The Tindog sa Dagat Floating Art Lab - Progressing Marine Resilience through Foregrounding Indigenous Knowledge and Culture
Aquatera are excited to be participating in a project which connects Indigenous maritime wisdom with modern tools, helping progress marine resilience and foreground Indigenous knowledge and culture.
Tindog sa Dagat (Cebuano for "to stand on the sea") is a mobile, modular boat designed as a kitchen, gathering space, and experimental art platform built to move with coastal communities. Tindog sa Dagat serves as a hub for communal meals, storytelling, ecological exchange, workshops and direct encounter with the sea. The boat can also act as an emergency response asset during climate-related crises.
The floating platform prototype is being developed with initial seed funding from phbritish britishcouncil in Davao in the Southern Philippines, and is led by artist Rhine Bernadino. Uniting different forms of knowledge into the same floating platform, the project is co-designed with the Art Relief Mobile Kitchen, artists, designers, researchers, technical collaborators and the Bajau community - an Indigenous seafaring people whose ocean knowledge is held not in archives but in practice: in navigation, making, weather-reading, and everyday life on the water.
The initiative sits deliberately at the intersection of Indigenous maritime wisdom and modern tools, testing how traditional ocean knowledge can work holistically and synergically alongside renewable energy, underwater documentation, and marine science.
Designed as a replicable methodology rather than a one-off object, the project is being developed as a long-term programme with connected strands in coastal England and Scotland, each shaped by its own community but sharing the proposition that the sea is part of home, not its edge, and that those who live closest to it hold essential knowledge for what comes next.
As a long-term technical and strategic partner, Aquatera is proud to support the project with expertise in marine energy, science, and coastal resilience.
We welcome contributions, collaborations, research, proposals, partnerships and everyone who wants to experiment and explore with us.
If you would like to learn more about the project or discuss how to get involved, please reach out to our team!
Marianne.catanyag@aquatera.co.uk
