“Contested Waters” Venice Workshop: Aquatic Futurism

Contested Waters is a visual art project connecting aquatic aesthetics from Taipei, Venice, and Kaohsiung. Swimming into the ways in which waters are militarized, capitalized, and troubled in the age of hyper geopolitical frictions, in 2024 we launch the tri-year project by first gathering together in the upcoming workshop in Venice, in October 11-12th, at S.a.L.E. Docks. The 2024 workshop focuses on the theme of Aquatic Futurism, bringing together Italian and Taiwanese scholars, artists, and activists to explore and re-imagine an aquatic urban design in our time of planetary polycrisis.

In the 2-day workshop, participants will take lagoon walking, boating, wetland journeying, sharing bodies of water in planting, listening, sounding, thinking and feeling with the contested politics of waterways. By staying with the trouble of waters with the practitioners in Taiwanese and Italian critical ecology art network and the anti-big-cruse movement, we hope to explore new horizons toward conceiving and re-conceiving aquatic futures as critical material connections.

The workshop is a part of the Contested Waters exhibition project 2024-2025 (Taipei, Kaohsiung, & Venice), curated by Dr. I-Yi Hsieh (Multispecies Justice research cluster, the International Center for Cultural Studies, Taiwan N.Y.C.U.), in collaboration with S.a.L.E. Docks art collective & the Art for Critical Ecology network in Venice, along with the Environmental Humanities program at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

Font Design | Yajou Chang