The Waves Come in Pairs

In 2021, Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal recorded an intimate conversation about the Mediterranean at their Parisian home: “There are many Mediterraneans: the geographical, the historical, the philosophical... the personal, the one we swim, and we have swum in. It's an experience to swim, it is something you can't explain to somebody who never swam. This feeling of being held up by this water.”

The third cycle of TBA21–Academy's curatorial fellowship program The Current (2021–23) focused on these multiple Mediterraneans, in a program entitled Thus waves come in pairs, after a line from Adnan's poem “Sea and Fog.” It pointed to the necessity of thinking of, and thinking with, the Mediterraneans as plural—through their interconnected cultures and the various possibilities for narrating their ongoing transformations. Taking the conversation between Adnan and Fattal as a point of departure and inspiration, this publication collects interdisciplinary reflections around/about the Mediterraneans through art, oceanic thinking, science, and activism, while recording fragments of the past two years of research, carried out through conversations, lectures, walks, trips, podcasts, and live performances.