Written by Letizia Artioli, Architect HMONP / Venice Climate Change Pavilion Founder / MArtScience KABK / PhD IUAV / human being
"Here more than anywhere else – It is as if space, aware of its own inferiority with respect to time, responds to it with the only property that time does not possess: with beauty.
And that is why the water takes this response, it torches it, twists it, beats it, crumbles it, but in the end, it carries it almost intact towards the open sea into the Adriatic."
(Iosif Brodskij “Fondamenta degli lncurabili”,1991, Adelphi)
Marble, salt, water, human tides and silent creatures populate the dimensions that melt in Venice, completing her landing to the sea. To sense the city beyond itself, floating in a Lagoon, towards the sea: this is a different journey.
Venice is amphibious and is characterised by celestial veins that run through it, as the veins branch out into our body, as the Barene [1] are furrowed by the liquid tangle that characterises them.
When I arrived in Venice, I still remember the astonishment of the sighting of dolphins, jellyfish, and sea turtles in the Lagoon as an extraterrestrial glimpse that broke into the quiet city during the pandemic times. The interconnected balance of a multi scaled-ecology reflects in this confluence: the Lagoon is a point of departure (and arrival) for a “bodies-of-water jump-of-scales”. At the molecular scale, the cycle of water intrinsically connects us: we are constantly permeated by the water particles and air that have been breathed by other humans and non -humans.
At the local scale, the lymph that flows in the lagoon, mountain rivers (Sile, Brenta, Bacchiglione) inject sweet waters from the land, and salty water comes and brings within all the global history from the Adriatic Sea, then the Mediterranean, till the Ocean(s).
The Venice Climate Change Pavilion: floating
The Venice Climate Change Pavilion is a project born at the intersection of art, science, ecology and research. It is an urban pavilion that diffuses environmental data in the Venice Lagoon, uses ephemeral practices and transdisciplinary ecologies for Ocean and Lagoon Literacy, weathers ArtScience for the amphibious future, and connects citizens and research embodying transdisciplinary knowledge. To live in a Lagoon means to constantly delve between land and water, between stone and tides, and to embrace rhythms that transcend the human scale. The project started in May 2021, Awarded as part of EU Maritime Forum YOUTH4OCEAN “Arts and Culture relating to the Ocean Literacy” EU4Ocean Award 2022, VCCP raised as a spontaneous answer to the theme of Venice’s Architecture Biennale 2021 "How will we live together?", beginning from the awareness of the hidden climate data we live within and an analysis of the Venetian Lagoon’s fragile ecosystems. The Pavilion is officially part of EU4Ocean as a project tackling the UN Ocean Decade’s Challenge 10: “Restoring Society’s Relationship with the ocean”.
The idea of a diffused Pavilion, that collects stories and data from local scales to then bridging it on a global scale, relies on the urgency of new narratives to accelerate the process of adaptation and mitigation towards the climate and biodiversity crisis:
we are all connected by water ecologies, the ecological problems are a shared path that involves us all as citizens and human beings.
To make a paradigm shift, it is needed to wave and create narratives where we can feel, sense and embody the knowledge that we hold (like the seven unheard IPCC Reports). We cross layers that melt our cultural heritage into endangered ecosystems.
We can interpret and understand our being in the world as citizens and as human beings by analysing a single sample of water collected in a different part of the sea, and approach it like a poem: de-layering and de-territorialising data makes new cartography and new geographies possible.
The sea is a key of interpretation that holds up the major challenges of the future: rising sea levels, rising global temperature, CO2 absorption cycle, microplastic pollution, biodiversity loss, acidification of pH, and alteration of specimens (alien species).
The pavilion stands as an amphibious and amorph series of ephemeral appearances. Before being citizens of Venice, we are humans of the Lagoon. The Venice Climate Change Pavilion has a diffused body and a displaced neural system, like a Siphonophore. We’re using data as a source to sense and experience the invisible: unveil what is invisible, below and under the water level, air pollution level, nesting seasons, alien specimen indexes, sea level rise, different migrations.
The human body is conceived as a sensor porous to the inputs that technology translates: molecules into sound, forgotten archives of cultural heritage that are being forgotten, words, specimens…
I started thinking about a diffused pavilion, with the idea that anyone crossing the city could also have the right to see the invisible layers in which they were “swimming”. People could float/ swim/ feel/breathe/sense together with the Lagoon. A pavilion that emphasized the intrinsic link between the liquid city and the ecosystem to which it belongs. Something that could reconnect the sea to the marble in an unexpected way, by raising awareness. We literally swim in data, we breathe H2O that has been sea, ice, and clouds.
The Venice Climate Change Pavilion is a hybrid creature that appears and disappears, always leaving traces of regeneration behind. In a sort of “reversed approach”, parallel and complementary, the pavilion appears in different media and manifestations during times and spaces that are leftovers and emptied by the current trend of mass tourism, mismanagement and extractivist policy of the city. The freedom of the format allows amorph contamination and experimentation to pollinate beauty and knowledge in the new climate regime (Latour, 2018), at one of the forefronts of climate change, and cultural heritage porous contamination and preservation.
Data for Senses: Composing with Lost Ecosystems
Technology acts like a mediator to collect data that, like The Rosetta Stone, allow us to decode the planetary phenomena (Lovelock/Margulis,1970). In a single sample of water that we collect, we can find microplastics coming from the Pacific Ocean, molecules that have passed through bodies and histories in the new geographies of migration through the Mediterranean, specimens from the Atlantic, and the most autochthonous bacteria from Venetian saltmarshes. Different layers of invisible data overlap over the same territory: history, policy, pollution, culture, memory [2].
Through data sonification, and data physicalization, data become “sense-able”. Invisible data of overlooked pollution levels, or lost ecosystems, alien specimens and slow violence are given voice and materiality.
//An example of how to make knowledge liquefy and accessible is CE002 (“You are a Butterfly until you don’t flap your wings”)//
Taking inspiration from the axiom butterfly/tornado (Chaos Theory), the installation aims to amplify and make resonance of our micro scaled actions and their potential reverberated macro effect. While we wave and flap our wings thinking that we are unnoticed, unrelenting processes of slow violence are making our ecosystems fade away. Field recordings of landscapes that disappeared are left like fluctuating digital sonic traces to compose with. The installation is a sonic instrument that triggers the echoes of lost landscapes (database of field recordings of natural environments that have subsequently been destroyed following EEA report) thanks to human touch “composing it” (Playtron device midi controller). Between the butterfly and the tornado, disruptive phenomena’s information seems to appear suddenly, with no prologue, no anticipation, without announced beginnings and sometimes, reactionaries/relentless to end.
While dipping our fingers in the water samples, the instruments make us composers of lost landscapes. The strange relationship that we wave with nature is expressed in a composition of archived field recordings, poetic insights that flash while we see the soundscapes we inhabit slowly disappearing in our ears, while we compose a third sonic landscape spectators of present ruins/future ghosts and composers of present ghosts/future ruins.
Data-information-knowledge does not work as a linear transmission, as misinformation and disinformation are the main threats to democracy, according to the 2024 global risk report. We have an overload of data and a challenging route from information to knowledge.
Dip your fingers into the water, in two different glasses, starting from the red wire.
What you are hearing are field recordings of lost landscapes, ecosystems and specimens that have been lost in the last 10 years due to climate change.
You are composing a third new landscape, out of ghosts, echoes of lost ecosystems, and our continuous exchange of particles with the world.
We are spectators of present ruins/future ghosts and composers of present ghosts/future ruins.
The strange relationship that we wave with nature is expressed in a composition of poetic insights that flashes while we see the landscapes we inhabit slowly disappearing under our eyes, and while we compose a third sonic landscape made of echoed ghosts, through a liquid interface.
The research approach of the Pavilion aims to float within and re-weave the data/information/knowledge/wiseness/body chain, to redesign the relationship between humans/citizens and data, to give access to knowledge, and to embrace being eco-systemic beings.
From micro to macro, from the Lagoon to the Sea: transcending Bodies of Water
Venice is a material paradox, in which it is not possible to build with the visible but with its complementary. Liquid dimension cracks characterise the city and transcend our citizen identity to lead us to want to have gills.
At the molecular scale, the cycle of water intrinsically connects us: we are constantly permeated by the water particles and air that have been breathed by other humans and non-humans. Most importantly, the challenges of the future (pollution, biodiversity loss and climate change) are a common ground that transcends geopolitical barriers.
Rivers, seas, and clouds are the connectors and collectors that define new geographies.
To embed and embody information by transducing them and making them sense-able means operating as a phenomena that transcends the human body’s scale. To hear echoes from Blue Crabs crawling below the surface, to retrace the lost coastal ecosystems that have been destroyed in the last 15 years. To feel the fingers in the water, and to immerse in a synaesthesia of neon messages.
The Lagoon of Venice is the ultimate “dispositif” of the encounter between man and the sea. The human body becomes the ultimate frontier to permeate the knowledge that we cannot see.
The fishermen’s huts emerge from the mercurial mirror of the Lagoon, with suspended pylons and wires that remind us of the herons’ legs more than the metal and wood stacked on the borders of Pellestrina (the southern Island of the Lagoon). Floating seagulls in the Lagoon remind us of the act of being transported by a flow and not a ravaged act of extraction.
In a single queue, the veins of the city are filled with floating plastic shoals, and I feel like I have to swim in a dense bank of human beings that flow aimlessly. Trying to go from a sea of people to real waves in a looping migration.
Light messages floating on the lagoon, lost sounds being heard again, in the continuous dance of trying to dive again in our being living and alive, with 60% of water inside our bodies, on a 70% water enveloped planet.
Or maybe it's just a pretext to bring a mobile lighthouse in dark times, one that floats through the canals, like an embolus that unblocks high-voltage ideas and slime.
"If you stay alive for two more seconds,
leave one for yourself and another
for the world."
F.Arminio,2021 [4]
Sources
[1] “Barene” :Salt marshes are tabular-shaped terrain typical of lagoons, periodically submerged by the tides.
[2] Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker, ‘Weathering : Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality’, Hypatia 29, no. 3 (2014): 558–75, https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12064.
[3] ‘Karen Barad - Meeting the Universe Halfway_ Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning-Duke University Press (2007).
[4] F.Arminio, “Stai Calmo”, Poem, Cedi La Strada agli alberi, Chiarelettere,(2017)
[5] B.Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime,La Decouverte Editions,2015
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