Forms of Navigation: Cabotage. A collaboration between Bulegoa z/b and fluent

Forms of Navigation: Cabotage is a public collaborative programme between Bulegoa z/b and fluent and is part of Bertatik Bertara/Tan Cerca/So Close 2020, which is due to be staged between Bilbao and Santander, stopping at different points on the Cantabrian coast. The aim of the programme is to be a cross-border social and discursive platform from which to speculate on other forms of navigation for artistic communities.

Forms of Navigation: Cabotage explores the social economic and political values of a post-industrial, port landscape shaped by tourism. The sea, with its trading routes, ports and wharves, is one of the main settings and actors in the global economy, and yet in many ways is a slippery, ambiguous terrain. If it reaches the news it is as a setting for catastrophes, or the occasional strike. Historically, work and the sea have been paired in such a way that certain power relationships and terrestrial hierarchies are intensified and the demands of late neoliberalism paradoxically become more visible.

As a reaction to many of these issues and the discursive potential that can be articulated from these two territories, historically interwoven by the activity of ports, this programme on “littoral politics” brings together artists, filmmakers, curators, writers and environmental academics to explore the construction of a littoral affinity modelled by centuries of history, sedimentation and a common climate.