We Marry You, o Sea, as a Sign of True and Perpetual Dominion (working title)
Sonia Levy, with field recordings / sound design by JrF, additional recording by Pheobe riley Law
premier 1st of September 2023 - Venice. MicroClima, Ocean Space, TBA21 Academy
& at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Madrid - Oct - Jan 2024
"We Marry You, o Sea as a Sign of True and Perpetual Dominion" engages with Venice and its Lagoon "from below"; with the aim to bring attention to the city's submerged, life-giving and altered biogeomorphological processes. What insights can be gathered by attending to these muddy land-waterscapes? The consolidation of Venice during the middle ages as a trading hub and as an epicentre of naval advancement, transformed the amphibious landscape into a place of hard barriers and controlled boundaries. The dredging of transnational shipping lanes in the early 20th century changed the Lagoon into an industrial frontier, reconguring spatial class divisions between the island city and the mainland, increasing the volatility of an already dynamic space and changing the possibility of life within it. One might consider the controversial MOSE (mobile food defence barriers systems) started in 1987 as a legacy of such military-industrial schemes that often fortify spaces while ignoring multispecies relationalities. Amid these tensions, the project seeks to ask: how can alternative understandings of history, agency, management, and politics emerge from thinking materially and analytically "from below"?