Thus Waves Come in Pairs - Thinking with the Mediterraneans - A conversation between Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal

In 2021, Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal recorded an intimate conversation about the Mediterranean at their Parisian home: “There are many Mediterraneans: the geographical, the historical, the philosophical... the personal, the one we swim, and we have swum in. It‘s an experience to swim, it is something you can‘t explain to somebody who never swam. This feeling of being held up by this water.” The third cycle of TBA21–Academy’s curatorial fellowship program The Current, spanning from 2021–23 focused on the Mediterraneans in a program entitled Thus waves come in pairs after a line from Adnan’s poem “Sea and Fog”. It pointed to the necessity of thinking of, and thinking with, the Mediterraneans as plural – plural as their interconnected cultures, and bodies of sweet and salty water, and possibilities of narrating their current transformations.