This post begins with a bit from a poem I wrote while in Venice and proceeds with a three-part reflection from the four weeks I spent in the laguna.
en el agua alta forjarías una estatua de una sensación que se hunde una potencia que se funde donde te esperaría mareado por lo brillante que sean la maniobra de dedos me desearías tocado por el oleaje de tu mano al profundo estaría tocadísimo quieres que te escriba y quiero que me leas así me volvería un libro y la playa otra biblioteca de manuscritos difuntos húmedos e iluminados esperaríamos que nos alcance hacia la laguna desde llanos inciertos me prestarías la mano susurrando sabor de arena te rellenaría la boca que exigente es un deseo el único que no se derrubiaría
I’ve been reflecting slowly on the last month, the month of May, a month I spent in a city in a laguna. The world knows Venice, and I knew it — or at least in a way. But when I arrived I forgot that Venice and got to know this one: a place of glorified antiquity, remembered for its prosperity, celebrated for its ability to concentrate cultural capital before there was even such an idea as cultural capital, mixing people and crafts into syncretic forms, raising from the Po, drowning in the sea, dependent on exchanges made possible by sea and aircraft burning fuel that slowly but surely raise the waters around it. How poetic and how tragic and how usual it is that the very substance that protected Venice and made it an attractive and safe place to live at the north of the sea is that which promises its undoing. The city made itself from water and water will unmake it. It seems only correct. Only how things work, really. Everything I used to make my self is that which continually undoes me. I go on filling myself with letters, lovers, and libations and the more I offer myself as a site for reception, the less of me and the more of them I am. Like the city, I get washed away. Like the water, they seep into my pores and leak up from my foundations. The “I” of me gets eroded, blown elsewhere, deposited, and grows with fresh seeds. And who was “I” anyway?
In Venice I found I was searching to find the language of the place. Italian, yes — to get my tongue, teeth, and jaw moving together in ways they were unfamiliar with. I practiced its vowels and double consonants. I studied, very briefly, its verbs and their conjugates. But even more than Italian I dreamt of speaking the language of the laguna. How it breaths, whispers, mumbles, spits, and hums. I wanted to talk to it — a interlocutor, like any other, comprised of innumerable and heterogeneous parts, holding secrets, and sometimes with much to say.
I spent my days crossing its surface, breathing in its sulphates and iodines, receiving its saline aroma as a greeting each morning through my window. I saw other people read the laguna like a an book that always lives off the shelf, saw them speak with it like a familiar, watched them confide in it and how it confides in them. There’s no classes where they teach its tongue, and though there are a lot of books that allow you to learn its vocabulary, grammar, and syntax at a distance, there is no way to learn laguna without seasons of careful conversation with its patterns and flows.
I lived there for a month and only began to recognize the routine of its tides, waves, surges, and stillness by the very end. I cannot imagine arriving to somewhere like Venice and believing I know exactly how to speak with it, let alone speak on its behalf. There are many who try. I guess that’s what humans like to do: try. Even in vain. I tried, I guess, too. In my own way — slowly, gently, with humility. One day I’ll return and pick up where I left off learning laguna.
What should architecture do for us? How do we engage with the built environment? How do we build the environment? These are questions asked by the exhibition Picoplanktonics, Canada’s contribution to the 19th Venice Biennale of Architecture. The exhibition is staged as part sculpture installation, part living laboratory. The researchers behind the project have spent the past five years fabricating and prototyping structures that are alive with a kind of cyanobacteria (aka picoplankton, aka PCC 7002) that not only photosynthesizes to create oxygen but also bio-mineralizes to create calcium carbonate which permanently removes CO2 from the atmosphere. Over time these mineral deposits add up and reinforce the fragile sculptures (which are made of sand, glue, and the bacteria), making it potentially useful for construction.
I was lucky to be invited for a fellowship with the Canada Council for the Arts to work in the national pavilion for the opening month of the Biennale where I got to learn how to take care of these living structures, attuning myself to their slow growth and subtle changes over time. Andrea Shin Ling, head researcher behind Picoplanktonics, spoke to us about, in her words, “troubling architecture” : challenging our expectations of what architecture should do. Should architecture make our lives easier, or make our lives better? In a climate crisis and sixth mass extinction, what is architecture’s ethical obligation? With what materials and ideologies do we make? Who are we and who is us?
Troubling makes me immediately think of inconvenience. As Laura Berlant put it in her posthumously published On the Inconvenience of Other People, “‘inconvenience’ describes a feeling state that registers one’s implication in the pressure of coexistence” (pg.3). For Berlant, it’s “mostly an experience of everyday aversion, adjustment, minor resistance, and exhaustion” (pg.6) that we are actually driven toward while at the same time bothered by. We’re bothered that we want that which bothers us, but want it to bother us in a regular way insofar that it makes us step outside the ourselves and experience the world anew.
I stared to see the sculptures at the Canadian Pavilion as inconvenient objects. They require a whole lot of care, maintenance, and fine tuning to make work. They’re fragile, unstable, and prone to decomposition. As its caretakers, we had to adjust our senses to that of this hybrid sand-glue-microbe, knowing that its survival wouldn’t be easy for us but might, hopefully, benefit us in the long run.
