Dry Ocean Collective (Multidisciplinary Project)

Dry Ocean Collective

A collective by artists from diverse interdisciplinary backgrounds, including Katja Aufleger, Aliou Diack, Ibaaku, Fabian Knecht, Jeewi Lee, Ana Lessing Menjibar, Agnes Stillger, Ibrahima Thiam, and Nathalie Vairac.

Dry Ocean, a transcultural collective of artists and researchers from Dakar and Berlin exploring ideas of relationality and plurality. At its core lies the idea of relating individual cultural imprints, hybrid experiences, and knowledge traditions through artistic practices. The resulting works are not conceived as singular positions but as expressions of mutual affect, a process of transformation that manifests in a collectively created aesthetic form. Dry Ocean perceives the world as relational, in constant flux, shaped by currents, metamorphoses, and encounters beyond dividing boundaries. The collaboration follows the principle of epistemological plurality (Boaventura dede Sousa Santos), integrating marginalized archives, cosmologies, myths, histories, and embodied practices of repair and healing. Through this, practices of learning and unlearning emerge, opening up new perspectives on cohabiting the Earth. In addition to workshops in Dakar (2022), Toubab Dialaw (2023), and Madrid (2024), Dry Ocean developed temporary installations and performances in Madrid (2024) and in 2023 for the garden of the Musée Théodore Monod/IFAN in Dakar as part of Partcours.

Thank you IFAN, Musée Théodore Monod (IFAN), Goethe Institute Senegal, Goethe Institute Madrid, and the Kemmler Foundation for their generous support.

To Sea is a ephemeral sound performance entitled To Sea and speaks to the audience from the accumulated sound archive of Dry Ocean. It merges sounds of waves and breath as the source of all life, in an organic wave of rhythmic dissonance.

With special thanks to Goethe Institut Madrid.

Musée Théodore Monod, IFAN 
02.-16.12.2023

In this second episode, entitled 'The Opening', Dry Ocean will for the first time present collectively conceived works in progress in public space.

After a period of introspection, L‘Ouverture marks the opening of Dry Ocean to the world. The multi-part presentation, consists of a sculptural installation, a banner and a performance in the museum‘s garden is a laboratory of experimentation in communal exhibition making and a visible translation of this process. It aims to explore the existence of the invisible in the visible and the persistence of the absence in space, land and material, documenting events and presences that we perceive only as traces.

The banner Klang des Salzes (Sound of salt) carries several layers of Dry Ocean‘s collective actions in the past. Black and white symbolise light and darkness as two sides of reality, representing the visible and the obscure. The remains of the salt testify to a collective baptism and to the textile‘s charge of meaning. Echoes of a shared poem can be seen in the poetic fragments, visible only at close range. Like a code, the character Arabic „ و “ (wa) is interspersed in bright white. It symbolises of protection in the back and forth between land and water. 

Mbaalu gént (the net of the dream) is a sculptural pavilion made of discarded fishing nets traded with fishermen in Dakar. It conveys the ambiguity between being trapped and being sheltered, between catching and losing dreams.

The ephemeral sound performance entitled To Sea activates both pieces and speaks to the audience from the accumulated sound archive of Dry Ocean. It merges sounds of waves and breath as the source of all life, in an organic wave of rhythmic dissonance.