The Season of the Aliens, Chiara Famengo, November 2025
As a fisherman of the Venetian Lagoon confesses, “we cannot read the lagoon anymore.” His words speak not only of loss, but of an epistemic rupture – a way of knowing unmoored. The lagoon, like every living waterscape the grief council tends to, has always been mutable: a dynamic confluence of currents, sediments, tides, and human and more-than-human gestures rippling through the system. Yet these movements, once legible, now unfold too quickly, too violently, for the senses to translate. What does it mean to inhabit such uncertainty – to hold space for what exceeds prediction, to remain in conversation with those living at the edge of unravelling? How might we accompany endings – plural, overlapping, unresolved – with slowness and care that does not seek closure? What anchors remain in an ever-shifting landscape?
Chiara Famengo holds ‘the Season of the Aliens’, sharing her current project, AMALGAMA, as part of ongoing witnessing to the Venetian Lagoon. The work turns to local algae, often discarded as “aliens”, and explores how they might be meaningfully integrated into local ecologies, food systems, economies, and culture. Rising sea levels, increased salinity, the arrival of non-native species, and eroding marshes are reshaping the lagoon’s fabric. Amid these changes, seaweeds are not merely surviving—they are thriving: acting as bioindicators, offering potential ingredients, and pointing toward new forms of adaptation. Rather than defending against change, AMALGAMA invites a choreography of care—a way of living with uncertainty and imagining futures that flow, as the lagoon does, beyond containment. The project is supported by the Tidal Arts, funded by the European Commission.
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