enlivened by various performances staged with the participation of the local community. The multidisciplinary events will include theater, music, dance, visual arts, video mapping, and projections of the artworks produced throughout the residency program, thus virtually including Alonissos and Gozo in the event.


(ART4SEA Kickoff Meeting that took place on March 1st, in the De Cardona Room of the BCC Mediocrati Business Center in Rende, Cosenza, is pictured above)