Marea, or the ecological disaster as a cultural and political phenomenon

A mapping of the multifaceted volunteer movement that was mobilised after the Prestige oil spill, describing the ecological disaster as a political and social phenomenon.

In the words of curator Leire Vergara, from the conversation Complicidades = Konplizitateak = Complicities (2012):

Marea deals with the difficult task of having to represent a non-community. Marea was produced at a time when Toni Negri and Michael Hardt were projecting their own large theoretical shadow on cultural production, and their diffuse image of the multitude was represented in different social, political and cultural manifestations. And the main questions remain of how to understand the transformation of a collective in a society that, in my opinion, was at its own peak of transformation, concretely in 2001 with the fall of the World Trade Centre. The concept of Empire was immediately contested and still is today, and in a way Marea contextualises that particular moment, and those particular non-community manifestations. Of course, the question lies in what were the political actions to be undertaken by such a group.