Matteo de Mayda, Amina Chouairi – Lagoonal Capriccio

Lagoonal Capriccio by Matteo de Mayda and Amina Chouairi explores the Venice Lagoon as a complex hydro-environmental system in which natural processes and human-made infrastructures are historically and functionally entangled, to the point of forming a territorial matrix that can hardly be reduced to discrete components. The project focuses on the Casse di Colmata — land areas produced through reclamation processes and industrial expansion strategies that shaped the Lagoon throughout the twentieth century and which today, largely decommissioned or repurposed, operate as transitional territorial devices. These are unstable and liminal spaces in which erosion, sedimentation, contamination, and biological recolonisation continuously intertwine, producing provisional environmental configurations in constant redefinition. Within this specific territorial framework — also explored through archival materials — the Lagoonal landscape appears to gradually withdraw from the traditional representational imagery centred on the historical and monumental dimension of Venice. Archival images do not function here as merely illustrative or documentary materials, but rather as critical tools capable of articulating the processual and stratified dimension of the territory, making legible the morphological, economic, and political transformations that have shaped its current condition. Through the confrontation between historical materials and new photographic productions, a complex temporality is revealed, in which traces of industrial planning, infrastructural residues, and ecological dynamics coexist within the same visual field.