Most of my projects that use underwater film, experimental photography, sound design, drawing, and video performance constitute a long-term and multi-situated process of mapping sites, events, and experiences of nonhuman agency against the “slow violence” (R. Nixon) of environmental degradation in marine ecosystems. Each image, video, or sound recording realized at a specific location (be it a site of aquaculture, a preservation zone, or a site of underwater public work) connects to the other images, videos, or sound recordings part of the collection in their common enactment of resistance. This connection does not aim at constituting a route, and even less a geographically coherent pattern that could help any forms of rationalized orientation. Rather made out of ubiquitous embodied of water (A. Neimanis) and multispecies alloy, this mapping aims at growing an ethics of care and preservation through aesthetics (W. Lee). For an appreciation of nonhuman beings beyond the Western scopes of their commodification and instrumentalization, and for a conception of marine ecology that is neither measurable, reproductible, nor profitable.
Julie Patarin-Jossec 