Between Tides: Gatherings on Return is a symposium, taking place on Saturday 28 March and Friday 8 May 2026 at Ocean Space, convened by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Wietske Maas within the context of the exhibition Tide of Returns. It engages repatriation as a living, ceremonial, and polyphonic practice. The gatherings bring together situated Indigenous and transversal practices of return, reflecting on Italy’s role in restitution within the broader challenge of decolonizing museums, archives, and public memory.

The gatherings are shaped by three guiding concerns:

• Situated Practice — Embodied, artistic, site specific, and Indigenous and community-led approaches to repatriation.
• Polyphony — Convening multiple voices, languages, and ways of knowing, in resonance with the Venice Biennale’s In Minor Keys.
• Venice & Italy — Italy’s role in restitution, from colonial collections to contemporary returns.

The first gathering takes place on 28 March 2026, on the opening of Tide of Returns, and includes roundtables and open discussion, with short presentations and moderated conversation. It features contributions by Syd Britten Andrews (filmmaker, Alyangula, Groote Eylandt); Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll (artist and historian, Naarm/Vienna); Njabulo Chipangura (museum anthropologist and curator, Dublin); Manuela Ciotti (cultural and social anthropologist, Rome/Vienna); Rosa Anna di Lella (cultural anthropologist and curator, Rome); Noeleen Lalara (artist and Indigenous elder, Umbakumba, Groote Eylandt); Wietske Maas (curator and researcher, Venice); Samson Ogiamien (artist, Graz); Markus Reymann (co-director TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary/Ocean Space, Venice); Jesse Weaver Shipley (anthropologist and filmmaker, Hanover, NH); Francesca Tarocco (historian and director of NICHE, Venice).

• 10am | Words of welcome by Markus Reymann, Noeleen Lalara and Britten Andrews. Introduction by Wietske Maas
• 10:15 – 11:30am | Njabulo Chipangura and Jesse Weaver Shipley, moderated by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
• 11:30 – 11:45 | Break
• 11:45am – 1pm | Rosa Anna Di Lella and Manuela Ciotti, moderated by Francesca Tarocco 

A six-week interval follows the first gathering, allowing time for reflection and response. The May session returns to key contributions from March, drawing out insights and their particular resonance within Venice and the Biennale context.

Wietske Maas is a curator, artistic researcher, and editor based in Venice. She has worked as curator at the European Cultural Foundation, Amsterdam (2008–2018) and at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht (2014–2025) where she convened exhibitions, public programs, collective study, and publishing projects as acts of critical publicness: questioning how publishing can become a site for shared conversation on art and life-in-common. Alongside this work, she has developed artistic research in diverse international contexts, investigating social and urban ecology as sites of transformative convivial assembly.

Jesse Weaver Shipley is an artist, writer, and ethnographer who explores the links between aesthetics and power. He is the John D. Willard Professor of African and African American Studies and Oratory at Dartmouth College. His films, images, and multi-media installations experiment with storytelling and portraiture and have shown across Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa. He is the author of articles and books including Living the Hiplife: Celebrity and Entrepreneurship in Ghanaian Popular Music and Trickster Theatre: The Poetics of Freedom in Urban Africa. He is completing a film on global fashion and a book on the Aesthetics of Revolution.

Manuela Ciotti is Professor of the Social and Cultural Anthropology of the Global South at the University of Vienna, where she leads the research team Sedimented visions. She is also the Principal Investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant project The anthropology of the future: an art world perspective (ANTHROFUTURE). Her research addresses questions of social justice, art, and future in the Global South.

Njabulo Chipangura is Assistant Professor of African Anthropology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, where he specializes in museum anthropology and critical heritage studies. He joined Maynooth University in February 2025, following his role as Curator of Anthropology  at Manchester Museum, University of Manchester (2022–2025). Prior to that, he spent over a decade as Curator of Archaeology at the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe, based at Mutare Museum (2009–2020). He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. His work critically engages with the coloniality embedded in museums and advocates for collaborative, community-based methodologies. 

Rosa Anna Di Lella is a cultural anthropologist and officer at the MUCIV-Museum of Civilisations in Rome, where she curates the collections of the former Colonial Museum and coordinates the Educational Department. Her work combines anthropological research with participatory and collaborative practices, fostering critical reflection on sensitive and contested heritage. She contributes to the curation of programs and exhibitions, including the Museo delle Opacità (Museum of Opacities) project, which seeks to rethink how museums interpret colonial history and legacies.

Britten Andrews is an Australian filmmaker and photographer with over a decade of experience working closely with Indigenous communities. He is currently the media coordinator for the Anindilyakwa Land Council. Guided by Traditional Owners, the media program documents important stories, traditions, and language, helping to preserve the cultural identity of the Anindilyakwa people for future generations. In 2023, Andrews documented the repatriation journey of 174 cultural heritage items from Manchester Museum back to Groote Eylandt. He accompanied an Anindilyakwa delegation in partnership with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), capturing the significance of this moment in his film Engku-Wa Angalya (Far Away from Home, 2025).

Francesca Tarocco is Professor of Buddhist Studies at Ca' Foscari University of Venice and the founding director of the NICHE Centre for Environmental Humanities, where she leads an interdisciplinary international network of scholars and practitioners focusing on critical environmental humanities, water studies and political ecology. She is currently researching for two new books on cosmotechnics and on different trajectories of human-environmental relationships in Sinophone Asia. Tarocco also writes for Frieze and other art journals.

Noeleen Lalara: “I've been living on Umbakumba, my mothers country, since 2008. I've been doing arts for a while, partly for my Bachelor training at CDU. I study a Bachelor of Education and have only 4 units left to finish my degree. I have grandsons so I've been doing it slowly, travelling to Darwin to study. I do weaving with ghost net with pandanus, ghost net and strips of clothes. We all do it differently, my daughter in law Maicie does it her way and I do mine. We help each other too. When the art centre at Umbakumba opens Maicie & I will train all the other ladies to weave too. I'm based at home here with my grandsons, when I'm bored I just get some ghost nets and do some weaving.”