MIAMI, FL.- Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami launched the inaugural season of Tomorrow is the Problem, a new podcast series that approaches the urgent issues of our time by unearthing the hidden meaning behind everyday phenomenon.

The four information-packed episodes in season one look at oceans as a source of knowledge and considers its symbolic and historical meaning across many cultures and communities, and through the lenses of climate activism, marine archeology, Afrofuturism, and more.

Tomorrow is the Problem builds on ICA Miami’s robust program of digital initiatives, designed to engage audiences around the world with the cutting-edge ideas explored in ICA Miami’s in-person exhibitions and programs. The platform is spearheaded by the museum’s Knight Foundation Art + Research Center (A+RC), South Florida’s only museum-based research department. The initiative is made possible by a $2 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation grant in 2018, which kickstarted the museum’s five-year expansion of A+RC’s scope, including the creation of new digital platforms to advance the exchange of ideas between the public, artists, cultural theorists, and other thinkers in the Miami region and globally.

For the podcast’s first season, host Donna Honarpisheh, Assistant Curator, Knight Foundation Art + Research Center at ICA Miami, invites a diverse cast of thinkers and activists to join her in each episode as they delve into urgent issues from unexpected angles. Guests include Afrofuturists Abdul Qadim Haqq and DeForrest Brown, Jr.; marine archeologist Ayana Flewellen; novelist Edwidge Danticat; and journalist Dina Gilio-Whitaker, among others, who consider the sea as history, the sea as the future, transoceanic relations and migration, and rising tides.

“ICA Miami’s digital platforms are core to our programming and essential to encouraging dialogue on the most pressing issues of today. The launch of our podcast series is a major milestone for the museum, and a marker of the impact of the Knight Foundation Art + Research Center, as well as ICA Miami’s commitment to innovation and to reaching the broadest possible audience,” said Alex Gartenfeld, Artistic Director of ICA Miami.

“Through ICA Miami’s Knight Foundation Art + Research Center, our goal is to generate new research and find as many ways as possible to share emerging ideas and encourage dialogue amongst thinkers and the public across the globe. The podcast is an important element of this work, and we are grateful to the Knight Foundation and the many collaborators who have come together with us over the years to create this kind of resource,” said Gean Moreno, Director of the Knight Foundation Art + Research Center at ICA Miami. “Research on the environment and climate change has always been a major focus for A+RC, so the exploration of the cultural, social, historical, and political issues surrounding our relationship to the ocean is fitting as the subject of our first season.”

Tomorrow is the Problem

Season One Episodes

Episode One: The Sea is History




Examine the sea as a collective memory of violence, an underwater keeper of often obscured identity and meaning. Archaeologists Ayana Flewellen and Justin Dunnavant probe the relationship between the sea and human history alongside Master Diver and Marine Biology Ph.D. student Kelsey Johnson-Sapp. From sunken slave ships to coral preservation as an act of trauma healing, this episode is a thirty minute deep dive on the historical and symbolic meaning of our physical oceans.

Episode Two: The Sea is Future

The sea isn’t the exclusive domain of History, it also nourishes the ebbs and flows of the futures we could build. The wordless work of the Detroit electro-techno band Drexciya provided a new means to explore racialized narratives and appropriate cultural works, join our guests as they explore the three decades of communal world-building.

In this episode, illustrator and artist Abdul Qadim Haqq shares the genesis of Drexciya, the underwater bubble metropolis of the future, and how the unexplored oceans gave rise to the possibilities of a strong counter-narrative when it comes to the fate of the two million Black lives lost to the horrors of the middle passage. Rhythmanalyst, media theorist and curator DeForrest Brown, Jr. also shares his involvement in Drexciya and his Make Techno Black Again project. Professor of gender studies and writer Katherine McKittrick joins to discuss Drexciya as a metaphor and a geography for navigating the diaspora as well as its relationship to water.

Episode Three: Transoceanic Relations

Whether firmly grounded in the geographical idea of “place” or that of placelessness, the diasporic experience across oceans manages to keep historical notions of connectivity.

The Mundane Afro-Futurist Manifesto by Martine Syms sets the tone for this episode which sheds light on the white supremacist and colonial roots informing the way states construct a rhetoric of crisis around mass migration. Guests in this episode ponder the crisis or borders in voluntary and forced migrations across borderless oceans. Honarpisheh is joined by writer, translator, performer and scholar SA Smythe and novelist and writer Edwidge Danticat to discuss the mass displacement caused by the slave trade. Danticat speaks to the highly transient nature of Miami as well as her obsession with the ocean’s borderless connectivity and Smythe breaks down how European identity defines the “other” and the ways shifting ocean borders have enabled the abandonment of Black bodies.

Episode Four: Rising Tides

From Miami’s Tequesta to Hawaii’s Kanaka Maoli, Indigenous peoples everywhere are living memory of what the water has already taught us.

In this episode professor and activist Candace Fujikane and journalist, author, and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker provide indigenous perspectives that serves as a radical alternative to the dominant white, capitalist response to the climate crisis. Fujikane speaks to the importance of Indigenous knowledge and methods—Hawaiian and otherwise—for combating climate change through restoration. Gilio-Whitaker explains the significance, for the Colville Confederated Tribes, of the now flooded Kettle Falls along the Columbia river as well as the fracture and cultural wound the damming created.

All four episodes of season one are now available to stream on ICA Miami’s website and available on August 1, on all other podcast hosting platforms.