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Adelita Husni Bey

Il Fiato del Suolo, forum theater, 2025

Adelita Husni Bey, Il Fiato di Suolo, performance and forum theatre, at the TBA21 Solstice Festival, June 2025, Ocean Space, Venice. Organized by TBA21–Academy within the framework of S+T+ARTS4WaterII, an initiative by the European Commission. Photo: Enrico Fiorese
Adelita Husni Bey, Il Fiato di Suolo, performance and forum theatre, at the TBA21 Solstice Festival, June 2025, Ocean Space, Venice. Organized by TBA21–Academy within the framework of S+T+ARTS4WaterII, an initiative by the European Commission. Photo: Enrico Fiorese
Adelita Husni Bey, Il Fiato di Suolo, performance and forum theatre, at the TBA21 Solstice Festival, June 2025, Ocean Space, Venice. Organized by TBA21–Academy within the framework of S+T+ARTS4WaterII, an initiative by the European Commission. Photo: Enrico Fiorese
Adelita Husni Bey, Il Fiato di Suolo, performance and forum theatre, at the TBA21 Solstice Festival, June 2025, Ocean Space, Venice. Organized by TBA21–Academy within the framework of S+T+ARTS4WaterII, an initiative by the European Commission. Photo: Enrico Fiorese
Academy Commissions Commissions TBA21–Academy

Adelita Husni Bey

Il Fiato del Suolo, forum theatre, 2025, 60 min
In collaboration with Coro Operaio delle Voci dal Mondo (Voices of the World Workers’ Choir) – Venezia Fonte, Treviso, Spilimbergo. 
Musical direction: Giuseppina Casarin.

With the participation of: Ngalaha Noel, Giuseppe Tosatto, Giuseppe Palmieri, Pandora Climate Lab

Performed by: Lisa Boni, Giulio Canestrelli, Roberta Da Soller, Angelica Leo, Chiara Tarabotti, Vince Tosetto, Damiano Venuto

 

This work was commissioned by TBA21–Academy within the framework of the S+T+ARTS 4WaterII residency program with the support of Konsortium Deutsche Meeresforschung (KDM) within the Prep4Blue project as a contribution to the EU Restore our Ocean and Waters by 2030, and with the collaboration of Ca' Foscari, CNR-ISMAR, ETT, and Venice International University.

 

 

Il Fiato del Suolo, forum theatre is a part of Husni Bey's ongoing project, The Lagoon's Legislative Theater, which explores the connection between the Marghera port, the global flow of capital, and Venice, with its residents and more-than-human inhabitants. 

 

Multiple attempts at regenerating and converting the area through pointed investments have continuously stalled, making it an important symbolic microcosm of various, unresolved, intertwined instances of capitalist collapse, an area of capitalist ‘symptomatology’. The worker-led theater piece is centered on the history of Porto Marghera, an industrial zone situated directly across from Venice. It also reimagines the Venice lagoon as a breathing organism. Water—and the network of waterways—plays an integral role in the work: as a carrier, as life and living. 

 

Too often viewed as a boundary separating Venice from its industrial counterpart, the lagoon in this piece becomes a connective tissue, suturing together the intertwined histories of the two cities. Porto Marghera became a significant site of worker-led resistance, particularly against toxic conditions in the workplace. It was the setting for one of Italy’s first landmark trials in which a petrochemical plant was charged with environmental disaster and involuntary manslaughter for the deaths of over 150 workers from cancer. The question then remains: how do we account for what we have long called capitalist 'development', and the planetary devastation it has left in its wake?

 

Il Fiato del Suolo, forum theatre was presented at TBA21 Solstice Festival, curated by María Montero Sierra at Ocean Space, Venice, as part of the concluding event of the TBA21–Academy's residency program, organized within the framework of STARTS4WaterII and featuring live performance, sound, and participatory installation dedicated to deep listening to the multispecies stories of the Venice lagoon.

 

 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Adelita Husni Bey is an artist and pedagogue invested in anarcho-collectivism, theater, and legal anthropology. She organizes workshops, publications, broadcasts, and exhibition work using non-competitive pedagogical models through the framework of contemporary art. Involving activists, architects, jurists, schoolchildren, spoken-word poets, actors, urbanists, physical therapists, students, and teachers, her work consists of making sites in which to practice collectively. Her work was part of the Italian pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, Venice, 2017. She has participated in Care Ecologies, State of Concept, Athens, 2024, Quizá Mañana, XVI edition of the Cuenca Biennial, 2023, New Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018; The Eighth Climate, 11th Gwangju Biennale, 2015; Really Useful Knowledge, Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, 2014. She was a 2020-2022 Vera List Center Fellow with a project centered on the radical changes in social relations brought about by responses to past and current pandemics.

 

ABOUT S+T+ARTS

S+T+ARTS is an initiative of the European Commission to foster alliances between science, technology and the arts, in order to cultivate technological innovation centered on human needs and values.

S+T+ARTS4WaterII–Ports in Transformation is dedicated to tackling the complex environmental and societal challenges present in Europe’s ports and port cities.

Learn more about this edition of TBA21–Academy Residency Program in Venice HERE.