Abstract:  This commentary is a geopoetic exploration of grief, change, and loss that merges the personal and the planetary to hold space and make room for each other. We use the pronoun “I” in an estranged manner: as simultaneously multiple and only very loosely in the singular. This expanded “I” is in reference to the deep entanglements we are as eco‐social beings, beings that are fundamentally “more than one” and that escape linear regimes of logic and temporality. Our experimental spirit is initiated by a visit to Lamu Island in Kenya, a long‐term port of call in the Indian Ocean trade network, and is an elegy to a friend, Elleni Centime Zeleke (1972–2024), who was in Lamu with Hameed. It is also an ode to the melancholia felt in a changing, degenerating, warming assemblage of planetary ocean space in which we are all implicated and connected. The artists consider the memorial, its tempos, and interstitials as forces generative for shared and expanded spaces of mourning, love, and trepidation in the wake of unpayable debts (Da Silva 2022).

Keywords:  climate change; Indian Ocean; Kenya; Lamu; memory and mourning; oceanic acidity; planetary body; poetics

Published:   17 December 2025

Issue:   Vol 2 (2025): Seeing Oceans: How Artistic Research Contributes to New Ways of Looking at Ocean Life