TBA21 Solstice Festival

Join us at Ocean Space for a special solstice celebration! The TBA21 Solstice Festival features live performance, sound, and participatory installation in an evening dedicated to deep listening to the multispecies stories of the Venice lagoon, presenting TBA21–Academy’s residency program in Venice. The artists in residency, Adelita Husni Bey, Nandita Kumar, and Carlos Casas, convene this evening program to explore how the Venice Lagoon sounds, who speaks, and what information circulates through its waves. By situating the Venice Lagoon at the core of their research, this human-and-nature-made ecosystem emerges as a space for listening and a body that insists on being heard. 

The first to be heard are the workers from the refinery park of Port of Marghera. Oral histories, past and present stories, and resurrected poems gathered by Adelita Husni Bey revive the 70s labor movement that early on understood the interdependencies between the Lagoon's bodies and their own. The ecological harms inflicted as a by-product of their labor at the speed of the growing oil industry were felt both in the toxic waters and the workers' health, creating an early consciousness of the circularity of labor and ecological ties. Today, these early labor and ecological protests and demands raise no doubt of their relevance as the new labor forces —new waves of emigrants, often from environmental displacement— continue to reclaim their rights. Husni Bey's work makes us participants in intervening in the legal systems, conveying a narrative that pertains to a human and very much to the more-than-human sphere. In Venice, she will be joined by the Coro Operaio delle Voci dal Mondo (Voices of the World Workers’ Choir) of Venice, Fonte, Treviso, and Spilimbergo. 

Toxicity also speaks for itself. Nandita Kumar's focus on unraveling the properties of the phytoremediation plants begins by designing a sound composition to identify predominant chemical components in the lagoon's water. Those harmful traces of copper, arsenic, and phenol from the port industry's activities flow through the salt marshes, colliding with the flora to ultimately create a form of healing. The capability of the phytoremediation plants to metabolize certain minerals and "clean" the waters brings us to educate ourselves on which minerals and levels are present in this liquid body, what plants coexist in their waters, and how they interact. These precarious interrelations reflect a collective state of fragility, and the sounds they are assigned reiterate both human responsibility and the possibility of interactions. The chemical components and remnants of human activities are heard acoustically, and we start to understand the extent of their presence. 

Who are thus our neighbors? Are we capable of hearing them? How do we communicate with each other? Carlos Casas proposes an unprecedented auditory map of the lagoon—a sonic journey from atmospheric ambiance to underwater depths, including migrating birds, fish, gray shrimp, and mussels, alongside human activities from ports, infrastructure, and research. As if we were hearing the lagoon for the first time, the invoked three-dimensional space serves to reflect on the origins of Venice and the various acoustic ways in which interspecies interactions have historically emerged. Featuring a performance by the C.T.R. Centro Teatrale di Ricerca Venezia, this is an invitation to hear the benthic zone merging into the rhythm of the water, as well as the presence of non-human sounds in popular Venetian songs that demonstrate how acoustically we are connected, even if we are not fully aware of the extent.

Ocean Space has gladly received this call from the Venice Lagoon—to be heard. Following the space’s architectural nature, it responds loudly through its walls as the acoustic chamber that it is. Please join us in listening and reflecting on the histories and voices of the Venice Lagoon.

The artistic residencies are organized by TBA21–Academy within the framework of the S+T+ARTS 4Water II 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. The Local Expert Group that has supported the residents in their process includes Francesca Leon (ETT Solutions), Nefeli Myrodia (Onassis Foundation), Pietro Omodeo (Ca’ Foscari), Francesca Savoldi (Glasgow Caledonian University), and Jan-Stefan Fritz (Konsortium Deutsche Meeresforschung - KDM).