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Ocean Space reopens on 28 March with Tide of Returns, a project by Repatriates Collective that continues TBA21–Academy’s commitment to ocean knowledge and intercultural dialogue. The work explores what happens when European museums are asked to return cultural objects to the communities from which they were taken, an issue shaped by political, historical and emotional complexity. Rather than a didactic decolonial statement, the exhibition becomes a gentle act of cultural survival. Stories emerge through earth, water and craft, showing how knowledge is transmitted across generations.

In the first nave, a vast dune of sand from artist Noeleen Lalara forms a living landscape of totems, clans and “songlines.” Dolls created by Laimi Kakololo and Anindilyakwa artists become ancestral messengers, animated in film and in the soundscape by Rebekah Wilson. In the second nave, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt’s textile‑video installation evokes belonging and collective healing: woven blue fabrics and black braids echo both flowing water and strands of hair. A three‑channel video shows these textiles washed and braided in a river, suggesting rivers becoming oceans and memory carried by water. Tide of Returns turns Punta della Dogana’s former site of control and taxation into a place for rethinking memory, restitution and the unseen histories still carried by objects and their makers.