Onome Ekeh

Onome Ekeh, Writer and Filmmaker, Lecturer, Academy of Art & Design, Basel, Switzerland

The Networked Museum: Lessons from Finding Nemo

Revisiting Pixar’s 2003 classic Finding Nemo reveals more than a father-fish’s oceanic odyssey: it offers a mythic blueprint for how institutions might re-imagine themselves as vibrant nodes in a dynamic network of meaning. Marlin’s quest for his lost son Nemo – at first quixotic and anxiety-ridden – reveals the ocean, not as a monolithic “big blue,” but as a shimmering web of currents, schools, support groups, and signals.

Each encounter – shark AA meetings, jellyfish hives, surfing sea turtles – functions like a node in a cultural ecosystem. Dory, with her fractured memory and fluid trust, becomes the unsuspecting conduit. Nemo, named for “no one” (echoing Odysseus), is the MacGuffin around which the network coheres; the absence that generates story. As Marlin’s tale spreads from pelagic whispers to aquarium glass, it transforms into myth, carried across species, habitats, and media. The network is both infrastructure and imagination; the ocean, becomes environment and archive.

Transposing this to the museum, we might ask: what if the museum ceased to be the sovereign center of cultural gravity and instead became a node in a wider cultural ocean: a networked museum? How might its story ripple across publics, reaching distant and diverse participants? In an age of shifting economies, political antagonisms, and compressed attention, institutions must rethink form and function: doing less, doing differently, transmitting not simply objects but narrative, connectivity, and desire.

At the heart of the CIMAM 2025 agenda lies this paradox of enduring change while inventing new models of museum-making. Finding Nemo offers a metaphorical armature for this shift, a call for the museum to act as myth-machine and network node: virtuous not by checklist but by connection; necessary not by size but by flow.

Biography:

Born and raised on both sides of the Atlantic, Onome Ekeh started out as a painter, transitioned to design, fell in love with cinema, and somewhere in the collusion, went digital. Along the way she picked up an AI habit. She presides over a diverse body of work that encompasses film, video, theater, literature, and radio. Collaborations include works with Mabou Mines, Grisha Coleman, Okwui Okpokwasili, Carl Hancock Rux, David Thomson, and Annie Dorsen.

Ekeh is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation Fellowship, a Turbulence Media Award, and the Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen Fellowship. Most recent exhibitions include Especulaciones at Museo Moderno (Buenos Aires); House of Electronic Arts Basel (HEK); Basel Social Club (Art Basel). She is featured in the recent Serpentine Gallery publication, The Shape of the Circle in the Mind of a Fish. During Berlin Art Week 2024, she curated The Glittering Field, a showcase featuring 16 international artists for AOA;87 Contemporary.

Ekeh is a frequent speaker and panelist on the cultural dynamics of technology and nature and currently lectures in the Masters and Bachelors program of the Basel Academy of Art & Design in Switzerland.