When I Breathe, I Swallow the Lagoon/Quando Respiro, Digerisco la Laguna

performance, 2022

When I Breathe, I Swallow the Lagoon is a performance-walk that chronicles the bonds between humans and non-humans in a toxic environment. It does so by taking participants to where the landscape of the Venetian Lagoon rebels against binary geographical and temporal coordinates: land becomes liquid; emerged islands are part of the seabed; past and future blur into continuous present. Set in this amphibious Lagoon, never fully emerged or submerged, the performance moves along the infrastructure of an oil refinery in Venice’s petrochemical industrial site. Walking, standing, sitting, and breathing collectively, participants’ bodies are orchestrated into an immersion that fluctuates between unsettling proximity to toxicity and the empowering intimacy they collectively embrace.