SESSION: BLUE Aesthetics: Art and Aquatic Life

In an era of ecological crisis, multispecies entanglements, and heightened awareness of planetary interdependencies, we invite critical inquiries at the intersection of art history, artistic practices, blue humanities and animal studies. We seek to create a forum for reflecting on how artistic engagement with aquatic animals shapes aesthetic discourse. Thus, we encourage contributions that examine the role of visual art, film, and music in articulating fluid ecologies and relational ontologies within oceanic and aquatic contexts. Of particular interest are submissions that challenge disciplinary boundaries and propose new conceptual frameworks for thinking across water, more-than-human life, and the arts.

Topics may include analyses of the representation of aquatic animals in art and aesthetics, as well as investigations into how art engages with climate change and animal ethics in relation to water. We welcome decolonial, Indigenous, and ecocritical explorations on marine life, alongside inquiries into water as an aesthetic and epistemological medium through which interspecies relations are imagined and mediated. Contributions might also consider aesthetic dimensions of marine archives, ocean memory, and what has been termed “Blue Extinction”. Situating these themes within art-historical and aesthetic inquiry, the session aims to open new avenues for understanding how the arts not only reflect but also actively shape our relations with watery worlds and their more-than-human inhabitants.

Session Convenor:

Jessica Ullrich, University of Fine Arts Münster

Martin Ullrich, Nuremberg University of Music

Tabea Sabrina Weber, University Bielefeld

Speakers:

Dorothee Fischer-Kuklau, Trier University

The Afterlives of Aquatic Animals: Bodies, Images, and Knowledge in Enlightenment Natural History

During the eighteenth century, aquatic animals, particularly fish that were considered ‘exotic’, became important subjects for collection, classification, and display within the growing field of natural history. This study examines how taxidermied specimens, natural history illustrations, and accompanying texts shaped knowledge of fishes during this period. Through close visual and material analysis, I demonstrate how these diverse media interacted to represent aquatic life before the advent of the aquarium. My focus is on exemplary cases from the collections of the Linck family, apothecaries from Leipzig, and Marcus Elieser Bloch, a Berlin physician who contributed relevant publications in the field of ichthyology. Both collected far from the sea.

The innovative comparison of preserved specimens and natural history illustrations reveals different epistemological approaches. While images often prioritised clarity and abstraction, the physical remains of fish confronted naturalists with the challenges of decay, transformation, and aesthetic mediation. Together, these different modes of representation demonstrate attempts to comprehend aquatic life far from the sea, shaping both aesthetic discourse and eighteenth-century knowledge of fish.

This research centres on the historical animal body itself, exploring its agency within processes of killing, preservation, collection, and visualisation. The contradictions between image and specimen, as well as the material fragility of preserved dead bodies, expose the limitations of the Enlightenment ambition to fix and possess nature. Ultimately, this study shows that knowledge of aquatic life was produced by comparing different media and its frictions, revealing knowledge of aquatic animals to be a fluid and evolving construct itself.

Florian Endres, Princeton University

Fluid Failures: Marey’s Chronophotography, Naples’ Sea-Lab, and the Art of Broken Ecologies

This paper examines how the marine environment of Naples became a site for reimagining the relationship between art, technology, and ecology. Étienne-Jules Marey’s late nineteenth-century photo-experiments at the Stazione Zoologica di Napoli captured the movements of marine life amid the turbulence of the Gulf, producing images that blur the boundaries between organism, instrument, and milieu. His chronophotographic traces—blurred, unstable, and often “failed”—offer a visual register of environmental contingency and the limits of control at the heart of imperial science.

Two decades later, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer each spent time in Naples, encountering firsthand the city’s porous architectures, maritime infrastructures, and improvisatory forms of life. Reading these experiences through Sohn-Rethel’s Ideal of the Broken, Benjamin’s theory of allegory, and Kracauer’s reflections on photography, I argue that failure and malfunction functioned as ecological and epistemological modes: ways of thinking through the fluid entanglement of human and nonhuman forces.

By situating these figures’ Neapolitan encounters within the watery circuits of empire and scientific visualization, the paper proposes a media-ecological history of art in which fluidity, decay, and improvisation become central to modernity’s visual regimes. The “broken image” thus emerges as an art-historical figure for the instability of both marine and imperial worlds—where seeing, knowing, and failing are inextricably intertwined.

Joeri Verbesselt, University of Leuven

Can I Let Fishes Speak in My Film?

The opening scene of my film Only with hunters do we have wild animals (34’, 2024), recorded underwater around the Pacific island of Pongso no Tao, shows a moment when the camera, left on the seabed, is almost ceremoniously encircled by fish, before dispersing. This singular event, afterwards interpreted by the local Tao fisherman and novelist Syaman Rapongan as the fishes’ assessment of whether the device was a speargun, became a point of departure for imagining a cinematic voice for fishes through subtitles that translate an imagined underwater dialogue on the ontology of the camera, the white human behind it, and reflections on larger human-fish relations.

I reflect on the intentions behind these fishy subtitles as an experiment in critical anthropomorphism, seeking accountable ways of giving voice to non-human beings. Drawing on theories of non-human agency and sovereignty, I explore how this practice intersects with debates in visual anthropology concerning who speaks for, about, and with Others, and Barbary Myerhoff’s suggestion therein for a third voice—a fusion of the maker’s and the subject’s voices, intertwined so that it becomes impossible to tell which one leads the narrative.

In this exercise in interspecies storytelling, I experiment with a fictioning that acknowledges ethical mediation, foregrounds reciprocity, and reimagines the sea and fishes not as scenery but as living interlocutors.

Online video-link: https://youtu.be/JbszDSR5TSw

Ania Mokrzycka, Loughborough University London

Imagining Softness: apparitions from the depths

In art history and visual culture, corals have been imagined through radiant, stony forms that have come to shape Western consciousness – casting them as builders of worlds and as a resource bound to colonial and imperial ambitions. Expanding on the recent publication by Melody Jue, Coralations, which focuses on soft corals as a counter-figure to these dominant images, this paper explores how fleshy corals destabilise ways of knowing and making defined by distance, fixity, separation, and temporal linearity.

Seldom studied in scientific research and largely overlooked within the arts and humanities, soft corals resist extraction and permanence; inseparable from water, they embody an aesthetics and an onto-epistemology of dissolution and flow. The study combines visual-cultural analysis – tracing how images of coral have mediated colonial, ecological and aesthetic imaginaries – with agential realism, postcolonial and new materialist theories to challenge seemingly stable categories of representation, causality and sovereignty. Emphasing the embodied quality, or, as defined by Bridget Crone, turbidity of seawater, it examines how thinking-feeling with soft corals can cultivate new forms of attunement to the often-imperceptible entanglements within more-than-human lifeworlds across different scales and temporalities. By foregrounding softness as both a material condition and a conceptual mode, this study reorients art-historical inquiry toward the mutable, fluid, and interdependent, offering an alternative to enduring visual and epistemic frameworks shaped by colonial, extractive, and solidifying impulses.

Luca Seguenza, Accademia di Belle Arti Palermo

Oozing Slime. Viscous Aesthetics in Performance Art

This paper investigates how performance art engages with aquatic life and viscous matter to imagine new aesthetic and contaminated relations between species. Responding to current climate crises and the growing awareness of planetary interdependencies, it situates slime – following Wedlich’s Slime (2023) – as both a biological phenomenon and a conceptual tool for rethinking the notion of contamination in performance art.

The question guiding this paper is: how can artistic engagements with slime and watery substances challenge anthropocentric boundaries to reimagine interspecies coexistence within the blue humanities?

Drawing on feminist new materialism and hydrofeminism, the aim is to read artistic practices diffractively through theoretical frameworks. Works by performers such as Sonja Bäumel, Quimera Rosa, and Benedetta Panisson exemplify how art mobilises slime, secretion, and other aqueous substances to challenge anthropocentric paradigms and represent aquatic creatures not as symbols of purity but as agents of entanglement. These practices reveal how marine critters and their viscous environments become models for queerness and porousness.

Building on Oppermann’s view of water as a “fluid site of narrativity”, the paper proposes viscous aesthetics as a mode of art historical inquiry within the blue humanities – one that attends to the sensory, affective, and more-than-human dimensions of artistic creation. By thinking-with-water and slime, rather than about them, contemporary art does not merely represent ecological entanglements; it performs them, making visible the fluid, shared conditions of becoming-with that sustain and dissolve us alike.