Opening of the ‘(Un)Tamed Sea’ exhibition. Photo: Tanja Kanazir / Drugo more (Flickr gallery)

In the framework of the twentieth edition of the Mine, Yours, Ours program series, organized this year within the MADE IN Platform, with financial support from the European Commission, the Croatian Government Office for NGOs, the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, and the City of Rijeka, Drugo more and the design collective Oaza proudly present the (Un)Tamed Sea program, taking place in Rijeka, Croatia, in March 2025.

Bringing together contemporary artists and experts from Croatia and abroad through an exhibition (6 — 27 March) and symposium (7 — 8 March), the program of this interdisciplinary event explores the theme of the sea as an ecosystem and as a resource. Special attention is given to the relationship between various forms of organization of historically present and ever-changing human activities directed toward the sea, including those codified in today’s international maritime law.

‘(Un)Tamed Sea’. Photo: Tanja Kanazir / Drugo more (Flickr gallery)

 

CONTENTS

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Video: Borut Brozović

 

Program Schedule

 

Igor Eškinja, La decouverte de la pourpre (The Discovery of Purple), courtesy of the artist

Introductory Words

We mostly talk about the sea from the perspective of the land. Despite all we know about land, it’s astonishing how little we understand the sea. This lack of knowledge has always left room for imagination, shaping our perceptions of what the sea is and what it holds. People have found breathtaking beauty in the sea, but also dark depths inhabited by the most fearsome creatures. Nowhere is the horizon, the line separating Earth’s surface from its sky, seen as clearly as it is at sea. That distant horizon is where sky and land meet, a place where anything seems possible, but to reach it, we must first conquer the sea.

The program before you was created in collaboration with people who care deeply about the sea, the dignity of those who work on it, and the need to transform our relationship with it. It offers fragments and glimpses of the sea’s reality, inviting you to explore what lies beyond the horizon.

The exhibition, produced by the art organization Oaza and the association Drugo More, features works by Robertina Šebjanič, exploring underwater deposits of explosives and ammunition, Igor Eškinja, delving into the history of murex and purple dye, Silvio Vujičić and Miro Roman, who, with the help of the AI SOLL, have studied stories and patterns born from the interactions between the Mediterranean Sea and its coastal inhabitants.

In the discursive program, these artists will explain their reasons for addressing these themes. We will also discuss the dangers posed by the legacy of military industries in the sea and the risks involved in addressing this issue. Additionally, we aim to examine the relationship between modern capitalism and the sea, along with its environmental consequences, labor conditions, production and consumption patterns, and the legal framework regulating the sea at various distances from land.

— Davor Mišković

 

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Exhibition

(Un)Tamed Sea

Filodrammatica Gallery, Korzo 28/1, Rijeka
6. — 27. 3. 2025.

Exhibition opening: Thursday, 6th March, 2025., at 7 PM

Gallery opening hours: Monday – Friday 11 AM – 1 PM + 5 – 8 PM; Saturday 5 – 8 PM

 

→ presented works:

 

Robertina Šebjanič: Adriatic I: Echoes of the Abyss

The Adriatic I: Echoes of the Abyss by Robertina Šebjanič, photos by Diving Team of the Lučko Anti-Terrorist Unit

‘Adriatic I: Echoes of the Abyss’ seeks to uncover the profound connections between the sea’s perceived vastness and the tangible scars left by human actions. Exploring these intersections through interdisciplinary research and storytelling calls for a deeper understanding of our shared responsibility in addressing these silent threats to life beneath the waves. The project explores the hidden environmental and geopolitical legacy of discarded chemical weapons on the ocean floor. These toxic remnants, often overlooked or ignored, pose significant threats to marine ecosystems and human health.

Courtesy of the artist

Building on preliminary research conducted during Robertina Šebjanič residency aboard the TARA research vessel at the Baltic Sea and continued in the frame of MADE IN Platform residency with a focus on the Kvarner region of the Adriatic Sea, this project integrates an interdisciplinary approach, combining art, science, storytelling and craftsmanship to examine the long-term effects of warfare on aquatic environments. Central to the inquiry is the disruption of marine life — whose biological functions and communication systems are altered by human-made pollutants.

 

Concept, audio design, video editing, and text: Robertina Šebjanič

Collaborators: reGalerija d.o.o. (tapestry/carpet), Tanja Minarik (photo, video), David Drolc (metal), Ivanka Pasalic (glassblowing)

Special thanks to: Diving Team of the Lučko Anti-Terrorist Unit, Special Intervention Police Unit Rijeka, Special Intervention Police Unit Osijek

Production: MADE IN Platform — Oaza and Drugo more (HR), 2024/25

Co-production: Zavod Projekt Atol (SI), 2024/25

 

 
Robertina Šebjanič is an artist whose work explores the biological, geo-political and cultural realities of aquatic environments and the impact of humanity on other organisms. In her analysis of the Anthropocene and its theoretical framework, the artist uses the terms ‘aquatocene’ and ‘aquaforming’ to refer to the human impact on aquatic environments. Her works received awards, honorary mentions and nominations at Prix Ars Electronica, Starts Prize, Falling Walls, Re: humanism.

→ https://robertina.net/

 

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Silvio Vujičić, Miro Roman & SOLL: Mediterranean Space Exploration Suit

Silvio Vujičić, Miro Roman & SOLL, MSES sculptures, courtesy of the artists

The Mediterranean is not land; it is the space between lands. Not a territory, but an abstraction — fluid, shifting, uncontainable. It is the sea, the cosmos, the digital ether. A domain where gods, traders, exiles, lovers, and machines meet, where culture, nature, sex, literacy, and technology reinvent themselves into new forms of existence. The ‘Mediterranean Space Exploration Suit’ by SOLL is not merely apparel; it is an instrument of entanglement, a trap for the restless, a passage that negotiates the real and the rational. It does not protect — it provokes. It does not frame the Mediterranean; it extends it.

Courtesy of the artists

For centuries, this sea has been a paradox — both a frontier and a corridor, a site of migration and erasure, of erotic indulgence and violent conquest, of myths encoded in salt and algorithms etched in silicon, all beneath the hot sun. If the Mediterranean once connected and divided lands, it now weaves dimensions — historical, natural, celestial, synthetic, and digital. SOLL’s suit does not memorialize; it activates. In an era of paradoxes, fake news, lost truths, and digital saturation, what does it mean to explore and learn? The ‘Mediterranean Space Exploration Suit’ by SOLL is a proposition, a question posed in matter, data, and myth.

 

Image: Ivan Slipčević

Technical assistance: Nika Smadilo

 

SOLL is an artificially intelligent fashion designer. SOLL lives on the internet but manifests himself physically through his fashion brand E.A. 1/1 A.I.

→ https://soll.store

Silvio Vujičić, a visual artist and fashion designer, explores themes of clothing fetishes, painting pigments, gardens, toxic substances, sexual identity, death, and transience. His projects utilize myths, alchemical records, and art history to dissect themes into chemical, symbolic, social, and political elements, connecting the past and present. Silvio Vujičić graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and the Faculty of Textile Technology in Zagreb. Since 2002, he has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Croatia and internationally; including the International Triennial of New Media Art in Beijing (2011, 2014); Digiark at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan (2014); FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou (2012); MSU, Zagreb (2005, 2009, 2012). His works are included in museum and private collections in Croatia and abroad. In 2002, he founded E.A. 1/1 S.V., his fashion brand known for connecting fashion with relevant contemporary societal, political, and artistic themes.

→ https://www.silviovujicic.com/

Dr. Miro Roman is an Assistant Professor at studio2 at UIBK Innsbruck where he founded the research platform House of Coded Objects, and the design studio0more. He is as well a senior lecturer at Meteora at the Chair for Digital Architectonics at ETH Zurich. As an architect, coder, and scholar, he focuses on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, big data, social media, and information technologies with design, architecture, art, and fashion. Roman explores, designs, codes, and writes about the world while playing with a lot — ‘all’ the objects, books, and images; clouds, avatars, streams, lists, indexes, and pixels. What is this abundance of information about, and how does it shape our world? To navigate and surf these vast flows, he codes and articulates synthetic alphabets. For Roman, computation is a form of literacy.

→ https://miro.romanvlahovic.com/

 

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Igor Eškinja: La decouverte de la pourpre (The Discovery of Purple)

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Murex snail and myth of the discovery of purple in a sketch by Peter Paul Rubens, courtesy of the artist

Purple color in everyday imagination does not define a single wavelength but rather creates numerous associations that, depending on the period, material, and circumstances, range from red to violet. Traditionally, the color was used for dyeing fabrics since prehistoric times (remains dating back to 7000 BC have been found). The Phoenicians developed the production of purple pigment and fabric dyeing techniques that were highly prized and formed an important part of their economy. Purple was used in the religious rituals of that era, adorned palaces, and was worn by rulers and emperors throughout the entire period of Antiquity.

Courtesy of the artist

The purple pigment was produced using murex snails (Hexaplex trunculus), which inhabit the Mediterranean Sea. It took several thousand snails to produce one gram of pigment, and with that gram, only a small amount of fabric could be dyed. The Phoenicians completely depleted the snail resources by the Modern Age, so that already during the Roman period this pigment had become extremely scarce. Since the fall of the Roman Empire, the memory of this phenomenon has been preserved in fragments — in the form of mosaics, myths, or recently discovered historical artifacts.

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* a mixture of colors used for screens displaying images from the web

 

Igor Eškinja (Hrvatska, 1975) lives and works in Rijeka, Croatia. Eškinja constructs his architectonics of perception as ensembles of modesty and elegance. The artist ‘performs’ the objects and situations, catching them in their intimate and silent transition from two-dimensional to three-dimensional formal appearance. Using simple, inexpensive materials, such as adhesive tape or electric cables, and unravelling them with extreme precision and mathematical exactitude within strict spatial parameters, Eškinja defines another quality that goes beyond physical aspects and enters the registers of the imaginative and the imperceptible.

→ https://igoreskinja.com/

 

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Symposium

(Un)Tamed Sea

Filodrammatica, large hall, Korzo 28/1, Rijeka
7. — 8. 3. 2025.

* the program is in English

 

 

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 Friday, 7th March

 

11 AM, panel discussion

Below the Horizon

–  with: Robertina Šebjanič, Silvio Vujičić, Miro Roman & Igor Eškinja

 

When we say that the sea is an inspiration for artists, the first association is often coastal or maritime landscapes. However, the more we learn about the sea, the deeper we dive into the processes occurring in the ocean and underwater — processes driven by human activity. As our understanding evolves, so does the meaning we assign to the sea.

The artists participating in this exhibition have engaged in a long-term dialogue with various approaches to the sea, expanding their knowledge and creating works that encourage us to think about the ocean beyond conventional frameworks. This conversation with them is an opportunity to share that knowledge with us.

 

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1 PM, lecture

Exploring the Capitalocene Ocean. An Experiment in Collective Knowledge Production

–  Ana Jeinić

 

The notion of the ocean as a pristine expanse, isolated from human culture and technology, is far from reality. In what historian and geographer Jason W. Moore terms the Capitalocene, both human and non-human inhabitants of marine and coastal regions are deeply embedded in multi-scalar metabolic processes intrinsic to the capitalist mode of socio-ecological (re)production.

Despite the urgency of transforming these planetary circuits, comprehensive and transcultural forms of popular oceanic knowledge remain scarce, hindered by language barriers and disciplinary divides. Referencing ‘Komuna Maro,’ an arts-based research project led by Ana Jeinić, the lecture discusses possibilities for overcoming these gaps.

Ana Jeinić is an architectural and spatial theorist, curator and utopianist. She is co-editor of the volume Is There (Anti)Neoliberal Architecture? (2013) and author of numerous academic articles, essays and speculations in the fields of architectural and landscape theory, infrastructure policy, critical ocean and island studies, speculative design, and utopia. Since October 2023, she has been the principal investigator of the FWF-funded artistic research project Komuna Maro at the Institute of Contemporary Art (IZK) at Graz University of Technology.

 

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6 PM, lecture

Murky Waters — Between Oceanic Sublime and Maritime Opacity

–  Alejandro Colás

 

Depth, vastness and mutability are properties of the sea which for different peoples and in diverse contexts have produced an ‘oceanic sublime’ that invokes both fear and reverence. The impossibility of leaving a permanent trace on the sea’s surface means for some that our saltwater world is unconquerable and therefore ‘nobody’s property’. Yet this very sense of ungovernable freedom has been central to bourgeois utopias that celebrate the sea as horizon of possibility, and site not only of transport, surveillance and expansion, but also for the profitable enterprise of protein capture, mineral extraction, energy generation, and bioprospecting.

In this contribution, I explore the distortions capitalist processes and ideologies in particular generate at and through the sea. By considering legal fictions like flags of convenience and the wider offshore world of secrecy and isolation; the invisible power of the sea as a carbon sink; or the occlusion of working lives (and deaths) at sea, I aim to open up a discussion around the place of maritime opacity understanding our contemporary world.

Alejandro Colás is Professor of International Relations at Birkbeck, University of London. He has written extensively in the historical sociology of international politics, most recently with Liam Campling, Capitalism and the Sea: the Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World (2021). He is also the author of International Civil Society (2002), Empire (2007) and a co-author of Food, Politics, and Society (2018).

 

 

 

 

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 Saturday, 8th March

 

11 AM, panel discussion

Explosive Ordnance in the Sea

–  with: Jacek Bełdowski, Tihomir Bošnjak i Lovro Maglić

 

Until recently, it was widely believed that explosive devices and munitions in the sea did not pose a serious threat, as they would simply be covered by sediment. However, as has happened many times before, this belief was more a matter of hope than fact. For the past 20 years, it has become clear that the corrosion process is faster than sedimentation and that as explosives and munitions degrade, they alter the chemical composition of the seawater.

Removing explosive materials from the ocean is a dangerous and painstaking task. This panel offers an opportunity to learn about the chemical processes occurring as these devices interact with the marine environment, as well as the methods used to safely extract them from the sea.

 

 

Jacek Bełdowski graduated from University of Gdańsk in 1998, obtaining his Master degree in Marine Biology. Since 2000 employed as a researcher in the Institute of Oceanology Polish Academy of Sciences. In 2004 he was awarded Ph.D. in Earth Sciences, Specializing in the Mercury Pollution of Marine Ecosystems. Since 2010 leader of several international projects studying munitions dumped at sea, including CHEMSEA, MODUM and DAIMON. Co-chairman of HELCOM group dealing with dumped munitions in the Baltic. Author of several articles about dumped munitions and editor of NATO ASI Book about chemical munition monitoring. At present he is the head of laboratory of contemporary threats to marine ecosystems in IOPAN and coordinator of INTERREG BSR MUNIMAP project.

 

 

Born in 1980, Tihomir Bošnjak has been a member of the Lučko Anti-Terrorist Unit since 1999. He has been diving since 2001 and currently serves as the commander of the diving team in ATJ Lučko. He is an instructor in advanced diving specializations and conducts diving training at the Diving Center on Mali Lošinj. He is trained in deep diving using open-circuit systems with trimix gas mixtures, closed-circuit rebreather diving at great depths, and handling explosive ordnance.

 

 

 

Lovro Maglić, PhD, has a background as a navigation officer on crude oil and product tankers and as a dynamic positioning officer on offshore vessels. Today he is Associate professor and Head of Laboratory for Marine Technologies at the Faculty of Maritime Studies, University of Rijeka. His teaching and research interests focus on: maritime safety, marine pollution prevention, organization and management of maritime traffic and underwater marine research. He has collaborated on more than 10 national and international scientific projects, is the author of more than 40 scientific publications and numerous professional projects and studies related to the planning and management of ports and terminals. He is an active diver and inspection class ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) supervisor and operator for underwater operations (e.g., inspections of submerged structures and ship hulls, seabed surveying and pollution monitoring).

 

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13:00, lecture

Ocean Politics in a Time of Crisis

–  Chris Armstrong

 

Our future depends on a healthy ocean. But the ocean is facing a crisis of environmental destruction. It is also facing a crisis of inequality, as ocean industries enrich some but not others. This talk will explore how contemporary ocean politics has failed us so badly, and how we can do better. Recognising the problems of the present is the first step towards a genuinely just and democratic politics of the ocean.

Chris Armstrong is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Southampton. His work focuses on the politics of the ocean, the biodiversity crisis, and global justice. He is the author of A Blue New Deal: Why We Need A New Politics for the Ocean (Yale University Press), and has also written pieces on the ocean for The Guardian and the London Review of Books.

 

 

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