07/05/2025 time: 18.00 – 21.00
Ocean Space – Chiesa di San Lorenzo, Castello 5069 – Venezia
NIn the evocative setting of the former Church of San Lorenzo, home to Ocean Space in Venice, the Biodiversity Gateway and the Institute of Marine Sciences of the National Research Council (CNR-ISMAR) present Luminous Ecologies: artistic experimentation with the diversity of life. The protagonists of the meeting are artists Andrea Caretto and Raffaella Spagna, in dialogue with researchers Alessandra Pugnetti, Amelia De Lazzari (CNR-ISMAR), and Alba L’Astorina (CNR-IREA). The event marks the publication of the monograph Bright Ecologies. Caretto/Spagna: Experiences, Forms, Materials, which documents over twenty years of artistic research by the duo, guided by a philosophy that combines aesthetics, care for materials, transformation, and collective participation.
Precursors of a radical and undisciplined artistic approach, Caretto and Spagna explore the relationship between art, nature, and community, working with material and immaterial elements—earth, seeds, rocks, microorganisms, but also archives, memories, and human relationships—giving rise to spaces for shared reflection. Their works are based on a philosophical, poetic, and political practice, in dialogue with post-humanist currents of thought, ecocentric theories, and new materialisms. The meeting will be animated by a selection of objects, sculptures, and artifacts collected over time by the artists, presented as “story activators,” capable of stimulating narratives, visions, and reflections on ecology, biodiversity, matter, and coexistence. The conversation will take the form of a performance, punctuated by moments of ‘shared nourishment’ created in collaboration with TOCIA! Cucina e comunità, a Venetian gastronomic collective engaged in research into culinary traditions, food recovery and the creative fusion of knowledge. Through convivial gestures and local ingredients, TOCIA! interprets cuisine as a cultural and social practice capable of activating new forms of dialogue and transformation.
Ecologie Luminose is an immersive and collective experience that invites us to rethink the role of art in the contemporary world, not only as an aesthetic language, but as a practice of care, listening, and transformation, capable of generating new ecologies of thought and living. The meeting is the first event in the “Biodiversity Dialogues” series, a cycle of events promoted as part of the Biodiversity Gateway of the National Biodiversity Future Center (NBFC), funded by NextGeneration EU funds.
Organized by:
Biodiversity Gateway
Cnr-Ismar
Cnr-Dsstta – GdL Natura, Ricerca e Società
Ocean Space
TBA21-Academy
Organizational contact:
Elisabetta Russo, PhD
Cnr-Ismar
Arsenale Tesa, Castello 2737/f, 30122 – Venezia
elisabetta.russo@cnr.it
Access: registration/accreditation
Free admission subject to availability, with mandatory registration on Eventbrite
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