GENERATOR: USF Contemporary Art Museum presents Edison Peñafiel’s MARE MAGNVM (A Floridian Odyssey/Una Odisea en la Florida), an immersive panoramic video installation filling the Harbor Hall Gallery at USF St. Petersburg. MARE MAGNVM features a stylized, monochromatic sea populated by 14 boats, each with its own unique collection of characters caught in a perpetual loop. Every 30 minutes, the film’s characters arrive back where they began. Despite being larger than life, their boats are constructed of various found objects, including wood, oil drums, and tires, pointing to real-life scenes of migration across bodies of water.

The name MARE MAGNVM comes from the Latin for “Great Sea,” the term the Romans used to describe the Mediterranean. The word “mare” has a complicated history, being associated with evil spirits and terrors in various cultures, including in Old English and Old Irish. Today, the waters of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, along with other sites of mass migration, reflect an ongoing horror, as millions of migrants flee war, instability, and climate change. MARE MAGNVM does not refer to a single migration event, but rather expands the viewers’ experience to encompass the phenomenon as a whole. A panoramic artwork, MARE MAGNVM immerses viewers in the struggle of crossing borders, alerting them to a future in which rising waters will push unprecedented numbers of people away from the places they call home.