Getting to know the Ocean through the Arts along with Denise Lira Ratinoff: Life

Denise Lira Ratinoff has been a Plastic Oceans Ambassador since 2019 and is working on a new project called AIR(E). In this first installment of a new blog series she shares with us how she experiences the ocean and marine life through her artwork and all the personal and technical challenges she has to overcome to capture the ocean and marine life as good as possible for her project. Visit her website HERE. 

Life

What is vocation? What is the learning that I wish to communicate? How does life progress while being in a state of consciousness? What is the reaction that I wish to project? How do I divide the day in order to feel alive and not live to not exist? The days never go to sleep and the nights are never silent and that is the constant lesson to which we have to adapt to feel that our body palpitates to the rhythm of what is simple. For example feeling the singing of the birds at dusk or the wind that passes at different speeds or the rain that dances in different directions or the thunder that screams with its presence … the variables of nature are so vast that we have to understand that we are also nature and we are part of it, so we must keep our minds constructive and not accept destructive minds.

For more than two decades I have been reflecting about the importance of time, climate change as a latent factor and the body as transport of the extreme experience to create consciousness. I mention the questions in the beginning because today, in the XXI Century as a whole planet, we must urgently educate, communicate and stop destruction, stop consumerism and human confusion that is destroying what life gives us, the Ocean.

My call in life is to explore the Ocean, and from Art transmit the indescribable beauty in words of each creature that inhabits the oceans. To present the richness of the marine flora that protects us from any number of catastrophes and that is now being exterminated without knowing its existence and its richness. I explore nature with all of its variables, and I transmit them through the world of sound, film, photography, use of organic materials, solid residues and the direct contact with space, creating sensorial experiences that awaken the senses.

Climate is a fundamental factor and the protagonist in each of the planet’s respiration. At present, the changes in temperature, winds, atmospheric pressure, humidity, uncontrolled rain and more are some of the dominants of the present crisis that we are in. We all know that without water there is no life, and that the social responsibility must be generated collectively since life is defined by the sense of community. Culture is the identity of the people and that education must be generated in the first years of formation, teaching to be respectful for human lives and learning to breathe to feel alive. 

The sustainability is the necessary harmony and balance of every productive structure. For example, the concept of a circular economy is the essence of that balance since we cannot forget that we are a part of gestalt. 

Due to everything experienced in these two decades, the film AIR(E) was born, it’s a new project that reflects and alerts us with a scream and an action in defense of our planet and life in the Ocean. Two of the threats that weaken the ocean will be brought up: contamination caused by plastic and acoustic contamination. 

The objective of this project is to alert and make a call for action, regarding the alarming problem of disconnection of society. The large industry is filling our planet with plastic, materials of very slow fragmentation, that often end up in the Ocean and other ecosystems, contaminating water, land and air – and affecting life, from microscopic organisms to large mammals. No one can remain indifferent regarding the continual deaths of mammals due to eating the plastic, altering their environment and the acoustic contamination generalized in the ecosystems. 

During the last decades there has been a huge level of submarine noise provoked by the extraction of oil, maritime transportation, use of sonars, tragic collisions between vessels and Cetaceans where the message is focused towards the essence of life and the base of love. 

We are all connected with the Ocean, when we breathe, from the origin of what we call life, the Ocean is the responsible one for the Oxygen. Conservation is teamwork where all are invited and urged to participate.