Aquarium of Curiosities - Review

The threat of rising sea levels is a deeply troubling issue that is woven into the fabric of the climate crisis. This issue is especially concerning for my generation and future generations which creates a profound interest within me.

I’ve always had a fascination with the natural world and its intricate wonders, which is amplified by the indigenous relations in my family heritage. This inspired my interest in the project directed by Isabel Hofmeyr and Charne Lavery called Aquarium of Curiosities.

This project is an experimental digital archive that showcases the “creative and critical work on the southern seas” that is part of the initiative, Oceanic Humanities for the Global South. This initiative focuses on addressing climate change and providing humanity studies in oceanic studies.

The Aquarium of Curiosities project holds collections of curiosities from graduate students and research associates. These collections range from informative articles such as “Endearing Portraits of South Korea's Elderly Female Freedivers,” “Haunting virtual floods submerge cities around the world,” and “Secrets of the deep: Senegal's slave shipwreck detective,” short films such as “Jonah” and Xhosa Music: “Found at Sea,” digital artwork, visual art, blog posts, youtube clips, performance art, other projects like "Sea change" and other websites.

This project generally focuses on the global south which encompasses regions that have historically been marginalised and economically disadvantaged. It also gives a focus on indigenous knowledge on oceanic collections. Each item in the archive touches on oceanic topics through the lens of ethnicity, race, gender, and indigeneity. Examples include the article of female free-divers in South Korea, South African art by digital artist Meghan Judge, and the youtube video called “Found at Sea” about heritage and preservation of indigenous life in South Africa.

Empowerment within this project

This project's representation of ethnicity, race, gender, and indigeneity allows for many opportunities of empowerment. Through the project's focus on mainly regions of the world that have been historically marginalized, it provides opportunities for voices and perspectives that may have gone underrepresented in society. This empowers communities in these regions by offering visibility to their narratives and contributions of the oceanic humanities. This is especially important as the global south regions are the most affected by climate change. The visibility of narratives and contributions also empowers these individuals to showcase their knowledge and experiences that has been generally deemed unimportant by huge corporations. For example the film Xhosa Music: Found at Sea provides powerful information about indigenous life in South Africa.

The project defines their process of curation as relatively free form with their only criteria being that the contribution is “related to the ocean (coastlines, submarine worlds, ports, maritime networks, ships, fish, and so on); to the global south (the poorer parts of the world, the third world, the developing world, but also the southern hemisphere more loosely defined); and also to the arts and humanities (literature, art, history, theatre, film, design, stories, or science that engages the imagination).” This empowers individuals to give curiosities and contributions that they find interesting as the criteria is pretty freeform. This allows many different perspectives which ultimately fosters a sense of ownership and agency amongst contributing members. The project also ensures that the perspectives from the global south come from those directly involved in the region, furthermore fostering empowerment to those contributing.

This project can also be considered empowering to the public as its online archive is accessible to everyone who has access to the internet. This allows for individuals to learn and experience all that has been contributed to the project, and the complexities of people's experiences and identities in the global south in the area of oceanic humanities.

Moreover, this project fosters empowerment for those who have contributed to the project, as it informs the general public of the climate crisis and allows for more conversations around climate change, and further ambitions and actions to combat the crisis.

What is being argued by this project ?

The Aquarium of Curiosities presents the importance for intersectionality within the area of oceanic humanities. With the intersectional approach of environmental issues, geopolitical contexts, and cultural expressions within the oceanic humanities in the global south, it provides and recognizes the importance of different and complex experiences and identities in the study of sea rise and climate change

The metaphor of shifting from the renaissance dry cabinet of curiosities to a wet aquarium of curiosities, reinterprets and reimagines the collection of cultural artefacts that emphasizes the fluidity of knowledge surrounding culturally oceanic issues. This is especially true with how the interface actually works.

Click Me

The floating view that showcases images of the contributions that have been collected are constantly moving generally every 3 to 4 seconds. This reinforces the idea of fluidity and dynamism associated with oceanic knowledge, that aligns with the project's broader thematic ideas of the constantly changing nature of oceanic cultures and identities.

Critiques of this project

Though this project looks at many diverse perspectives a lot of contributions seem to come from South Africa. To be more inclusive the project could seek contributions from a more extensive range of regions within the global south. Something that also could be implemented to create a more inclusive representation, is to ensure that the content within the project is available in multiple languages instead of just English so that it may be accessible to a broader audience.

The writing on the website could also be larger to create more accessibility. Even for me as a young student with good eyesight it was pretty hard to see the words associated with the artefacts.

Something that would also help with the representation of the mobilised data would be to create categories for each type of curiosity. While I was looking through the contributions here in the linear view, I found it difficult to establish what each curiosity was until I clicked the link and looked further. Providing more categories would help to alleviate the sense of disorganisation. These artefacts could be easily distinguished by themes, regions or even by format such as film or blog post.

Something I also found to be quite disappointing was that some of the artefacts I clicked on were dead links. Some regulatory scheduled clean up would fix this issue.

Overall

I thought that this website to be exceptionally informative, providing a delightful and enriching experience. It gave me a broader sense of oceanic knowledge from different marginalized perspectives, while also keeping the concerning themes of rising sea levels and climate change at the core of oceanic humanities. I think that the expansion of curiosities and contributions added to this website would make for a really enthralling experience.