Site in progress, more projects coming soon!
Site in progress, more projects coming soon!
WE MARRY YOU O SEA AS A SIGN OF TRUE AND PERPETUAL DOMINION
We Marry You, O Sea engages with Venice and its lagoon “from below,” focusing attention on the city’s submerged, life-giving, and altered bio-geomorphologies. Underwater filmmaking opens new ways of knowing the materialities of the Venice Lagoon, revealing a troubled environment that complicates prevailing political histories told from above the waterline.
The work draws its title from the Sposalizio del Mare (Marriage of the Sea), a medieval ritual through which Venice staged its sovereignty over the sea by casting a ring into the lagoon. The ritual exposes enduring masculinist-imperial logics that frame water as possession, reflecting on Venice’s ongoing quest for mastery over the waters that permeate the city.
In a lagoon continuously modified to sustain human settlement, wetlands and infrastructures have long been intertwined. Venice’s consolidation as a mercantile and naval power during the Middle Ages relied on extensive hydrological engineering for defence and navigation. Twentieth-century industrialisation intensified these interventions: under Fascist modernisation, wetlands were irreversibly transformed into a petrochemical frontier, bound to Mussolini’s ambitions to position Venice as an industrial power, succeeded by new forms of extraction through mass tourism.
These histories of transformation unfold through rarely seen archival photographs documenting the lagoon’s industrial conversion, surfacing and receding against present-day images of its submarine conditions. These perspectives from below unsettle the top-down visions of the archive, as the afterlives of petrochemical development permeate the lagoon’s turbid shallows.
An original score, composed from human voices and underwater recordings, further links submerged spaces with human domains. Weaving together the lagoon’s acoustic lifeworlds, marine crackles and tidal pulses mingle with the hum of machinery, passing vessels, and drifting voices.
We Marry You, O Sea as a Sign of True and Perpetual Dominion (2025) Trailer
A film by Sonia Levy
Commissioned by TBA21–Academy and TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary with the support of STARTS, an initiative by the European Commission, and the European Marine Board’s EMBracing the Ocean artist in residence program, an activity contributing to the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030) as well as the local support of the Marine Biology Station Umberto D'Ancona, University of Padova.
Underwater Cinematography: Sonia Levy with the help of Sam Smith
Cinematography: Sonia Levy
Editing: Sonia Levy and Sam Smith
Underwater Sound Recording: Sonia Levy, Jez riley French with Pheobe riley Law
Music: Lydia Samuels
Underwater Sound Recording Arrangement: Lydia Samuels and Sonia Levy
Vocals: Lydia Samuels, Dominic Stichbury
Recorded by: Nicholas O’Brie, Upcycled Sounds
Soundscape designer: Udit Duseja
Researcher and assistant: Chiara Famengo
Scientific Advisors: Heather Anne Swanson, Alberto Barausse, Ifor Duncan
With the kind permission of
SEPOline: a project to apply innovative solutions for artisanal fishing (EMFF Veneto region – Measure 1.26 INNOVATION – Beneficiary: Scientific Institute CESTHA, Experimental Center for Habitat Conservation)
Archivio fotografico del Comune di Venezia, Fondo Giacomelli
Archivio fotografico dell’Ente della Zona Industriale di Porto Marghera
Many thanks to: María Montero Sierra, Markus Reymann; Meredith Root-Bernstein, Sam Smith and Chiara Famengo; Filippo Picardi, Emily Sepe, Cristina Breggion, Andrea Sambo and Mattia Panin; Matteo Stocco and Giacomo Carraro; Federico Riccato, Riccardo Fiorin, and Giacomo Cipolato; Barbara Vanin, Roberto Ranieri and Michela Ballarin; Gianluca Palma; Federica Cacciatore and Rosella Briscolò Brusà; Angela Pomaro, Irene Guarneri, Fantina Madricardo and Marta Picciulin; Jane Da Mosto; Pietro Daniel Omodeo; Francesco Visentin; Amina Chouaïri; Pietro Consolandi, Miriam Calabrese and Barbara Nardacchione; Paolo Rosso; Hélène Wand-Polak and Albert Levy; Hanna Rullman and Gabriella Hirst; and Filip Tydèn
Still from Sonia Levy, We Marry You, O Sea, 2025
Installation view of Sonia Levy: We Marry You, O Sea, Liquid Intelligence, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, 2023. Photo: Roberto Ruiz | TBA21
COLLATERAL INQUIRY
“LAGUNA DAL BASSO”: A SERIES OF WORKSHOPS EXPLORING POLITICAL BIOGEOMORPHOLOGY1
Sonia Levy, facilitated by Chiara Famengo
with Alberto Barausse, Stazione Umberto d’Ancona, University of Padova and the advisory support of Amina Chouairi (Università Iuav di Venezia), Louise Carver (Lancaster University), and Pietro Daniel Omodeo (Ca’ Foscari)
This project aims to develop fresh insights into the Lagoon's history, agency, and governance by adopting a material and analytical perspective "from below." Although the Lagoon appears well studied and understood, recent hydrological modifications have reshaped the possibilities of life within it. The imposition of top-down governance structures has further exacerbated fragmentation, resulting in a contentious mosaic of institutions and conflicting practices that further disrupt the intricate biogeomorphologies of this locale. These transformations, a combination of waterscapes engineering, environmental alterations, societal changes, and the broader impacts of climate change, have resulted in challenges to understanding an ecosystem. Its significant alterations sometimes exhibit perplexing behaviour, suggesting a state of unpredictability and enhanced complexity, compromising the Lagoon's lifeways.
Our participatory workshops are designed to employ an "epistemology from below"2 acknowledging the Lagoon's dynamic and ever-changing nature. By examining shifting marine environments and emphasising often overlooked ways of knowing and being within the Lagoon, we wish to integrate scientific, local ecological, and artistic knowledge towards a non-exploitative relation to watery environments. The initiative actively involves marine scientists studying this fragmented water body alongside Lagoon fishers and local stakeholders, fostering a collaborative learning environment to interpret these aquatic assemblages within their socio-ecological depth. The term "from below" draws inspiration from "History from below," a historiographical approach that prioritises the experiences and perspectives of ordinary and subaltern people over those in positions of power. Extending this methodology, our project broadens the scope to encompass a more inclusive understanding of historical agents, including the more-than-human worlds, to foreground the socio-ecological dependencies of the Lagoon. How, these workshops will ask, could Lagoon’s governance be negotiated by implementing diverse perspectives and fostering more environmentally just practices?
In our endeavour to explore changes in the Lagoon and their impact on life, we draw from diverse forms of knowledge and experiences, encompassing scientific insights and local ecological perspectives of those who intimately navigate the Lagoon on a daily basis. Our goal is to create narratives that shed light on the intricate interplay between governance, history, practices and hydrodynamics, geomorphology, and the thresholds that have altered life’s possibilities.
The series of workshops will be centred around three main topics: spatiality, temporality and valuation.
“Laguna dal Basso” is a long-term project initiated in 2022 with the support of TBA21–Academy and STARTS, an initiative by the European Commission, currently funded by the European Marine Board’s EMBracing the Ocean artist in residence program (2023-2024), an activity contributing to the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030) as well as the local support of the Marine Biology Station Umberto D’Ancona, University of Padova.
The project is currently affiliated with Ca’Foscari University, The New Institute: Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE).
The project is rooted in Sonia Levy’s film and research, “We Marry You, O Sea, as a Sign of True and Perpetual Dominion”, a cinematic inquiry “from below” that delves into Venice’s subaqueous realms, providing insights into the current conditions of the Lagoon. This cinematic inquiry unveils rarely-seen archival images capturing the industrialisation of the Lagoon. Beneath the water’s surface, the project introduces new dimensions of knowledge, encouraging reflection and complicating mainstream historical narratives that typically begin above the water’s surface.
1 In our approach, we intentionally avoid compartmentalising geomorphological and hydrological processes from their impact on life, and reciprocally, we avoid disconnecting life from its influence on these processes.
The title is inspired by UCSC SEACoast “Slow Seminar: Political Geomorphology” which took place on April 20th, 2023.
2 Omodeo, Pietro Daniel (2022). Hydrogeological Knowledge from Below: Water Expertise as a Republican Common in Early‐Modern Venice. Berichte Zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 45 (4):538-560
COMPANION CONTENT
SEASCAPE EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE VENETIAN COCOON [podcast]
This episode of Magical Fresh & Salty Conversations features two discussions that touch upon the interests of the STARTS residents: Sonia Levy is joined by scholar, writer, and surfer Karin Amimoto Ingersoll, while her collaborator Meredith Root-Bernstein talks to philosopher Emanuele Coccia. Together, our guests look at the possibiliy of knowledge otherwise emerging from our interactions with watery spaces. How can immersed perspectives generate epistemologies that challenge imperial structures? How can thinking at the interplay of surface and subsurface processes help us understand both human and more-than-human agency in a changing world?
Part I: Sonia Levy with Karin Amimoto Ingersoll
A Kanaka master navigator enacts his oceanic literacy daily by embodying about 3,000 environmental pieces of information and making about 200 decisions based on the corporeally collected data.
In her conversation with the artist Sonia Levy, Karin Amimoto Ingersoll, a Kanaka Maoli political scientist, writer, and surfer based in Honolulu, discusses her notion of "seascape epistemology”. How can embodied literacies like navigation (ho’okele) and fishing (lawai’a) offer cultural affirmations that open up alternatives to the neocolonial systems that continue to subjugate Hawai’ian identity? In their residency project, Sonia Levy and her collaborators think from within the depths of a very different space: the Venetian Lagoon. How can Ingersoll’s approach inform Levy’s submerged perspectives, initiating life-affirming passageways of knowing and being?
Part II: Meredith Root-Bernstein with Emanuele Coccia
In this conversation, the lagoon is a cocoon: a place of transformation where every single living being reciprocally transforms and is transformed by its environment. The interdisciplinary conservation scientist Meredith Root-Bernstein talks to the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, departing from his works Metamorphosis and The Life of Plants. Examining various approaches to agency and image-making, the residency project was interested in wetland flora as agentive beings instead of passive tools in lagoon restoration projects, echoing biological and ecological concepts such as developmental plasticity and ecosystem engineering. Our guests delve into this interest in moving beyond questions of observation, or gaze, toward a situated and embodied understanding of life on Earth.
Magical Fresh & Salty Conversations is produced by TBA21–Academy with the support of STARTS, an initiative by the European Commission.
Special thanks to our guests: Emanuele Coccia, Karin Amimoto Ingersoll, Sonia Levy, and Meredith Root-Bernstein.
Editor at large: María Montero Sierra
Sound edited by: Elena Zieser
Introduction and credits voice-over: Nathan Johnson
Music by horizonsnd.
Underwater sound recordings of the Venetian Lagoon by Sonia Levy and Jez Riley French
Produced by: Miriam Calabrese, María Montero Sierra, Katarina Rakušček, and the artists.
MORE-THAN-HUMAN UNDERWATER FILMING [podcast]
This episode of Magical Fresh & Salty Conversations features the artist and STARTS resident Sonia Levy in conversation with Erika Balsom, a London-based scholar and critic working on cinema, art, and their intersection. During their STARTS residency, Sonia Levy and her collaborators, environmental anthropologist Heather Swanson, ecologist Meredith Root Bernstein, and landscape architect Alexandra Arènes, looked at the Venetian Lagoon through the lens of nature-based solutions to mitigate flood risks. What issues arise from Venice’s long history of taming its waterscape? With a shared commitment to noticing more-than-human worlds, the group strived to forge their own understanding of the controversies arising from the lagoon’s water management.
In Sonia’s eyes, lagoons are fascinating places to think about the meeting of different bodies of water - fresh and saltwater. Filming underwater became a way to get to know the ephemeral world of the lagoon and its processes of transformation in the hope that this submerged perspective might also bring about speculative approaches to policy change.
Magical Fresh & Salty Conversations is produced by TBA21–Academy with the support of STARTS, an initiative by the European Commission.
Special thanks to our guests: Erika Balsom and Sonia Levy.
Editor at large: María Montero Sierra
Sound edited by: Elena Zieser
Introduction and credits voice-over: Nathan Johnson
Music by horizonsnd
Underwater sound recordings of the Venetian Lagoon by Sonia Levy and Jez Riley French
Produced by: Miriam Calabrese, María Montero Sierra, Katarina Rakušček, and the artists.
BECOMING LAGOON-LITERATE by Karin Ingersoll [text]
Produced to accompany the installation for Liquid Intelligence, curated by Chus Martínez with Soledad Gutiérrez and María Montero Sierra, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Text designed by Grégory Taniguchi-Ambos
POLITICS OF THE TURBID IMAGE: AGAINST UNDERWATER FASCIST VISUAL RHETORIC [article]
Ifor Duncan and Sonia Levy
Ifor Duncan and Sonia Levy
This article examines submerged environments and modes of visual mediation that are used to depict them. Attending to the turbid image as an optical register of complex material and political conditions, the authors challenge the normalization of clarity in underwater imaging and question assumptions of access, legibility and the opacity/transparency binary. Navigating between clear and turbid waters, they draw on feminist, postcolonial and anti-colonial approaches to understand these political ecologies and their mediation as critical sites of intervention. The article examines the depiction of coral environments by Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and naturalist Ernst Haeckel, whose visions inform lineages of ecofascist thinking and the contemporary resurgence of authoritarian environmental imaginaries. Finally, drawing on examples from their own practices and those of allied thinkers and practitioners, the authors attempt to redress these trajectories through anti-fascist submerged practices that foreground the murky, situated entanglements of water against reductive, extractive, totalizing visual regimes
Click the images to read the open-access article