As part of the public engagement activities of the EU Horizon project PartArt4OW – Participatory Art for Society Engagement with Ocean and Water and the scientific co-creation of knowledge about Ocean and Society advanced by participation for raising awareness about the issues affecting the Ocean, CO>SEA Collaboratorium for the Socio-Environmental Analysis of the Ocean, Raw-News Visual Production Agency in collaboration with MEMOTEF Department, Sapienza University of Rome premiered the short documentary Blue Kinships. Documenting Ocean Relationships (available here) at the SiciliAmbiente Film Festival 2025 edition in San Vito Lo Capo, Palermo (Italy).
SiciliAmbiente is an international film festival dedicated to fiction feature films, documentaries, short films, and animated films that focus on the environment, sustainability, and human rights. For years, SiciliAmbiente has received prestigious recognition in the field of sustainability. The festival has repeatedly been awarded the Culture in Green prize by the Buygreen Forum, recognizing it as Italy’s leading “green” cultural initiative. Rather than pursuing conventional sponsorship models, SiciliAmbiente and its partners aim to cultivate meaningful collaborations that support a wide range of activities engaging both the local community and visitors to San Vito Lo Capo. SiciliAmbiente is committed to promoting a “culture of sustainability”—a vision of development that benefits all people, now and in the future. This vision integrates social justice—such as the fight against poverty, the protection of human rights, and access to healthcare—with the urgent need to conserve natural resources and ecosystems, all within a framework of solidarity and mutual support.
The screening has been invited to enrich the 17th of June Festival session dedicated to the Science of the Sea, focusing on the contribution of visual documentation to research practices. The coordinator of research projects, Chiara Certomà (Sapienza University of Rome) introduced the activity of the Collaboratorium, while the film director Federico Fornaro (Raw-News) explained what making video for research entails and requires, together with the video-maker Giuseppe Lupinacci (Raw-News).
Visual documentation, including professional and amatorial film-making and photography, is a powerful means in creating transformative knowledge and advancing participatory, engaged and action research practices. Through visual documentation and, particularly film-making, this is able to make present to people the matter of concern, stimulating the debate and engaging them in doing research on the field, including by making ocean geographies accessible for everybody and have been able to overcome one of the principal obstacle in making citizen science and participatory research in ocean environment. The videoing accompanied researchers in giving a narrative of the entire process, and thus in driving it toward one or another direction, and then in story telling what we have done, so spreading communication and outreach.
Credits and Accessibility
Blue Kinship. Documenting Ocean Relationship was produced by Raw-News Visual Production Agency as part of the European Horizon project PartArt4OW and the Sapienza Third Mission pilot initiative CoSea_Lab. The projects are coordinated by Chiara Certomà and are recognised as official activities of the United Nations Ocean Decade.
Blue Kinship. Documenting Ocean Relationship is available on YouTube https://youtu.be/eZbeJHEiLVE and Zenodo https://zenodo.org/records/14787505
The video is a supplementary material of the book “Blue Kinships. An Exploration of Society & the Ocean”, edited by Chiara Certomà for Palgrave MacMillan, New York 2025.
Programme of the Festival: file:///Users/chiara/Desktop/Catalogo-Sa_2025_Stampa_compressed.pdf
Catalogue of the Festival: https://www.festivalsiciliambiente.it/catalogo-programma-festival-siciliambiente-2025/
Press release in english and italian:
In the news:
Chiara Certomà 
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