The Sea is History, as Derek Walcott teaches us with his condensed poetry. Sea is limitless. Sea is a Map. Sea routes re-memory the timeless bridges that link the past with the present and the future. 

The Mediterranean seabed hosts remains of human traces that cover more than 5000 years of European and World history. It is also home to huge amounts of marine debris, anthropogenic, manufactured, or processed solid material discarded, disposed of, or abandoned in the environment, being currently considered one hot spot of microplastics pollution in the world. 

Relating to the European cultural and natural maritime heritage can create a better understanding of European identities – among citizens and non-yet-citizens –, of common grounds of struggle and reciprocal and represent a common ground for environmental struggles. In the last decade, the Mediteranean Sea has been made into the deadliest border Europe ever had but we should keep in mind that in fact it is not a borderscape but a territory of multidirectional possibilities, a weave of narratives still to be listened to and of echoes getting louder. Yet it is also a space where underwater interspecies collaborations are happening and new communities are being created.

We invite artists, scientists, historians, activists, designers, coders, policymakers, and practitioners of other disciplines to submit proposals starting from the following questionings:

How does the sea function as a deep archive? How do time and space collapse into a continuum and a flowing of memories and histories across continents and eras? Can water imagery and sea as imagined space help imploding geographical and affective distance? How can we engage with liquid violence, hydropoetics of displacement, and ocean forensics? How can we read the dispersion of people and the construction of diasporas in Europe through water? Can we formulate new perspectives on marine ecologies, and the tangible effects of climate change and anthropogenic violence on the sea? What can we learn about our corporality from the sea, and its underwater cosmologies? How can we formulate new ways of fluidity and multiple being in the Mediterranean context?

Within the MAREBOX project, we encounter the Sea as a time capsule that connects the past with the present and we aspire to bring to light stories narrated by the Sea through cultural expression, innovation, technology, creativity and artistic works under the core theme: Underwater Culture.