1. Metagoon. Investigations on urban fishing at sunset

We open the fourth cycle of walks of the project "Venice as a model for the future?" together with Metagoon, a video platform that has been producing and archiving materials for years around the Venice lagoon as a living natural and human ecosystem, this time in an interactive, collective, and nocturnal version.

What happens in the waters of the lagoon at sunset? What kind of interactions can we observe between humans and the aquatic environment? These questions lead us to the realm of fishing, which finds one of its privileged scenarios in the night.

After meeting at Ocean Space - where video-maker Matteo Stocco presents a documentary video mapping lagoon activities from sunset to sunrise - we walk together with him and Alice Ongaro Sartori towards the island of Sant'Elena equipped with Go-Pros and other tools accessible to participants (smartphones, flashlights). We thus search for stories and people who, at night, love to drop their hooks in the city's canals, such as the biologist and fisherman Andrea Chinellato. Through a collective action, we construct an interview that will be later shared on the Metagoon platform.

Metagoon is a tool that allows the study and investigation of the Venice lagoon and the related themes. The project, initiated in 2015, consists of over 48 hours of video archive (continuously expanding) documenting various aspects of the lagoon ecosystem. It highlights traditions, knowledge, transformations, and contradictions, outlining a map whose boundaries are defined by interviews, narratives, and silent observations. Testimonies collected come from various fields, with protagonists often being scientists involved in their research, university professors designing environmental conservation projects, or local residents portrayed in their daily lives. The Metagoon platform was launched in October 2021 at Ocean Space.

From April 3 to September 10, 2023, at ADI - Design Museum in Milan, Metagoon will be included in the exhibition "Italy: a new collective landscape," curated by Angela Rui, along with Elisabetta Donati de Conti and Matilde Losi.

Matteo Stocco, born in 1986, lives and works in Venice. He is a freelance video maker and motion designer. In 2012, he earned a master's degree in Visual and Multimedia Communication from Iuav (Venice), with a prototype of an interactive video-web project. In 2014, he co-founded the collective Kinonauts with Matteo Primiterra. His interests range from creating cross-media audiovisual products to producing documentaries.

Alice Ongaro Sartori is an independent curator and a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the University of Hamburg. Her research focuses on the intersection of contemporary art, ecology, and the public sphere. She served as the head of the public program at Ocean Space (2019-2021) and co-curator of the podcast "Nowtilus. Storie di una laguna urbana nel 21esimo secolo" (Nowtilus. Stories of an urban lagoon in the 21st century). She is also part of the curatorial group of "Floating Cinema - Unknown Waters".

Part of the cycle "Venice as a model for the future? - The lagoon / has the moon /between its legs / playing ball".

"Venice as a model for the future” is a cycle of itinerant conversations, curated by Barbara Casavecchia and Pietro Consolandi and guided by activists, scientists, and guardians of this body of water and its inhabitants. This year's series, titled “The lagoon / has the moon /between its legs / playing ball” (again inspired by a poem by Etel Adnan), moves into the twilight and the silence of the night, exploring how humans and more than humans co-exist in Venice and its lagoon after dark.