“Venice as a Model for the Future?” is curated by Barbara Casavecchia and Pietro Consolandi for TBA21−Academy and Ocean Space. This chapter moves beyond the urban boundaries of the city of Venice towards the islands of its lagoon. The participants direct their steps and gazes to the land and the seascapes created by the interaction between various species, not only human, that inhabit them: from coastal sand to garden soil, from salt marshes, a thriving home to wild plants and birds, to seabeds populated by tiny fish and molluscs.

https://www.ocean-space.org/activities/una-dispensa-viva-per-una-comunita-in-fermento

Venetian Lagoon at Lio Piccolo

A LIVE PANTRY FOR A COMMUNITY IN FERMENTATION
With Marco Bravetti, founder of TOCIA! – Cuisine and Community, we will be developing a culinary, political and philosophical discourse based around the relationship between humanity and the territories we inhabit, exploring the edible ingredients they can offer us. The fermentation and transformation of things that become food, the act of cooking and sharing a meal with others, become fundamental elements in understanding what it means to cohabit and care for an ecosystem with other lifeforms.

MEMORIES OF SAND: THE SALT MARSHES OF THE CENTRAL LAGOON
The salt marshes have always played a role in safeguarding the Venetian Lagoon: protecting it from the wind, mitigating the tides, supporting its biodiversity, and absorbing carbon dioxide. However, in the second half of the 1900s they started to disappear. What remains of them in the central lagoon, beyond the memories of the Venetians? Do the mud and the sand found on the lagoon bed still contain the records of the ecosystems that they accommodated until just a few decades ago? Can we conceive of a way to restore the salt marshes, making them an operational element for the future of Venice? Landscape architect Amina Chouiri leads us on a journey through the past, and into the future, based on her thesis “The Operating Venetian Lagoon – The Agency of Barene”, awarded “Best Graduate 2020” by the Faculty of Architecture at Delft Technical University (TU Delft).