Otherwordly Stories/Storie dell’Altro Mondo

public programme, 2022

‘Otherworldly Stories’ is a two day public programme that reinterprets human-plant relationships in terms of co-cultivation to explore alternative configurations of the present. From libraries of natural materials to the cultivated fields of the Venetian Lagoon, from science fiction to seed banks, the events probe the blurred threshold between human and non-human in an attempt to define a material politics for social and ecological justice.

Day one focuses on infrastructures and methods of cataloguing and preserving the living embedded in two archives: the seed bank and the natural materials library. The film ‘Wild Relatives’ by Jumana Manna and the workshop ‘Syntropic Materials’ by Eugenia Morpurgo insert the non-human perspective in these contexts to overcome the binomial technoscience-local traditions and rethink preservation in the face of the climate crisis.

Day two tells stories of climate catastrophe where the future is not an 'other' world. On the contrary, it is already nested in the present reality. A menu responding to rising salinity in the fields of the Venetian Lagoon curated by Prometheus_open Food Lab dialogues with examples from science fiction literature and cinema presented by Marco Malvestio. Both events overcome the human-climate divide and reconfigure our place in the world.