Exhibition concept

The AquaGranda exhibition is a living portrait of a socio-natural ecosystem that, despite its fragility, seeks a new balance for the future of the lagoon and its people. The exhibition offers a series of perspectives and overviews of a historically proactive and resilient coastal community threatened by increasing risk related to rising sea levels and the extremes of weather events that can affect tides.

The works, co-created by artists and researchers from the many testimonies of the citizens who provided the raw material for AquaGranda's digital memory, illustrate their reactions and relationships during the 2019 extreme event.

These reconstructions weave back the meanings embedded in the collected multimedia materials and highlight what these fragments of memories represent for the community that experienced the event firsthand.

The exhibition invites visitors to remember the November 2019 flood together in one of the most evocative places in Venice, the Church of Santa Maria delle Penitenti. The Pio Loco is one of the few buildings in the lagoon city where traces of the 2019 event have remained crystallized. Through this exhibition, we would like to bring the visitor back to the heart of one of the most tangible socio-natural events related to climate change.

With this exhibition, we aim to build an engaging and multifaceted narrative of an extreme event, to understand a story that intertwines environment and society.