OCEANBODIES is a community-based practice and embodied process which began in 2020. The project has had several series of collaborative research in Philadelphia, PA. In 2025, OCEANBODIES participated in the Indy Convergence Artist Residency and is moving on to become a full-length movement-based multi-media performance and social practice in 2026 in Indianapolis, IN.

The piece brings these streams of inquiry together: The ocean and the body as evolutionary sites; the ocean and the body as sites of ancestral grief, and the ocean and our bodies as the sites of climate catastrophe.

Evolutionary sites

Humans are infinitely evolutionary beings. Our bodies are a part of the great unfolding of first life in the ocean 4 billion years ago to the human form we now inhabit today. We hold the records of multiple attempts, pathways, failures, and re-emergence of evolutionary processes within our own cells. This connection means we are always already a part of nature.

Ancestral grief

Much current research points to how our bodies hold and transfer experiences through cellular memory. Our bodies, then, are the archive of both the grief and the resilience tied to the experiences of our own ancestors.

Climate catastrophes

Our bodies are also the living record of contact and process of environmental circumstance. Along with the earth itself, our bodies are vessels that carry toxins and the material remnants of human “progress” and consumption. The alternations in soil, air and water also alter our blood, bones, nerves and organs. Our bodies are where the climate catastrophe meets its pinnacle and … the potentials of resolving crisis. 

OCEANBODIES is a space and a practice of opening perceptual access points to this infinite memory, orienting to the ocean, and trusting the information that comes through. With a collective of artists, we follow an un-bound language of structured time, where we deep dive into this memory together, and re-surface with our own findings of image, impulse, sensitivity, story/myth, emotions, and memory-flashes.  As a queer-ecology approach to research, I hope to establish a nurturing space for artists to encounter embodied process of this nature and form a sustainable support network within the process itself. The material for the performative piece evolves and is crafted from this collective place of autonomy and personal discovery.

email me at jannameiring@gmail.com with your interests. I’ll be looking for artists, donations and volunteers along the way.