Abstract
Venezia Fabrica Futura is a practice-based, participatory research and design project developed for the 2023 Fuori Venice Architecture Biennale. The project investigates the hidden dimensions of urban unsustainability in Venice, where mass tourism, ecological precarity, and sociopolitical surveillance converge. The research unfolded through collaborative processes with local communities, students, and cultural institutions, positioning Venice simultaneously as a fragile ecosystem and a contested cultural landscape. Over three months, workshops, public installations, and speculative interventions became platforms for dialogue, enabling participants to critically examine how infrastructures of control—such as newly implemented surveillance systems—intersect with environmental vulnerabilities and collective memory. Participatory interventions included interactive video games, bio-fabrications with mussels from the lagoon, experiential tastings, experimental underwater herbariums, sound re-elaborations of wave motion and pollution data, and guided “marine meditations.” These activities fostered embodied engagement and multisensory encounters with the city’s ecological and sociopolitical complexities. At its core, the project seeks to decenter the human figure and situate it within a larger ecological continuum, reconnecting bodies, materials, and environments. The participatory framework generated tangible outcomes—films, models, and spatial interventions—while foregrounding lived experience, cultural memory, and artistic speculation as vital components of regenerative futures. The poster presents visual and experiential documentation of these processes to invite dialogue on how practice-led and participatory research can cultivate new imaginaries, foster ecological responsibility, and reveal the complex entanglements of social, ecological, and political forces shaping urban futures in unruly ecologies.
Presenters
Stefano DealessandriStudent, Master, The Royal Academy of Art The Hague, Zuid-Holland, Netherlands
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
VENICE-LAGOON, MASS-TOURISM, PARTICIPATORY-INTERVENTIONS, BIO-FABRICATION, ECOLOGY, MULTISENSORY-ENGAGEMENT
