Looking back is going forward: the journey of Underwater Haiku

Hello again blog readers, this is Daphne. Since April 2020, I have been working and creating along with colleagues and people from around the world on the Underwater Haiku (UWH) project, a collaborative initiative merging poetry, visual arts, and science. If you’d like to read more about UWH project, here‘s a post I wrote about creating the Underwater Realm. Today, I’d like to share about a very inspiring conference and the talk I presented about UWH as well as an invitation to our project’s final exhibition in Swansea.

The conference was organised by the University of Bangor and called: Small Scale Solutions: Re-Inventing the Live Event. During the conference, I was given the opportunity to present the different smaller projects we created under the UWH umbrella (Exquisite Corpse, Underwater Words I & II, Collaborative Competition) and to also talk about how these smaller projects from the past two years are being combined to create our Lab’s new community exhibit, Join Us Underwater.

Preparing for the conference was also an opportunity for us to reflect and talk about how the UWH project, and the methods used, shifted depending on the COVID-19 regulations. You can find my talk as well as others from the conference, here.

As we approach the end of our project and COVID-19 regulations are easing, we chose an in-person community exhibition that will be the last piece of this 2-year project and is open to everyone. Starting this week, and for all of April and May 2022, the Join Us Underwater is open to the public in Oriel Science, Swansea. Join Us Underwater is an interactive exhibition addressed to all. The exhibit draws on the existing materials of the UWH project and aims to provide a space for people to attune to underwater environments with creative activities. Visitors are also invited to learn more about the UWH project and to contribute to it with their words, doodles, drawings, and any other written reflections, prompted by the exhibition. By bringing together all the new contributions we intend to create a collective artwork that will be showcased in Oriel Science in September 2022.

You can find the Oriel Science building at 21-22 Castle Street, SA1 5AE, Swansea, UK.

For more information regarding opening days and hours, please refer to the image above or contact us on Twitter: @FIRELabTweets & @OrielScience.

See you there!