Venetian Lagoon Mussel Farming Between Tradition and Innovation An Example of Changes in Perception and Multispecies Relations

In Venetian lagoon, mussels as a food, together with technical innovations and new knowledge for their exploitation, are a recent discovery. In the past, the lagoon’s fishers considered them inedible. The first mussel farming was launched in 1939 and mussels began a new process of rehabilitation. It is the beginning of a new relationship. Mussels turn themselves into delicate animals that need care and fishers develop new interactions with the other non-human components of the environment. A mutual relationship (or inter-agentivity) is created between mussel farmers and mussels, and it brings undeniable advantages to both species.

Assemblages in the Venetian Lagoon: Humans, water and multiple historical flows

Since the dawn of its existence, and at times thanks to ambitious interventions, Venice and its lagoon have needed to be constantly protected from the various ways in which water has reclaimed its existence. This article asserts that the ways in which Venice approached the watery world imply a tendency to relate to the natural environment as if it was something humans ought to separate themselves from, rather than something towards which they could harmoniously relate. As a result of this mindset, the natural changes which made humans interventions necessary are most often phrased as events abruptly sprouted into being, and less as obvious consequences of pre-existing ecological alterations of the islands’ ecosystem throughout the centuries. In order to read these events differently, this article adopts assemblage theory as delineated in the work of Manuel DeLanda (2006], 2016), according to which history comprises a multiplicity of flows, each belonging to a specific social reality. As such, this article auspicates a way to read ecological alterations of the Venetian lagoon beyond the mere actions of humans and to see, instead, socio-natural changes as the result of intricate relations between heterogenous agents and forces.

Far From Gentrification and Touristification? Residents’ perceptions of displacement on Murano Island

Murano, an island in Venetian Lagoon, is world-renowned for its historical glassmaking industry. In the last decades, similarly to what is happening in central Venice, Murano has seen a significant decrease in its population and a reduction of its traditional activities, both being connected to broader tourism gentrification dynamics. Prompted by this, the authors devised and circulated a wide-ranging questionnaire that aimed to investigate the economic, social, and territorial factors affecting people’s quality of life on the island. The questionnaire was completed by almost 15% of Murano’s residents and one aspect that it captured was various inhabitants’ perceptions of issues concerned with tourism gentrification, which we analysed using Cocola-Gant’s (2018) concepts of residential, commercial, and place-based displacement. We found that Muranese residents these dynamics most keenly when they impact their daily life on the island, and they are concerned about the loss of the identity of places they know and live in. We conclude by affirming that this situation is not irreversible, and that policy makers can act to address it.

‘Mappy’ Imageries of the Watery City: The cartographic figure of the Venice Lagoon across epochs and media

Adopting a cultural approach to cartographic repertoires, this carto-essay highlights the immense visual heritage of the Venetian Lagoon in order to extrapolate a series of ‘mappy’ images that have given shape to the cartographic figure of the city on water. In light of the current convergence of visual culture and cartography, and by adopting visual juxtapositions, the article evokes different cartographic variations of the watery city: from the city sitting on the sea to the city sitting on the lagoon, from the port city to the archipelago, from the maritime city to the (wet) landscape city par excellence. This contribution thus proposes a journey across a range of Venetian cartographic imageries, which include different media and epochs, as well as different genres and registers, from the majestic to the banal, and from the dramatic to the ironic, thus also moving across the different cartographic moods associated with the watery city. As Juergen Schulz used to say during the 1970s while he was investigating modern-age Venetian cartography, the map is not always a map: in past times, the map was often a vehicle for nongeographical ideas. Even today, maps are ideas, they are ways of knowing, thinking and acting, they hold cultural meaning and political messages, but also hopeful imaginings. Indeed, cartographic representations of and rhetoric about the Venetian Lagoon are carried out by different actors, thus contributing to a process of continuous re-figuration and de/re-centralisation of the lagoonal space.

Heart of Wetness: Living, narrating, and representing ancient memories and new water rhythms in the Venetian Lagoon

The natural and human ensemble of Venice and its lagoon, with its peculiar island features, is among one of the most studied urban and environmental systems in the world. This introduction to Shima’s special issue on Venice and its lagoon provides a brief historical and environmental context to this space and a possible platform whereby the local complexity and liminality of wetlands, lagoons and islands gesture to and evoke global themes, conceptual views, and transdisciplinary opportunities. Focusing on key topics like the theatricality of water engineering, the understanding of water rhythms and the recovery of water memories, we introduce the articles presented herein, providing a geo-historical framework for the various interpretations of living, narrating and representing Venice and its lagoon.

An Island for Everyone: Poveglia as contested public space in the Venetian Lagoon

This article focuses on the story of the proposed privatisation of Poveglia, a small uninhabited island in the Venetian Lagoon. In March 2014 the Italian State Property Office announced that a 99-year lease on Poveglia would be offered for sale in an online auction. The reaction of some citizens led to the formation of the association Poveglia per Tutti (Poveglia for Everyone), whose activists and supporters wanted the island to be preserved as a public space and blocked the acquisition. The article firstly frames Poveglia in the processes that are particular to the small islands of the Venetian Lagoon, from abandonment to tourism-related ‘land grabbing’, and then contextualises the story of this minor island in a more general discussion regarding broader ‘right to the island’ narratives and practices with reference to some other European cases. Finally, the article presents the results of a an ethnographically informed analysis of the association Poveglia per Tutti to discuss the capacity and potentialities of some small islands - as separate, limited, and identifiable spaces - to be part of territorialisation processes dealing with active citizenship, resistance to tourist monoculture and the usability of public space. In this way, Poveglia becomes a synecdoche for the whole of Venice and its lagoon, ‘condensing’, at the same time, local and global dynamics.

Multidirectional Thalassology

This article merges discourses from Indian Ocean studies, Island Studies, performance art and decolonial methodologies to offer interdisciplinary ways of thinking about La Serenissima and its navigational histories. It is a transdisciplinary speculative entry, part empirical, part analytical, part applied phenomenology. We write this as a collaboration between two members of the Harmattan Theater company, a New York City based environmental performance ensemble applying environmental theory to site-specific performances engaging oceans and islands. The article is driven by the following research questions: What are the historic relationalities between the Venice lagoon and the Indian Ocean? How has the acqua alta flooding of Venice, accompanied by the mnemonic histories of the Venetian lagoon, impacted understandings of lagoon cultures in the global South, particularly the Malabar Coast of South Asia? This question has propelled the artistic and academic research of May Joseph and Sofia Varino across environmental history, island studies and performance. Drawing on histories of Venetian navigation and lagoon culture, Joseph and Varino propose a comparative lagoon aesthetics, one that would link two archipelagic regions, the Venetian Lagoon and the extended archipelagic region of the Laccadive Sea of India. While we believe a contemporary archipelagic study connecting these two regions does not currently exist, the historical archives suggest otherwise. We draw on the Venetian Camaldolese monk and cartographer Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi from the 15th Century to initiate this comparative dialogue between North/Southisland ecologies, seafaring histories and ocean futures affected by climate change and rising sea levels. This research is part of a book that Joseph and Varino are co-writing on islands, archipelagos, coastal regions and climate change, drawing on a ten-year collaboration working with large-scale site-specific environmental performance as research, activism and embodied phenomenology.