An invitation to disengage from the colonial logics of mapping, counting, and possession, and instead acknowledge our connection to those who refuse to be seen.
The One Dive is an encounter with absence, an absence charged with life but always slipping past the human gaze. The whales of the Mediterranean do not perform for us; they inhabit a world deeper than our vision, older than our trade routes. Yet in the Pelagos Sanctuary, where they should be protected, their absence speaks louder than their presence.
In a sea where 15% of global trade crosses less than 1% of the ocean surface, The One Dive takes the human gaze and fractures it. A vertical film, a ferry window, a shot that denies the horizon, forcing the viewer to look not outward but downward, into the water column where whales may exist, or where they may have already disappeared. Only through a monocle, a narrow keyhole of another way of knowing, can one glimpse the scars, archival images of wounded bodies, mapped by collisions, by speed, by our hunger for movement at any cost.
The installation is not about spectacle, it is about rejection. It questions the cartographic fantasies of human sight: the satellite gaze, the map that flattens, the sonar that commands, the census that demands proof of life.
One Dive plunges into the void, not as a lack, but as a challenge to our ways of knowing. It proposes an ethic of witnessing that requires no visibility. Whales do not ask to be found. They ask for space to exist. Can we create kinship with what does not surface for us?