New Currents: Indian Ocean Futures
New Currents: Indian Ocean Futures is a research project that explores how evolving national ties and the exchange of ideas and material cultures shape the future of the Indian Ocean region. Examining the architecture, design, and spatial politics of port cities, the project asks: What currents can be traced? And what do these flows of spaces, goods, labour and knowledges teach us about the future of this region? By focusing on Rotterdam—a city shaped by harbour—New Currents opens dialogues with similar sites along the Indian Ocean.
New Currents is a long-term, collaborative initiative based in Rotterdam, a port city in a nation inextricably linked to the Indian Ocean through diasporic and colonial legacies. The project explores how spatial, artistic, and memory practices can bridge the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe—and particularly their coastal communities—in efforts to address the interlinked realities of globalisation. It raises questions about the diverse shared heritages and situated futures of the Indian Ocean territories. Spaces in this region, seen as sites of ancient exchange, conquest and settlement, reveal transformations that inspire alternative ways of organising spaces, materials and political structures.
The research looks at infrastructures, migration routes, trade networks, and cultural histories to reveal alternative ways of understanding collaboration and shared futures. Through case studies, collaborations, and international networks, the project challenges dominant geopolitical narratives and highlights the Indian Ocean as a space of interconnected histories, ecological relations, and cultural exchange.
Examples include the lingering songs and chants of sea traders who sailed the monsoon winds from Somalia to India; the trading forts and their goods that remain as architectural and design artefacts; spatial resistance against encroaching port and road projects on public land use; private sector monopolies over submarine data cables crossing trade routes of old empires; or the worship of ancestral sea deities and ocean mothers that influence contemporary design responses to climate disaster.
Geographically, the Indian Ocean (or Afrasian Sea) connects Asia, Africa, Europe and Australia through its coasts, inlands, archipelagos and oceanic regions. It continues to grow in influence through evolving national alliances that impact borders and livelihoods in the region. The project brings together a wide range of perspectives through shared practices of archiving, listening, and learning that challenge narrow understandings of this region.
The programme draws on a global network of researchers and curators to explore and map multiple 'micro-histories', uncover historical legacies that continue to matter, and review collective work around knowledge about this topic. The aim is to develop new vocabularies and narratives to describe the interconnected conditions of the ocean and its networks.
This project was previously presented as 'Modernisms along the Indian Ocean' and has been re-named 'New Currents: Indian Ocean Futures'.