Events

Past Event

Venice Rising Series: Elemental Venice

November 23, 2020
1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
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We hope you will join us on Monday, November 23, 2020, 1:00pm EST for the semester's third event, entitled Elemental Venice featuring Shaul Bassi (Center for the Humanities and Social Change, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) and Daniela Zyman (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21), Vienna) in conversation with Jorge Otero-Pailos (GSAPP, Historic Preservation, Columbia University). The registration link is attached below. 

Focusing on two environmental initiatives recently inaugurated in Venice, namely the Center for Environmental Humanities at Ca' Foscari and TBA21-Academy’s Ocean Space, we will discuss approaches to a new "stoicheology" – from the Greek stoicheia (elements) – in an attempt to reanimate and reimagine nature-cultural assemblages, detected in the Venetian lagoon and beyond. Elemental ideas have always belonged to the realm of art, literature, science, and mythology, and are being reanimated today, not as fossilized anachronism, but as collective engines for inquiry and imagination. It is precisely because of their archaic and deep-routed presence in nearly all human accounts, that they might serve us well today and gesture toward a resonant reconnection between “material,” “thought,” and “agency.”

In advance of our event, participants may wish to read Shaul Bassi's NY Times OpEd Waters Close over Venice (Nov. 15, 2019) and a recent article in The Art Newspaper on Ocean Space and the current exhibition Oceans in Transformation.