Venice Lagoon EMBracing the Ocean project

Sonia's EMBracing the Ocean residency project will engage with the Venetian Lagoon "from below" with the aim to bring attention to the city's submerged, life-giving and altered bio-geomorphological processes. Sonia will develop a film in collaboration with marine scientists made of out-of-sight submarine audiovisuals of the Venetian Lagoon.

The project will actively engage with the scientists who attend to this fractured waterbody and the people who navigate its multiplicities through a residency at the Stazione Idrobiologica Umberto D'Ancona, University of Padova. The Stazione works closely with fishers' local ecological knowledge towards sustainable fishing practices. The film's submerged perspectives will be collected when accompanying scientists on fieldtrips and with fishers, directed by their research and knowledge. Through close exchanges with scientists from the Stazione, notably with Associate Professor Alberto Barausse, who has experience working across socio-ecological systems and sustainability, participatory workshops will be held with local resource managers and policymakers using the submarine audiovisuals as a catalyst for co-creating epistemologies and strategies for the Lagoon management. These participatory workshops will be designed in collaboration with curator and researcher Chiara Famengo, working at the intersection of art, ecology and community engagement. Via these partnerships, the project will create a choir piece for the film's soundtrack, emulating the Lagoon's underwater environments and capturing its altered condition by inviting these actors to summon its acoustics. These audiovisual queries will intimate the rarely articulated relation between human realms and submerged spaces.

The film will premiere at a film festival in Venice and be exhibited locally in a gallery and internationally in an art museum. A podcast series will also accompany the development of the project.