Abstract

Blue spaces – oceans, seas, lakes, and rivers – are dying. Leisure in Blue Spaces involves negotiating and adjusting to how pollution is ecological. Pollution is not simply an outcome of leisure but formative of it. Pollution is not simply an object but an active agent. Blue space leisure involves thinking, feeling, adapting, and acting with the rhythms, flows, surges, throbbing, and aesthetics of pollution.
An international collection of photographers, activists, artists, filmmakers, scholars, and more interrogate contradictions, paradoxes, and tensions of ‘polluted leisure’. The example for this particular exhibition is surfing. Surfers are ‘canaries in the coalmine’ in this age of pollution.