Cohabiting within Wetness.

The Venice lagoon is the largest coastal wetland in the Mediterranean basin. For its brackish nature, its tides and rich biodiversity, as well as for the huge human impact on its ecosystem, it is a reference for studies and planning in areas with similar characteristics around the world. It is therefore necessary to imagine not only the city, but also its lagoon as a model for the future.

Today forecasting techniques are based on predictive modeling, which identifies recurring patterns in existing data and uses them to predict how they will behave in the future, in order to plan adaptive solutions. But what happens if some crucial variables are excluded from the development of scalable models? For example, we know that the construction of the flood barriers MOSE was slowed down by the unpredicted growth of colonies of mussels and other mollusks on the concrete caissons at the base of its bulkheads.¹

Every project should take into consideration the life of the territory that hosts it, which is constantly changing. We cannot ignore the importance of community and cultural relations between people, nor mistakenly consider nonhuman factors, such as the aforementioned mussels, the mud, or the salt marshes, as lacking agency. As philosopher and political theorist Jane Bennett reminds us, history is the outcome of cohabitations and coalitions of different elements, organic and not, of which humanity is only a part: “How do worms make history? They make it by making vegetable mold, which makes possible ‘seedlings of all kinds,’ which makes possible an earth hospitable to humans, which makes possible the cultural artifacts, rituals, plans, and endeavors of human history […] Worms participate in heterogeneous assemblages in which agency has no single locus, no mastermind, but is distributed across a swarm of various and variegated vibrant materialities.”²

What “transformative relationships”³ between collectivity and species are ignored in constructing models for the future growth of the lagoon, and how might we rethink them as we consider the lagoon as a living environment? How have they changed, not only through the centuries, but also in recent decades? What regeneration and active citizenship projects are already underway? With the itinerant conversations of the cycle “Cohabiting Within Wetness,” the third chapter of the project “Venice as a model for the future?” developed by TBA21–Academy for its Ocean Space, we direct our eyes and walks toward the localized action of organisms and phenomena often disregarded, yet fundamental for the balance of this ecosystem.

The project “Venice as a model for the future?” was initiated in 2020 and is curated by Barbara Casavecchia and Pietro Consolandi. “Cohabiting Within Wetness” is part of the three-year research cycle The Current III—“Mediterraneans: ‘Thus waves come in pairs’ (after Etel Adnan)," led by Barbara Casavecchia.