Cristina Baldacci
Lucio De Capitani
Shaul Bassi
Pietro Daniel Omodeo
Edited by Cristina Baldacci, Shaul Bassi, Lucio De Capitani and Pietro D. Omodeo
What does Venice look like when observed from the perspective of climate change, environmental collapse, and human-animal relations in an age of industrialization and mass extinction? That is, as a privileged observatory of the Anthropocene?
This guide, composed of several voices, forms a new, illuminating and disturbing mosaic of Venice and its Lagoon. What does the Venetian School of Painting tell us about our relationship with the environment and animals? What do peripheral places in the Lagoon like Porto Marghera and Pellestrina reveal about the advent and impact of modernity? What stories of extinction lie behind local delicacies like baccalà mantecato? What does the centuries-old relationship of Venetians with water tell us about other cities threatened by an increasingly hostile climate?
The guidebook, accompanied by a map, is intended as a tool for learning about the city in a new way. Venice emerges here as a unique ecosystem at risk, but also as a key to understanding our increasingly vulnerable world.
Preface by Serenella Iovino
INTRODUCTION (by Lucio De Capitani); I. WATERSCAPES (texts by Francesco Luzzini, Paul R. Merchant, Pietro Daniel Omodeo and Heiner Krellig, Hannah Strothmann, Carmen Concilio, Elena Longhin, Cristina Baldacci); II. ARCHITECTURE (texts by Jonathan Skinner and Andrea Vianello, Emiliano Guaraldo, Heiner Krellig, Marita Liebermann, Rebecca Snedeker, Giulia Repetti, Joanne Cheung); III. FOODWAYS (texts by L. Sasha Gora, Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, Camilla Bertolini, Eleonora Sovrani and Jane da Mosto, Francesco Vallerani); IV. ECOLIBERATION (texts by Petra Codato, Margherita Tess, Joseph Campana, Sara Lando, Daniel A. Finch-Race, Marianna Tsionki); V. MIGRATIONS (texts by Beppe Caccia and Barbara Del Mercato, Olga Smith, Shaul Bassi); VI. IMMERSION (texts by Pietro Consolandi, Gina Caison and Léa Perraudin, Giacomo-Maria Salerno, Felicity Mangan, Katherine Ball); VII. AIRSCAPES (texts by Fine Brendtner and Denise Frazier, Robert-Jan Wille, Stefano Liberti, Jennifer Scappettone).
The book was created with the co-financing of the European Union - FSE REACT-EU, PON Research and Innovation 2014-2020.
Year of publication: 2023
Language: Italian
Cristina Baldacci is an associate professor of contemporary art history at Ca' Foscari University in Venice.
Her research interests focus in particular on archives as metaphor and art form; practices of appropriation, montage, and re-enactment; image theory and visual culture; and the challenges facing art history, artistic practices, and archives in relation to the Anthropocene.
She is co-editor of the book Venezia e l'Antropocene (Venice and the Anthropocene), published by wetlands in November 2022.
Lucio De Capitani is a researcher at Ca' Foscari University of Venice.
His research interests include English-language literature from the colonial period to the present day (in particular English-language Indian literature, the works of Amitav Ghosh and Robert Louis Stevenson), theories of world literature, the relationship between anthropology and literary studies, and ecocriticism.
Lucio De Capitani is the author of the introduction to Venezia e l'Antropocene (Venice and the Anthropocene), published by wetlands in November 2022.
Shaul Bassi is a professor of English literature at Ca' Foscari University in Venice.
His publications include Shakespeare in Venice. Places, characters, and charms of a city that takes the stage (with Alberto Toso Fei, 2007), Turbo Road. Kenya, its writers, a child (2023) and Venice and the Anthropocene (co-edited, wetlands 2022). He is co-founder of the international literary festival Incroci di civiltà.
Pietro Daniel Omodeo is a cultural historian of science and professor of historical epistemology at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He is responsible for the ERC EarlyModernCosmology project (Horizon 2020), the FARE EarlyGeoPraxis project (Ministry of University and Research), and the Max Planck Partner Group !e Water City. He is the author of Political Epistemology: The Problem of Ideology in Science Studies.
He is co-editor of Venezia e l'Antropocene, published by wetlands in November 2022.