Seascape Epistemology and the Venetian Cocoon

<p>Every living being is an experiment made out of the flesh of the planet. In order to navigate it, the stars have to become a part of you. This episode of Magical Fresh & Salty Conversations features two discussions that touch upon the interests of the STARTS residents: Sonia Levy is joined by scholar, writer, and surfer Karin Amimoto Ingersoll, while her collaborator Meredith Root-Bernstein talks to philosopher Emanuele Coccia. Together, our guests look at the possibiliy of knowledge otherwise emerging from our interactions with watery spaces. How can immersed perspectives generate epistemologies that challenge imperial structures? How can thinking at the interplay of surface and subsurface processes help us understand both human and more-than-human agency in a changing world?</p> <p><strong>Part I: Sonia Levy with Karin Amimoto Ingersoll</strong></p> <p>A Kanaka master navigator enacts his oceanic literacy daily by embodying about 3,000 environmental pieces of information and making about 200 decisions based on the corporeally collected data.</p> <p>In her conversation with the artist Sonia Levy, Karin Amimoto Ingersoll, a Kanaka Maoli political scientist, writer, and surfer based in Honolulu, discusses her notion of “seascape epistemology”. How can embodied literacies like navigation (<em>ho’okele</em>) and fishing (<em>lawai’a</em>) offer cultural affirmations that open up alternatives to the neocolonial systems that continue to subjugate Hawai’ian identity? In their residency project, Sonia Levy and her collaborators think from within the depths of a very different space: the Venetian Lagoon. How can Ingersoll’s approach informs Levy’s submerged perspectives, initiating life-affirming passageways of knowing and being?</p> <p><strong>Part II: Meredith Root-Bernstein with Emanuele Coccia</strong></p> <p>In this conversation, the lagoon is a cocoon: a place of transformation where every single living being reciprocally transforms and is transformed by its environment. The interdisciplinary conservation scientist Meredith Root-Bernstein talks to the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, departing from his works <em>Metamorphosis</em> and <em>The Life of Plants</em>. Examining various approaches to agency and image-making, the residency project was interested in wetland flora as agentive beings instead of passive tools in lagoon restoration projects, echoing biological and ecological concepts such as developmental plasticity and ecosystem engineering. Our guests delve into this interest in moving beyond questions of observation, or gaze, toward a situated and embodied understanding of life on Earth.</p>