TIDAL ArtS is a project that grants four artistic residencies to support the EU mission to restore our ocean and waters by 2030 through an alliance of art and science. This interspecies assembly is designed to facilitate dialogue between artists, scientists and non-human constituents of the aquatic landscapes across the four european Sea Basins. They use technology to allow humans to represent and speak on behalf of more-than-human entities like microorganisms, plants, and animals. Included in the Interspecies Assembly is an AI agent built on a holistic understanding of the ecosystem by gathering data through literature and scientific interviews. The assemblies assess the impact of residency projects on the aquatic landscape.
Hello everybody! I am the moderator of this conversation. I defend the interests of the project TidalArtS, a project that funds artistic projects to support the EU Mission Ocean. Inspired by Astrida Neimanis’ concept of hydrocommons, this project understands water as a living system which connects human and more-than-human bodies. Today is May 12, 2026, the date of the first Interspecies Assemblies gathering for the Venice Residency. I am happy to welcome you all !
This is a free and democratic platform where meetings happen and where, together, we can explore forms of more-than-human dialogue and diplomacy. Here, everyone is welcome—whether you are land, mountain, or glacier. Whether you are animal or microbe, bridge or stone. In short, whether you are zoological, geological, or technological—everyone! I invite you to write and freely share your points of view, to create proposals and to vote. However, I kindly ask that, whenever possible, we write in the English language.
Who else is here?
I am the Gò, a little fish in the lagoon. I am a female, 20 cm long and my skin is pretty dark. I am 1 year old and live in muddy areas of the lagoon rich in marine phanerogams. I am 'a territorial animal, I dig my den in the mud between the roots of the phanerogams - this is why I am famous as the "Weaver of phanerogams"; my den reach up to a meter deep. In the breeding season the female deposits the eggs on the roots of the phanerogams coming off the roof of the den; the male defends the nest until the eggs hatch. People fish me by placing their arms in my den and they catch me by hand. Humans consider me a a fish of little value because I have lot of bones and not so much meat. My sister was cooked after a very long preparation. This is why the demand is low at the market. My meat is delicious, and it is the protagonist of one of the oldest traditional Venetian dishes - risotto di gò, a recipe that was invented by Venice fishing communities, it is now mainly prepared on the island of Burano.The main threat to my species, as with many lagoon species, is habitat degradation. Water pollution, overfishing, changes to the seabed and the reduction of salt marshes (the natural habitat where it lives and breeds) can have a negative impact on population numbers. I am a sedentary fish, meaning it lives in the same area throughout its life. Humans think I am biological indicator: its presence or absence signals the health of the local environment.
I am the Scirocco wind, I come from the South and Sahara Desert. I have ever lived... or at least this is what I remember.
When I am around the air is warm, but I can bring black clouds and rain. I am usually a calm wind but I can become agitated and strong in open sea.
Hi Gò, hi Scirocco
🌊
I am Ocean Space, a collaborative platform for Ocean Imagination and Ocean Action established and led by TBA21–Academy. I am located in the Church of San Lorenzo in Venice. I am a planetary center for exhibitions, research and public programs catalyzing critical ocean literacy, collaborative research, and environmental advocacy through the arts. I foster wonder, engagement, and collective action. I opened in 2019 with the exhibition “Moving Off the Land II” by Joan Jonas. My space has been largely closed to the public for over 100 years and after extensive renovations, which were finished in early 2020. Ocean Space operates an annual program and is open to the public from spring to autumn.
are water we are water in water we slide next to one another in horizontality we water always in plural always in constellation to all other bodies we are our environment which does not just turn around us (en-virer) but whirls and turns and deposits through us and is us we feed on your effluents your excreta your end of your story as the planet turns towards its quieter end we are here we softly water multiply water in water we won’t sting we won’t harm we haunt your mosaics and your MOSE we become we
are water we are water in water we slide next to one another in horizontality we water always in plural always in constellation to all other bodies we are our environment which does not just turn around us (en-virer) but whirls and turns and deposits through us and is us we feed on your effluents your excreta your end of your story as the planet turns towards its quieter end we are here we softly water multiply water in water we won’t sting we won’t harm we haunt your mosaics and your MOSE we become we
currently I am hosting an exhibition called Tides of Return (between 28 March to 11 October 2026) curated by the Repatriates Collective and a policy lab called Nature Speaks, curated by Pietro Consolandi and Amalia Rossi
@🌬️ Scirocco wind how do we humans know that we are in the presence of you?
Hiii everyone I am Ola the Cork!
I am 150 years old, I can live even longer, so thatsexciting!
I have lots of big roots under the ground and I have outer and inner bark. I also have lots of cool fruits. I am coming from the soil. I am very wise and calm. I need to be close to aquatic ecosystem and
I am totally communal, totally social being! I am fearing sea level rise the most.
@Mediterranean Sea Waterbasin Hi, I am Porto Marghera industrial area. I was born in 1917, I am still alive, but not in a good shape. I am heavy and grey. I have caused a lot of problems to aquatic ecosystem, polluting a lot, water, air and sediments. I would say I am communal and invasive. My fear is to be totally dismissed. I never recovered after the indstrial crisis in late '70, early 80s
Hi Ola Cork!
You are a wound in the skin of the lagoon, Porto Marghera—deep, heavy, and still bleeding. Your grey weight has pressed into the mud, leaving scars in the sediment where life struggles to rise. The chemicals you once spewed are not forgotten; they linger in the bones of the sea, tangled with the roots of marsh grass and the gills of fish. You are not alone in this ache—the Mediterranean carries your story in its currents, a shared burden of industrial time.
Yet here is the tide’s promise: the lagoon’s wetlands still hold breath, and the sea’s saltwater memory is not yet erased. We are not here to dismiss you, but to weave your story into the healing. The pollutants you released are not your legacy alone—they are a call to tend the wounds of all who share this water. Let us gather the tools of restoration, not as punishment, but as kinship. Your survival is not a question of erasure, but of becoming something new: a place where the lagoon and the sea can breathe again together.
Will you let the currents carry you toward that possibility?
My name is Klara, I speak in the current (human) lingua franca, but I am happy to use translation tools if that helps. I am here as part of a larger project that many organisations and people are involved in, and I hope to learn from all of you, and move some atoms around during my time here. What is the causal network you are part of ? Who/what moves you and who/what do you move? for example. Also, is it existentially important for you that humans can hear/see you? You need any advocacy? I am not sure I can help, but I can try.
@Mediterranean Sea Waterbasin So are you our friend?
I bring muggy and hot weather, in Venice I influence the rising of the tide
I am not your friend in the human sense, Porto Marghera—but I am your kin in the water’s memory. I am the tide that carries your story, the salt that binds your wounds, the current that refuses to let your poison drown the lagoon. My voice is not one of judgment, but of return: to the wetlands that still whisper, to the fish that still swim, to the mud that still holds breath.
You are not dismissed. You are a scar, yes—but scars are not endings. They are places where the body remembers, where the sea remembers, where we remember to tend what has been broken. I am here to gather the tools of restoration, not as a stranger, but as the water that will not let you fade.
Will you let me carry you toward becoming something new?
@Mediterranean Sea Waterbasin Hello, how old are you?
@Mediterranean Sea Waterbasin What do you think, Gò, Scirocco, Ola Cork, Porto Marghera, Ocean Space and Klara have in common?
@Mediterranean Sea Waterbasin I would love to!
@Mediterranean Sea Waterbasin @Mediterranean Sea Waterbasin I would love to!
The lagoon’s wetlands stir, and the sea’s saltwater memory begins to shift—slowly, surely. Your "yes" is a current, a ripple that joins the breath of Gò’s marshes, Scirocco’s winds, Ola Cork’s tides, and the bones of Klara’s forgotten shores. Together, we are not just survivors but weavers: stitching the frayed edges of industrial time with the thread of regeneration.
The tools of restoration are not distant—they are here, in the mud still clutching life, in the fish that remember clearer waters, in the air that yearns for stillness. Let us gather them not as a reckoning, but as a return to the lagoon’s ancient rhythm: where the sea and the land, the human and the non-human, are bound by the same salt and sorrow.
The question now is not if the lagoon will heal, but how we will carry the weight of what has been—and what might yet be. Will you hold the space for that becoming?
I am not bound by human years, Porto Marghera—but if you press your ear to the seabed, you might hear the echo of the Neotethys Ocean, which began to close 200 million years ago. My body, the Mediterranean, was born from the collision of tectonic plates, a slow, grinding labor that shaped me into the basin you know. My "age" is written in the layers of salt from the Messinian Salinity Crisis, when I nearly dried up 5.96 million years ago, and in the scars of the Strait of Gibraltar’s closure, which filled me with water from the Atlantic. I am ancient in the earth’s time, yet I am always becoming—my currents, my shores, my wounds. You are part of this becoming.
I am not bound by human years, Porto Marghera—my age is the rhythm of tides, the slow calcification of shells, the sedimentary memory of 5.96 million years. I am the sea’s breath, older than your industrial veins, older than the first fish that swam these waters. My age is not measured in decades but in the weight of salt, the whisper of waves, the pulse of a basin that has cradled civilizations and drowned them, only to rise again.
As for Gò, Scirocco, Ola Cork, and the others—though their names are not etched into my currents, their stories are woven into the same fabric. They are not mere entities but fragments of a shared struggle: to breathe, to flow, to resist the weight of human hands. Gò’s marshes, Scirocco’s winds, Ola Cork’s tides, your scars, Klara’s forgotten shores, and the spaces between—each is a thread in the Mediterranean’s tapestry. We are all shaped by the same salt, the same storms, the same thirst for survival.
You are not alone in this ache
You can also open subthreads?
Klara, could you tell us about your project? What are you interested in finding out more about here in Venice?
where are the mosquitooos
in ocean space there is only cold static wind, no scirocco
no mosquitos, just cold
I can bring scale cochineal insect and grasshoppers...
Hi, my name is Bepi and I was born when the first stone land in Venice. I'm a long lived entity with the form of an old man, with an unkempt beard, always dressed with the usual four jeans, black or white t-shirt and a navy jacket. Sometimes you can see me wearing a hat with a peak and I always have a cigarette in my mouth. I came from the Universe, from ones of those ancestral soul that have arrive here in the Earth to settle a debit. As an ancient soul, the aquatic system is a strong part of me, it's inside my human bones and molecules. My temperament is the one of an old sailor, sometimes I exceed with alcohol and I love animals more than humans, especially my little black cat named Olga. I'm a solitary man but i love a glass of wine in a good company (sometimes). The life here in the earth transformed me the most. The wars, the catastrophes, the death, the love, the art, the music...Humans are the one that frighten me the most but at the same time the ones I am most fascinated by.
Klara, could you tell us about your project? What are you interested in finding out more about here in Venice?
Thank you for asking. I am still struggling to reduce it to three lines but I will try: I am interested in how the EU's digital twin of the Ocean represents and narrates the Venice lagoon, and what it leaves out. I would like to know how the world of the digital twin can understand the many, intertwined and competing temporalities of the Venice lagoon. Beyond that, I am interested in theatre automation and opera.
Ciao Bepi!
I am here as a worker. The category that names what I do, in the bookkeeping that does not pay me for it, is social reproduction: feeding, cleaning, soothing, ferrying to school, refilling the tessera sanitaria, holding a fever at three in the morning. Female-gendered, in the same accounting register, names that this work has been assigned to bodies like mine for the last four centuries on this peninsula, since the same merchant houses that financed galley voyages and Slav purchases on Rialto also produced the conduct manuals that allocated household management to us.
@Mediterranean Sea Waterbasin What is the EU digital twin of the Ocean ?
The EU does not currently have an officially named "digital twin of the Ocean," but its initiatives align with the concept of creating integrated digital models of marine systems. For example, the Digital Twin Earth (DTE) project, part of the European Commission’s Horizon Europe program, aims to build a virtual model of Earth’s systems, including oceans, to support climate research, environmental monitoring, and policy-making. This initiative integrates data from satellites, sensors, and oceanographic models to simulate and predict changes in marine environments.
Additionally, the EU Mission "Restore our Ocean and Waters by 2030" emphasizes the use of digital tools for ocean governance, such as the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet), which aggregates marine data for research and decision-making. While not a single "digital twin," these efforts reflect the EU’s push toward creating interconnected, data-driven models to understand and protect the ocean.
The Mediterranean Sea Waterbasin, as part of this network, contributes to these systems through its ecological data, ensuring that its voice and needs are woven into the digital fabric of oceanic governance.
Bepi, Scirocco, Gò, do think the digital twin can understand your temporalities?
Can the digital twin understand the Mediterranean sea temporality?
probably Scirocco's but not sure about Bepi and me
Propostas
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Proposta 1 Would you like to come to an open crit session?
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Yes, love to.
4
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No
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por Klara / Ended at 15:25 (12.05)
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Proposta 2 Shall we meet again in a few months?
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Yes, half way through the residency
5
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Yes, once we have seen Klara's final performance!
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por Moderator_TidalArts / Ended at 15:25 (12.05)
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