S4 – Venice Is Leaking: Interventions in the Lagoon-City Continuum
Rhythms of everyday life in the hydrosphere alert us to the continuum that exists in Venezia — city and lagoon. Here, water and land are co-constitutive and have been since the first engineering of the islands into human-habitable refuges. What happens below the surface is inextricably connected to what happens above. Between fresh and saltwater.
The fluctuating surface levels of the acqua alta. The caigo (the Venetian term for fog) and the stravedamento (the Chioggian term for when the Dolomites are visible). Nutrition, erosion, accretion, flooding, and toxicity all occur within this continuum at multiple scales and registers. Thinking about Venezia as an expanded watery environment follows the encouragement of Anuradha Mathur and Dilip Da Cunha to approach the future from an understanding that Wetness is everywhere (2020). In addition to the presence of wetness, we consider water’s absence, salinity, and an array of other characteristics.
This seminar focuses on the critical role of activist, creative, and cultural practices in confronting environmental concerns facing the lagoon-city today and in the future. Using Venezia as a starting point, we bring diverse examples from other places into comparison to generate cross-cultural conversations around strategies of care for water ecologies. These conversations will address flora, fauna, and human appetites; the politics of public spaces; decolonization; the collection of ecological knowledge; and collective and inclusive tactics for sustainability.
In doing so, we engage with Astrida Neimanis’s provocation that humans are mostly wet matter or Bodies of water embodying a leaky and porous relationality with our environments (2017). In flood, drought, or contamination. How can we refine or condense this understanding to generate ways of eroding or reshaping the infrastructures that lead to mass pollution, water privatization, overfishing, the washing away of salt marshes (barene), overtourism, cruise ships, and so on?
We set out to explore practices and methodologies for intervening into the continuities of changing environmental and social conditions in Venezia and beyond. Activists, artists, designers, conservators, curators, historians, chefs, and other creative practitioners will participate in transdisciplinary conversations about engaging with the lagoon-city to ensure the survival of this vital and multispecies environment. We hope to produce a toolkit to spark change now and in the future.
Venice Is Leaking: Interventions in the Lagoon-City Continuum
Other Seminars ?
Discover other seminar threads