Tentacular Fellowship 2026/2027

TBA21–Academy's Ocean Space, in collaboration with NICHE Centre for Environmental Humanities and the UNESCO Chair on Water, Heritage and Sustainable Development at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, launched the first edition of the Tentacular Fellowship in June 2026. The fellowship is designed to support experimental, community-oriented practices capable of fostering regenerative processes with positive eco-social impact in the Venice Lagoon.

The fellowship invites an individual practitioner or a collective — selected through an open call — to initiate, strengthen, or expand an initiative based in the lagoon through the creation of a Tentacular Unit: a collaborative platform that brings together artists, researchers, institutions, local communities, and other stakeholders around a specific socio-environmental challenge.

The project selected for the 2026/2027 edition of the Tentacular Fellowship is Undercurrents: Poetics and Politics of the Submerged, curated by Sara Alberani.

Undercurrents: Poetics and Politics of the Submerged is a curatorial project grounded in political ecology and historical materialism that takes Porto Marghera as its point of departure to investigate the infrastructures of fossil modernity. Following the network of gas pipelines and the extractive industry, the project connects the Venice Lagoon to other petrochemical hubs across the northern Adriatic, such as Ravenna and Ferrara, extending to the central and eastern Mediterranean. What emerges is a geography in which the so-called energy transition does not mark the end of the fossil era, but rather the transformation of its infrastructures and the relationships that continue to shape territories, labour, and ecologies.

The proposal for the Tentacular Fellowship stems from a situated and autoethnographic curatorial research project initiated around the Ravenna petrochemical complex, where histories of labour intersect with industrial toxicity and environmental conflict. The recent floods in Emilia-Romagna have revealed how the climate crisis cannot be separated from the history of fossil industrialisation, shifting the focus from extraction to submersion and recognising bodies of water as political agents of resistance and emergence.

What flows beneath the surface, unseen or against the current? Undercurrents looks at what operates beneath dominant narratives: labour histories, the legacies of industrial toxicity, environmental impacts, and the forms of resistance that traverse these territories. Here, the submerged becomes a political category through which to read both the continuities of fossil modernity and its ongoing transformations.

Through the Tentacular Fellowship, Undercurrents will develop into a curatorial platform that brings together archives, universities, trade unions, collectives, artists, and local communities, taking the Venice Lagoon as one of the key nodes of the Mediterranean's energy infrastructures. Through fieldwork, archival research, oral history, and site-specific artistic practices, the project will establish an ongoing study group and a public program dedicated to artistic production and international exchange.

The project aims to build a curatorial infrastructure that extends beyond the fellowship itself, developing a critical counter-cartography of extractive infrastructures and the relationships that sustain them.

The project was selected from among those received via a public open call by a jury comprising:

• Cristina Baldacci - Associate Professor of History of Contemporary Art, Ca' Foscari University of Venice
• Benedetta d'Ettorre - Signature Project Lead, TBA21
• Chiara Famengo - curator, Three Rivers, Bexley; Speaker for the Living, Ocean Space
• Barbara Nardacchione - Community Engagement Lead, Ocean Space
• Noemi Quagliati - European University Institute, Florence; NICHE, Ca' Foscari University of Venice

Tentacular Fellowship 2026–2027 is an initiative-building Fellowship for the Lagoon of Venice. Produced by TBA21–Academy with the scientific support of NICHE Centre for Environmental Humanities at Ca' Foscari University.

Sara Alberani is an independent curator and cultural organizer based in Rome. In 2020, she co-founded LOCALES, a platform dedicated to site-specific interventions and decolonial practices in public space. She co-curated the Trampoline House collective at documenta fifteen, and her curatorial research focuses on the intersections of political ecology, labour struggles, and social and climate justice. She is currently investigating the impacts of extractivism on the water ecosystems of Emilia-Romagna in the aftermath of the 2023–24 floods.