Surface Tension: Venice and the Undercurrents of Mediation

How to move through a city that comes from the water as privileged frame of reference, that thinks every aspect of itself through the waterfront as accesspoint, that has agreed on liquid grounds of supply and disposal, of spatial scarcity and temporal submergence. A city that has challenged its inhabitants and visitors to move and to sense otherwise while undeniably and irreversibly turning itself into everything that comes and goes with being one of the top destinations of globalized tourism. Who lives here, who walks here, who dares to swim, who needs to be carried?
Luce Irigaray famously challenged Martin Heidegger’s notion of dwelling as critically reiterated toward aerial matter. Echoing Astrida Neimanis and their queering of Irigaray’s elemental conversations, Venice urges me to ask what is at stake when dwelling on and with the liquid element. The city facilitates water in its omnipresence as an infrastructural preset and as a resource. But not only in terms of it being the vital factor for carbon-based life, but rather of it being the solvent for an imaginary. That is the resource of water in contemporary Venice. A figuration of a picture opportunity and a brief but riskless adventure in getting lost in the lagoon maze. The cruiseships have been banned – so, fingers crossed, that at least Piazza San Marco is flooded while we are here.