TBA21 Solstice Festival

Join us at Ocean Space for a special solstice celebration. The TBA21 Solstice Festival features live performance, sound, and participatory installation in an evening dedicated to deep listening to the multispecies stories of the Venice lagoon, presenting TBA21–Academy’s residency program in Venice.

The artists in residency, Adelita Husni-Bey, Nandita Kumar, and Carlos Casas, convene this evening program to explore how the Venice Lagoon sounds, who speaks, and what information circulates through its waves. By situating the Venice Lagoon at the core of their research, this human-and-nature-made ecosystem emerges as a space for listening and a body that insists on being heard.

More information coming soon

The first to be heard are the workers from the refinery park of Port of Marghera. Oral histories, past and present stories, and resurrected poems gathered by Adelita Husni-Bey revive the 70s labour movement that early on understood the interdependencies between the Lagoon’s bodies and their own. The ecological harms inflicted as a by-product of their labour at the speed of the growing oil industry were felt both in the toxic waters and on the workers’ health, creating an early consciousness of the circularity of labour and ecological ties. Today, these early labour and ecological protests and demands arise no doubt of their relevance as the new labour forces —new waves of emigrants, often from environmental displacement— continue to reclaim their rights. Husni-Bey's work makes us participants in intervening in the legal systems, conveying a narrative that pertains to a human and very much to the more-than-human sphere.

Toxicity also speaks for itself. Nandita Kumar's focus on unraveling the properties of the phytoremediation plants begins by designing a sound composition to identify predominant chemical components in the lagoon’s water. Those harmful traces of copper, arsenic, and phenol from the port industry's activities flow through the salt marshes, colliding with the flora to ultimately create a form of healing. The capability of the phytoremediation plants to metabolize certain minerals and “clean” the waters brings us to educate ourselves on which minerals and levels are present in this liquid body, what plants coexist in their waters, and how they interact with each other. These precarious interrelations reflect a collective state of fragility, and the sounds they are assigned reiterate both human responsibility and the possibility of interactions. The chemical components and remnants of human activities are heard acoustically, and we start to understand the extent of their presence.

Who are thus our neighbours? Are we capable of hearing them? How do we communicate with each other? Carlos Casas proposes an unprecedented auditory map of the lagoon—a sonic journey from atmospheric ambiences to underwater depths, including migrating birds, fish, gray shrimp, and mussels, alongside human activities from ports, infrastructure, and research. As if we were hearing the lagoon for the first time, the invoked three-dimensional space serves to reflect on the origins of Venice and the various acoustic ways in which interspecies interactions have historically emerged. This is an invitation to hear the benthic zone merging into the rhythm of the water, as well as the presence of non-human sounds in popular Venetian songs that demonstrate how acoustically we are connected, even if we are not fully aware of the extent.

The artistic residencies are organized by TBA21–Academy within the framework of the S+T+ARTS 4WaterII, an initiative of the European Commission, with the support of Konsortium Deutsche Meeresforschung (KDM) and with the collaboration of Ca' Foscari, CNR-ISMAR, ETT, and Venice International University. The Local Expert Group that has supported the residents in their process includes Francesca Leon (ETT Solutions), Nefeli Myrodia (Onassis Foundation), Pietro Omodeo (Ca’ Foscari), Francesca Savoldi (Glasgow Caledonian University), and Jan-Stefan Fritz (Konsortium Deutsche Meeresforschung - KDM).

Adelita Husni-Bey is an artist and pedagogue invested in anarcho-collectivism, theater, and legal anthropology. She organizes workshops, publications, broadcasts, and exhibition work using non-competitive pedagogical models through the framework of contemporary art. Involving activists, architects, jurists, schoolchildren, spoken-word poets, actors, urbanists, physical therapists, students, and teachers, her work consists of making sites in which to practice collectively. Her work was part of the Italian pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, Venice, 2017. She has participated in exhibitions and biennials around the world and was a 2020-2022 Vera List Center Fellow.

Nandita Kumar “creates” at the intersection of art, sound, environmental science, technology, and community engagement. As a system designer, she explores the elemental process through which human beings construct meaning from their experiences, by creating sensory narratives through the usage of data, sound, video/animation, performance, smartphone apps, customized motherboards, solar/microwave sensors. Through interactive sound installations and her data-driven artistic experiments, she engages audiences in understanding complex environmental issues. Kumar is a DAAD fellow and has exhibited in Listening Biennale, Mardin Biennale, Ars Electronica, Pompidou, ZKM, Kiasma, among others.

Carlos Casas is a filmmaker and artist whose practice encompasses film, sound, and the visual arts. His works have been presented in international exhibitions such as the Biennials in Venice, Shanghai, Bangkok, and Istanbul. Retrospectives of his films have been presented at international festivals and cinemas from Madrid, Mexico, to Bruxelles, and his work has been exhibited and performed in international art institutions and galleries, such as Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou in Paris, NTU CCA Singapore; Hangar BicoccaMatadero Madrid, MAAT Lisbon, and Bozar, among others.