E la nave va

How to read the ship

Loads

Crates below the waterline. What weighs on each person in one area of their life, even when it is not their fault: a dismissal, a flooded home, loneliness, an argument with a partner.

Supports

Buoys above the deck. What keeps a life afloat: friends, a good team, a day in the countryside, going to the cinema, someone who helps with paperwork.

Currents

What moves the whole fleet at once: an economic crisis, a pandemic, a war, a Europe-wide heatwave. This is the polycrisis. The criterion is not whether something depends on us, but whether it happens to one person or to everyone: if your own home floods, it is a load; if the climate worsens for everyone, it is a current.

Load line

The Plimsoll mark, made compulsory on British ships by the Merchant Shipping Act of 1876 to prevent shipwrecks from overloading. It was a law, promoted by the MP Samuel Plimsoll. Political decisions are not the sea: they are the rule that sets how much load is safe. Here the line asks where the safe load of a life lies, and who should paint it. It scores no one.

Method: the three I’s

I read the JRC’s environome as a dramaturgy. Personal, social, built, natural and digital environments are actors that interact, intervene and impact the course of the human comedy. Those three verbs are also my way of approaching the residency: to interact with the researchers and their data, to intervene through the work, and to impact prevention.

Beneath prevention lies the question the ship keeps asking: how much can a life carry before it capsizes, and what keeps it from foundering?

Starting from the evidence

The work starts from InDepDash, the JRC dashboard that counts how many scientific papers link depression with each environmental factor. Among its 153,609 papers, natural light appears in seven and natural disasters in 7,863. That does not mean light matters less, only that it has been studied less. The dashboard itself warns that the number of studies is not the only measure of importance. Counting is not weighing.

The ship would be loaded from three sources and would show the distance, and the possible dissonance, between them:

• What is studied: publication counts from InDepDash.
• What people report: the JRC’s own survey on mental health, if it can be shared.
• What is lived: anonymous contributions from a volunteer group of staff at Ispra.

Alongside, I would keep a register of omissions: everything people bring that does not fit any JRC category, such as “online-only paperwork” or “an argument with my grandparents”. For researchers, it shows what their classification is missing. This continues the work begun at the JRC workshop in Brussels in June 2025.

Participation and ethics

With ethical approval, anyone on the team could make as many contributions as they wish: a short phrase about something in their environment that drags them down or keeps them going, the area it belongs to, and, optionally, a broad age band, a situation and whether they have a disability or are neurodivergent. Each contribution becomes a crate or a buoy.

• Anonymous and voluntary, with no names, no testimonies and no medical data.
• Contributions are added online or on dedicated computers at Ispra, without the option of erasing what has accumulated.
• People can choose a word from the list or propose a new one. New words are read by a person before they appear, in case someone writes something that identifies them, such as a name or a specific place.
• Any group with fewer than ten contributions is hidden in the statistics, so that no one can recognise themselves.
• Disability categories follow Article 1 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (physical, mental or psychosocial, intellectual, sensory), the definition used by the European Commission and by Spanish law. Neurodivergence is listed separately because, to be officially recognised, it has to fit one of them.
• Digital access is an area of its own: no connection at home, hard-to-use websites and forms, online-only appointments. Collecting contributions online must not leave out those who most need to be heard, so an assisted route is always kept.

Six months, three moments

April · work in progress

The working ship, presented to the team: a programmed digital design that transforms live as contributions arrive.

May · second round

The same people see what has been collected and choose what would help them most: which loads to lighten or remove, which supports to reinforce.

June · final work

An audiovisual projection narrated in my voice, in which the ship loads and lightens with everything collected and ends on two possible ships in 2040: one if nothing changes, one if load lines are respected. With it, a conversation with the team, a one-page note for policy, and a portable digital version for schools, health centres, hospitals, day centres for older people, associations and neighbourhoods.

Why 2040. Two reasons that coexist: it is the horizon of the EU climate target, and it is the horizon of a generation, since today’s schoolchildren will be adults by then. The 2040 ships are a rehearsal of the future, not a prediction, which is the kind of scenario work the EU Policy Lab does.

Who the question is for

The JRC is the European Commission’s science service, and this residency involves its Digital Health Unit, the EU Policy Lab and the Centre for Advanced Studies. The question of the work, what a load line could mean for housing, daylight, working conditions, school or screens, is meant to travel from the researchers to those who shape health, education and digital policy.

Why this work, from me

I have lived with chronic depression for many years, and it is my artistic practice that keeps me afloat. My Asperger’s and officially recognised 67% disability mould how I perceive the world: branching, lateral, alert to repetition and contradiction. Several selves coexist in me: the artist, the child who grew up between the Canary Islands and Western Sahara, the man ready to love and care, the disabled and neurodivergent person, the one living with chronic depression. Depression can silence some of them, let one take up all the space, or narrow the future to a single perspective, sometimes dark, sometimes luminous. I treat this plurality as an environment of its own.

Depression is neither a romantic place to inhabit nor a private failure: it is lived inside environments, policies, relationships and acts of care. I want a work that shows this with data, with prevention as its aim, and that still moves us as we watch the ship transform.

Materials