I am Lodovica Guarnieri, researcher and designer working at the convergence of art, activism and science. My work grapples with technoscience as it relates to environmental and social justice, coloniality and climate change with a specific focus on coastal cities and environments. Hovering between social fabulation and scientific facts, poetry and activism, my projects use performance as a participative pedagogical format to interrogate the technical and political production of space and history as contested sites of power, as well as sites of resistance to dominant narratives. By studying them through a situated, feminist ethnographic and materialist approach, my practice attempts to find new material imaginaries for social and ecological justice.
During the residency I will develop Amphibious X, a counter-mapping project that brings scientists, restorers and activists into conversation to reimagine the ecologies of the Venice Lagoon in the face of water crises. The project starts by asking What if the Lagoon was not divided between “above” and “below” the water surface, but was instead submerging its inhabitants in a spectrum of wetness?
The project explores terraqueous interdependencies by connecting cruise-ship pollution, evictions, marble artefacts dissolution, and biochemical disruption in marine shelled organisms. Calling for the formation of an amphibious political constituency, the long-term aim is to empower local inhabitants (audience) and the communities involved, ultimately challenging neoliberal extractive dynamics in Venice, and beyond.
Always looking for ways to “hack” art’s space and language to spotlight urgent issues and their constituencies, I strive to foreground the ecological potentiality of art. In this sense I really look forward to the conversations and exchange of ideas that will happen in the next months.
https://www.greenoffshores.com