Toxic Blooms is an artist talk centred on the project Ciguatera, an artistic investigation that takes intoxication caused by marine microalgae as a point of departure to explore relationships between ecology, the body, and oceanic imagination. Informed by fieldwork conducted in the Selvagens Islands in the North Atlantic, the project approaches ciguatera as a phenomenon that exceeds toxicology, revealing invisible networks linking microscopic organisms, climate change, and maritime histories. Within this framework, ciguatera also becomes a way of thinking about processes of epistemic contamination, where science, myth, and colonial memory intertwine to produce unstable perceptual states. Through film, sound, and sculpture, the installation Ciguatera proposes an immersive environment that invites audiences to imagine the ocean as a living, unstable space and a generator of narratives.

During this talk, the artist invites audiences to engage with this research and reflect on how toxic algal blooms can be understood simultaneously as ecological events and poetic devices that transform perception and challenge boundaries between human and more-than-human worlds. Toxic Blooms thus opens a space for reflection on contamination, interdependence, and oceanic imagination, exploring how microscopic phenomena can trigger embodied experiences and narratives that reconfigure the ways we listen to, inhabit, and imagine the sea.

Art + Tech x Cosmos =
The programme brings together artists, creative technologists, curators, writers, and thinkers with contributions extending across several thematic constellations: from spiritual and the mythic, socio-technological infrastructures and (de)colonial logics, to speculative futures. Through these contributions, the programme explores the potential to reshape how we think about human and nonhuman creativity, how we experience the convergence of art and technology, and how their imaginative possibilities can inspire new cultural practices and worlds. Curated by Joasia Krysa, Nuno Crespo, Daniel Ribas and José Alberto Gomes.