Tina Helen

FLOATONOMY

MIXED MEDIA INSTALLATION, 2020

In Floatonomy Frisk Flugt sets out to examine the ocean as a political field, a geographical arena full of conflict, entanglements and utopian potential. It brings together notions like seasteading, migration, ecology, governance of flows, and climate change. The sea has always been an unpredictable domain, full of both danger and adventure. Through time the sea has served as a thoroughfare, as a wild common, an escape for people fleeing oppression and war.

Today the seas are changing. Ocean currents are slowing down, sea levels are rising and new geopolitical struggles are forming at sea. This of course is posing a host of problems but also offers possibilities - possibilities for new (geo)political configurations beyond nation states, new ecologies, possibilities for setting out to sea experimenting with new floating life forms.

The exhibition Floatonomy - produced for Open Studio in Toronto - comprises a series of prints, photographic work and written notes that all deal with the relationship between ocean and shoreline - be it the circular one around the island, the vertical one between water level and shoreline, or the horizontal one formed by concrete embankments - and the dream of floating outside the lines drawn up by authorities.

Frisk Flugt is a militant research project exploring potential lines of flight as resistance and praxis of autonomization. It is an edited output of shared ideas and visual practices founded in the format of a zine. Rather than being a classic academic publication on critical themes, Frisk Flugt propose a more fluid and aesthetic approach to the space of critique, balancing the visual work with the written word, the published with the performed, the theoretical with praxis.