Mangroves are frequently presented as legible systems: symbols of ecological balance, protective buffers against climate change, or measurable carbon sinks within global environmental discourse. Increasingly, they are folded into regimes of “blue carbon,” where their capacity to store carbon is quantified, traded, and instrumentalised within offset economies. In this framing, mangroves become not only sites of resilience, but units of compensation – absorbing the excesses of industrial expansion elsewhere. Responsibility for the damages of anthropogenic development is thus displaced, transferred onto ecological systems and the communities that inhabit and sustain them. What appears as conservation is often entangled with commodification, where value is extracted through metrics, and care is reorganised through markets. Mangroves are rendered visible, measurable, and exchangeable, aligned with narratives of protection and sustainability that risk obscuring the uneven burdens they are made to carry. This exhibition departs from that stability. Here, mangroves are approached not as objects of knowledge, but as conditions of relation, instability, and lived experience. They are thick, opaque environments where boundaries blur – between land and water, salt and soil, growth and erosion. They are not simply ecosystems, but working landscapes shaped by tides, labour, and time. Along estuarine edges, these environments have long been held through intricate practices of regulation and care – sluices that open and close with the tide, embankments that hold and release, fields that shift between cultivation and submersion. These are living infrastructures: technologies of the future-past, where ecological intelligence is embedded in practice. Yet these relations are increasingly unsettled. Rising seas, erratic monsoons, and sediment disruption alter the delicate balance between freshwater and salinity. Mangroves expand into agricultural lands even as they are cleared elsewhere. Tidal flows no longer follow predictable rhythms. What once operated through calibration now moves through uncertainty. The landscape is not unified in its experience: what protects one edge may threaten another; what regenerates in one zone may erode in the next. These are contested, unevenly experienced ecologies, where environmental change is not abstract, but lived differently across bodies, occupations, and geographies. Within this, the exhibition does not seek resolution, rather it remains with disturbance. Forms appear disoriented, unable to align within familiar structures of harmony. Surfaces blur between reflection and depth, making it difficult to distinguish what is grounded from what is unstable. Systems of production: of hydro-ecology, of community, of salt, of food, of labour, extend from these ecologies, revealing how extraction and sustenance coexist within the same tidal field. The presence of bodies within these environments does not clarify them; instead, it deepens the sense of partiality. Visibility is never complete. Relations are sensed rather than fully grasped. The exhibition shifts from spectacle to structure, from viewing to inhabiting. It resists the impulse to render mangroves as coherent or resolved. Instead, it situates the viewer within an environment that is opaque, resistant, and in flux. What emerges is not a singular narrative of loss or resilience, but a field of tensions: between protection and encroachment, stability and erosion, continuity and rupture. Mangroves, in this sense, are not simply ecological formations. They are sites where ecological, social, and perceptual systems no longer align cleanly. T hey hold within them the friction of overlapping temporalities – ancestral practices, present disruptions, and uncertain futures. ‘A Disquiet Tide’ does not ask how these environments can be restored to a prior balance. Instead, it poses a more difficult question: “How do we live with systems that are already shifting, conflicting, and unstable?” To remain within this question is not to resolve it, but to recognise that living within such conditions requires new forms of attention, relation, and negotiation – where stability is no longer assumed, and coherence is no longer guaranteed. - WENCESLAUS MENDES