This conversation focuses on reflection of the narrative of the ocean with a critical approach. The starting point arises around a long-term educational and participatory project involving the deaf community, Italian sign language, and science communication: Abecedarium. The Ocean in Sign Language.

The invention of great technologies has redefined the world, accelerated images, created boundaries, and established new systems. Among the great technological inventions that arise to describe the world besides photography is language. Language is a technological act that, by encoding itself, participates in the way we represent the world around us and becomes constitutive of our being.

In Giulia Bruno and Giuseppe Ielasi’s new video work, On The Other Ocean, the linguistic, visual, and gestural “sign” becomes a powerful tool and medium for knowing, looking with new eyes, collecting, fixing and creating a collective, visual, and performative narrative of the sea and its infinite relationships.

 

Valeria Bottalico