Subsoil and ocean exploitation, political and military conflicts over expanding territorial waters, and privatization of common goods cause not only environmental but also cultural damage: devaluing, erasing, and eventually forgetting ancient production techniques. Diverse local knowledges indeed emerge from territorial specificities, but are being eroded everywhere to make way for standardized techniques linked to industrial and large-scale distribution dynamics, causing a dangerous cultural removal: a collective amnesia that leads communities to forget their localized culture and connection to the ecosystem—the so-called shifting baseline syndrome.
These phenomena, evident in the Pacific areas and foregrounded in the Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania exhibition, are the critical basis of the ‘resistance diet’ project that can survive, adapt to, stem, and counteract the changes taking place. The design of a Diet For Resistance is not intended to be limited to a specific geographic area, but rather to be shared with places and people who face similar environmental, economic and social situations: loss of fertile soil and damage to marine ecosystems, pollution of land, air and water, decline of biodiversity, monocultures and overfishing, use of harmful substances and trawling, depopulation of territories and loss of traditional
knowledge, standardization of production and distribution. Venice has been the ground on which to start this research with the intention to create synergies with other geographies and communities.
The project was developed as part of the Convivial Table 2024 programme curated by Barbara Nardacchione in the Ocean Space and with the participation of a group of people selected through an open call who accompanied us on five appointments including installations, lagoon excursions, talks and workshops.

Lagoon guerrilla gardening project on the occasion of the bragora festival / sagra prodiga in Venice. Algae clay, soil, water and seeds of halophytic plants and flowers stuck together in and around the square by the canals for a wild and invasive (herbal) Venice.

Sguazziamo! (“Let’s splash!”) is a river ecology workshop developed in the context of Fare Acqua, the fourth edition of Traffic Festival, on the banks of the Cesano river, in the Marche region. The idea starts from the ancient game of “Pesca al contrario” (reverse fishing), in which the child in the centre impersonates a fish and, without using his sight, has to catch another participant. The other children form a circle around the fish and, using rods, place their baits. When the fish takes the bait, it ‘eats’ the fisherman and the roles are swapped. 

Starting from this historical symbolic game, Barena Bianca develops a discourse on rivers and their inhabitants – fish and other organisms – by handcrafting masks that replicate the fish of local watercourses and baits that can be good or bad: through these, the children learn about the role of rivers and their inhabitants, and the role that local communities can play both positively and negatively. After carrying out the didactic and craft part of the workshop, the children are taken on an exploration of the ecosystem, finding a place to play this ‘reverse fishing’ game in harmony with the river. 

The children thus become the fish of the river around which they live, and at the same time ecologists, farmers, scientists, politicians. Through this sort of role-play, they develop an emotional connection with the river, learning intuitively about the inevitable vital relationship between humans, non-humans and watercourses.

The workshop, conceived and developed on the banks of the Cesano river, can be replicated in any place crossed, surrounded or overlooking a body of water – rivers, lagoons, lakes or seas. 

Piantagruèl is a participatory process initiated by Meta Forte with Barena Bianca, Tocia! and Spontaneus Lab in the northern part of the Venetian Lagoon in 2021. The 2022 edition sees the addition of other initiatives in the Venetian environment such as We are here Venice and Prometheus Open Food Lab. Through excursions, workshops, meetings with local experts and other experimental methods linked to the idea of “place-based education”, Piantagruèl seeks to deepen local ecological knowledge of specific areas of the Cavallino peninsula and its surrounding areas, both towards the lagoon and inland. Specifically, the project and its participants focused on spontaneous herbs, the flora and fauna of the area and the characteristics of the ecosystem in two senses: on the one hand, understanding their changes and traditional uses, and on the other, inquiring possible developments in the present and future.

Developing over entire days, often without division between educational and convivial moments, Piantagruèl aims to create a horizontal learning environment in which each participant brings his or her own experience, and in which the ecosystem dimension plays a fundamental role: by immersing oneself in it, traditional learning is mixed with a more direct and immersive mode derived from the surrounding nature.

“How is it there? Here…”, part of the global program WE ARE OCEAN, is a critical geography workshop for the kids of Venice and for anyone around the world living with similar issues, such as environmental degradation of wetlands and growing pollution levels in both the air and the water, coastal erosion, subsidence and increasingly devastating floods. Irresponsible tourism development, depopulation of cities and lack of housing policies may also be of mutual interest. This is an invitation to care about each other, to think of our planet from the perspective of common threats and the potential to share solutions, rather than divide it into tiny clusters that compete with each other. It is developed by artist collective Barena Bianca as venetian iteration of the international project WE ARE OCEAN, commissioned and produced by ARTPORT_making waves with scientific support from We are here Venice and in collaboration with TBA21–Academy. The central focus is to send a message connecting apperently faraway places: talking about our home can mean also talking about a place on the other side of the world, if the threats we face are the same.

The workshop, initially designed to run during the lockdown period from Covid-19, evolved into an analogue format in the following year. While initially the prevailing format was that of ‘mail art’, with the involvement of two fourth-grade classes from the Benedetti Tommaseo high school in Venice, it was possible to develop the project into a didactic and interdisciplinary format. Similarly, the participants were invited to send a letter to Venice – or from Venice to a chosen place, elsewhere – describing why they are interested in the chosen place, why they are concerned, the hopes and dreams they might have for it, thus creating a connection between the place they are writing from and the place they are writing to. The conclusion and presentation of the workshop took place in the spaces of the CNR Ismar in Venice during the Global Program “We Are Ocean” curated by Artport Making Waves.

The digital map created together with the artist Donato Spinelli archives the letters collected during the project.

Muevete Muevete Barena was a didactic happening produced by We Are Here Venice that took place in Venice from Palazzo delle Zattere (V-A-C Foundation) to Campo Santo Stefano. 60 venetian children (fifth grade of Scuola Elementare B. Canal) were invited to realize a festive parade bringing with them a 30-meters long “anti-mimetic” textile support with a pattern realized from the Barene in Campalto. Refusing to surrender to exploitative logics leading to ecological and sociological downfall, fighting not to disappear, the autochthonous kids – almost an exotic species to tourists and visitors, who live Venice as a dead city and open-air museum – gave life to a metaphorical mythical animal of the lagoon appearing in a crossway of Venice’s touristic center (North to Rialto, East to San Marco) Once in Campo Santo Stefano, three big collective drawings were realized by the children, portraying elements of the venetian lagoon with chalks in frames composed by the Barena squares through a deconstruction and reconstruction of the textile.

Barena Primavera-Estate was a workshop developed in collaboration with Giorgia Cereda and produced and coordinated by We Are Here Venice. During the World’s Ocean Day, 20 Venetian kids recycled old shirts, about to be abandoned, in order to become living symbols of the Lagoon. Each kid composed his own image on the clay tablet before stamping it on the shirt, using plants and flowers from the Barene, giving life to a personal interpretation of the Lagoon’s ecosystem. The video, through the voice of Francesco Da Mosto – Venetian architect, historian and BBC presenter – that accompanies images from the workshop and the exploration of the Barene of Campalto, purposely mocks the style of a commercial that does not seek to sell anything. Rather, the “mock-mercial” strives to encourage to adopt a set of ideals necessary in order to tackle the downwards spiral of the Venetian ecosystem, in which both the resident population and the amount of Barene declined of about 70% during the last century. Each of us can be a Barena.

photo credits: Linda Zennaro