Komuna Maro: Artistic Research as Collective Knowledge Production in a Capitalocene Seascape

Abstract

The notion of the ocean as a pristine expanse, untouched by human culture and technology, no longer reflects present 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 oceanic knowledge remain scarce, hindered by language barriers and disciplinary divides. Weaving through the story of Komuna Maro, an arts‐based research project focused on networks of marine communities, technologies, and infrastructures in the northern Adriatic, the article explores possibilities for overcoming these gaps by engaging with the following questions: How can we conceive of the ocean as a material lifeworld without overlooking the political and economic realities that interact with and leave traces in the depths of oceanic matter? What epistemological framework might establish a logical connection between the brutal exploitation of workers in maritime economies and the devastation of non‐human marine life, without resorting to a generalized critique of “Western modernity,” which offers limited analytical tools for understanding the maritime dimension of global capitalism? How can we generate and share genuinely popular, critical, transdisciplinary, and transcultural forms of knowledge that call for a (re)invention of an “emancipatory oceanic internationalism,” rather than a retreat into localized and fragmented vernacular knowledge systems? Finally, what is—or could be—the role of artistic research in addressing these questions?