MUR 024 | CARLA TAPPARO || THE UNITY IS SUBMARINE
"The unity is submarine,
breathing air, our problem is how to study the fragments/whole."
-Kamau Braithwaite
The residency is an ongoing project by Carla (@osm.ia), named after Barbadian poet and theorist Kamau Brathwaite. It unfolds across three entangled axes—maritime knots, time, and the ocean—where material practices of binding and circulation become ways of thinking about how space is organized and experienced. Rather than treating time as linear or cyclical, the project approaches it as something entangled with material contact, where knots function as both technique and diagram of relation.
In Ishigaki, the work takes shape through installations assembled from discarded maritime ropes and fishing nets collected along the shoreline, combined with ropes made from locally sourced natural materials. Over the course of the two-week residency, these washed-up materials were gathered and reworked into a sculptural mermaid tail, designed not as a static object but as a temporary body for the sea. The tail was later returned to the ocean through a swimming performance, where it re-entered the currents from which its materials originated.
Alongside this material process, the project traces knot-based knowledge systems such as Warazan, a knotted straw method of recording used during the Ryūkyū Kingdom, reading it in relation to other fiber-based systems like the Andean khipu. These historical forms are placed in dialogue with contemporary infrastructures of the ocean, including submarine communication cables around the island and the site of Denshinya, a former relay station for underwater cables damaged during the US–Japan war, where transmission, rupture, and material memory intersect.
Carla Tapparo is an Argentine artist based in Italy working across island ecologies, maritime infrastructures, and material practices of relation. Her work explores knots, ropes, and oceanic systems as forms of knowledge linking embodied gesture to environmental and technological networks.
Alongside her artistic practice, she is involved in migrant rescue operations in the Mediterranean, engaging directly with maritime routes as spaces of movement and risk. Through installations, fieldwork, and performance, she develops site-responsive works that move between sculpture, ecology, and oceanic field practices.