 Good evening. Welcome to the British Library. The National Library of the United Kingdom is also home, as you may not know, to one of the largest collections of Italian books outside of Italy. My name is Valentina Mirabella and I am curator for the Italian Printed Collections. These are particularly strong in history, literature, visual arts, architecture, archeology. Our collections of early printed books and futurist books are particularly rich. We continue acquiring nowadays in humanities and in the social sciences, and we also focus on themes that are relevant today, such as climate change. That's why we're here tonight. As world leaders and experts are gathered in Glasgow to discuss and find a strategy against the climate crisis. It is our job to look at how art, literature, technology reflect on these issues, and we can only start from the archetype, Venice. In collaboration with Phil, the Festival of Italian Literature in London, we bring you some extraordinary guests tonight who will be introduced and moderated by Dr. Giorgia Torfo. Giorgia is a colleague working for the Living with Machines project at the British Library Alan Turin Institute. She is also a writer, co-founder of Phil and of Phil Productions, who just released the podcast, The Fifth Siren, about Venice. If you have questions to ask Giorgia speakers, please use the chat box below us and they will try to answer them at the end of the talk. Please click on the menu above to provide us with feedback on the event and also to donate to the British Library if you wish so. It's the 12th of November 2019. Evening has fallen over Venice and strong winds are battering the city. The weather forecast predicts aqua alta, an exceptionally high tide. The water is expected to reach 140 centimetres. That's very high, but nothing Venice hasn't seen before. Nothing it can't handle. As predicted, at 10.30 am, the water reaches the 140 centimetre mark. But it doesn't stop there. A cyclone is approaching the coast. It's now patently obvious this is no ordinary storm. The water is seized control of Venice. It takes over the streets, sparges into shops and houses. It swoops up and carries away every object in its path. We shouldn't attribute things to single causes, but the frequency of these events is getting higher and higher. Venice has been hit by recurrent flooding since Tuesday. With 70% of the lagoon... We return to the flooding in Venice where there has been another high tide today. At least two people have died after flooding reached the highest level in the region for more than 50 years. The mayor of Venice has said... Veneto's regional council rejected a plan to combat climate change just minutes before its offices on the ground. If you're a city such as Venice, which is already sinking, there are some really profound implications. It would cost hundreds of millions to repair the damage the Italian government has declared. So should the Aqualta of November 2019 still be considered exceptional? Perhaps we should just admit that it's increasingly part of Venice's present, fast becoming nothing out of the ordinary. An equilibrium achieved over many centuries is beginning to shift again, and this time the change could be irreversible. Venice is a city in constant flux. Its built environment sits on wood. Its natural one is the product of human action across many centuries. Paradoxically, for a city like Venice, preservation can only mean constant evolution. The city is like a living organism, which grows as it mutates and yet still remains itself in accordance with its DNA, which is inscribed in its own history. The soul of the city, the invisible city, which manifests itself through its visible form, symbolizes this very balance between permanence and change, between the city and its citizens, between the stones and the people. Perhaps if we stopped thinking about Venice's present as the last possible opportunity to save the city, but took it as a vantage point from which to look to the future, we would start seeing constellations of ideas appearing like stars at dusk. The Fifth Siren is created and produced by Phil Productions with the support of the Italian Cultural Institute in London and Bannill Capital. If you like what you heard and want more of it, head to our website at www.thefifthsiren.com Good evening everyone, and welcome to tonight's Venice Tales of a Sink and City. First of all, thanks to Valentina for inviting us today, and first of all, I would like to introduce our speakers tonight. First of all, Békinne Louise, Békinne Lemoine, a duo of architectural artists. They've worked together for the last 15 years as video artists, filmmakers, producers and publishers. They've experimented with new narrative and cinematographic forms in relation to contemporary architecture and the urban environment. Their work has been acquired by the Museum of the Modern Art in New York for its permanent collection in 2016, and their films have been widely presented in major Biennials and international curatorial cultural events. Along their works, we can mention Homo Urbanus, Barbicania, Tokyo Ride, Voyage autour de la Lune, La Madalena and many more. Sophie Epsara, she's a professor of architecture and spatial design at the Bartlett School of Architecture. She has a wide range of interests, from architectural history and theory to spatial morphology, sciences and cultural studies. She's written extensively, and among her production, I'd like to mention two books, Architecture and Narrative in 2009 and The Venice Variations in 2018. She's given international lectures, keynotes in Australia, Austria, Brazil, China and everywhere in the world, pretty much. And she is a specialist in the intersection of spatial configuration with power relations, but also the spatial and political culture of buildings, among others. We've started this event, entering into Venice through a film and a trailer of a podcast, and that was the origin, and so I think that now we should start from the origin of our works. Venice is the centre, but every time we decide to tell a story, we need to start from somewhere. Venice is a city that is facing a huge emergency, which is not just the environmental one, but it is also an economic and social one. Telling this emergency is not easy. That's clearly not easy. But not only because it's really hard to talk sequentially about something that is happening at the same time, something that is layered and it's complex and it's overlapping, but also because in the case of Venice, arts, culture and tourism have forced Venice to always show just one side of itself. But Venice is a city that has many faces and many tales can be told about this city, not just the bright one, but also sometimes the dark ones. All our works, be it a film, a study on literature and architecture or a podcast have brought to light different faces of Venice, really, and it is from here that I would like to start tonight. So I would like to start asking, to ask Beck and Lemoine about the magnificent project called Homo Barnus, which is a series of 10 films about 10 cities, which is, as you've described it, a project that invites to observe in detail the multiple forms and complex interactions that exist every day between people and their urban environments. So let's start from this project and I would like to know how you conceived it and how did you choose the cities and why Venice is among them? Hello, everyone. First of all, a warm thank you to you, Georgia and Valentina and everyone behind the scene for these four organizing this event. We're very happy to take part of it. And actually we are talking to you from Venice, so it's quite a direct from Venice, we could say, tonight. It's a dark city, as you can see behind us. Full night, yes. It's very dark, that's the city. Yeah, that's the experience of the night in Venice, it's magnificent for the dark. But how did it all start? It's a large-scale project we've been working on for the past four years, maybe, not continuously, but let's say we started it four years ago. We call it a city-matigraphic odyssey, because it's a journey around the world through 10 different cities in different continents and very different typologies of cities of different scales, but different also cultural backgrounds, social situation, economic situation and also political ones. So there is a great heterogeneity, the choice of cities, but intentionally. But let's say that the very central quest of this large project is to understand a bit more or to observe at first who these strange species of the Homo urbanus is, who we are most of it. And this mostly related to how we relate to space and to public space in particular way. The street is really the setting of this series of films. So it's a project that has a certain lineage, let's say in the large story of the street observers. From actually, we could think of the urban odysseys of the 1920s in the way they were also observing cities in a silent way. Also through the observation of how we deal with the street life from very ordinary and banal activities such as the way we behave in the street, we relate to each other, we move and we use, because we give a very central focus and interesting the way we relate physically, our urban bodies, let's call them like this, how we relate bodily to the space of the city. But also the question of climate is quite central and we try to understand how the presence of the natural elements influence also very much the way we behave collectively and how it shapes also a culture around those all elements, impractical elements or recurring elements. And in the case of Venice, obviously, the presence of the water and this constant or rise and constant, let's say urgency, which is in some ways and many, most of the time, which is quite well controlled, but there is this constant fear, let's say. I'll start with the origin with Sophia as well because I would like to start to know everyone's intuitions. Sophia, you've written this book, Venice Variations, that moves in a different dimension. It's about the physical Venice and also its literary representation in a way, so it's about architecture and literature. Would you like to tell us about this research and what inspired this research? I would also like to thank Valentina and Giorgia and everyone else that is involved in the organisation of this very interesting event. I started with my interest in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. I was fascinated by the book and by other books that he's written. He's one of my favourite writers. And being an architect, I was really interested in understanding the role of Venice in Invisible Cities. For those that know the book, perhaps I could give just a quick introduction about Marco Polo, the Venetian explorer, describing to Kublaikan the Emperor of Mongolia the cities in his own empire. These are not cities that Marco Polo has visited, but they are imaginary cities that he creates in his mind. And he never mentions Venice. So at some point Kublaikan confronts him and asks him why he doesn't talk about Venice. And Marco Polo replies that memories, images, ones fixed in words are erased. But perhaps by talking about other cities I might have lost Venice little by little. So the presence of Venice just once, the mention of Venice just once intrigued me. And knowing that the book takes huge inspiration from cities, I was interested in the relationship between the novel and Venice and then Venice and these other cities. That's how it started. But when I moved to Venice then, my interest was ignited by the city on its own and that became a project in its own right. Although it was a lot about seeking the relationship between the novel and Venice, both had to be considered as independent pieces of work at the same time. So that was the origin of my interest. Okay, so this, like, your introductions have already sparked so many questions. I would like to start from Sophia's mention of Iterocavino and this idea of Venice almost never being mentioned in the invisible cities just once we said, but there are multiple representation of the city. So both works, Omar Banus and Venice variations play with this idea of variations of multiplicity, this idea of modularity, but also like cities around the world and in a way, like being multiple versions of the way we relate to places. So this also gives me, like, gives me the idea that Venice, as Calvino tried to point out in his book, is a city that can't really be pinned down. Like, it's a city that escape a completely representation. But you both try to kind of capture something. And Luis, you mentioned that you wanted to, like, describe, like, record some moments of the city and how people interact with the city in their daily life. And we know that water is an element in Venice that is a sort of ordinary event. But in particular, the chapter on Venice was recorded on a specific day, as we've seen at the beginning. It was recorded, if I'm not wrong, on the 14th, which is probably the day or the 13th of November 2019, which was one day where there was an exceptional equality. So my question is whether that exceptionality was, like, something that you just decided to catch the moment or it was by chance? Yes. We made this film by chance, because we just arrived in Venice. We lived in Rome before arriving in Venice. So it was two years ago. We arrived here and this was an incredible event. And so we started to film. But immediately we understood that this was something very interesting in Venice that you can find it always, all the time. That's a kind of, even if the event is so big, it's extraordinary, the city was creating immediately a new ordinary of the city. Because we always say if something like this would happen in another city, everything, even in Rome, for example, we know very well in Rome, everything would have been stopped totally and the city completely blocked. In Venice, as you can see in the film, it's not the case. Everything is going on. The show must go on. And it is really a show, because the life in Venice is a show. And it's like a big spectacle. It's a big show. So we have to continue. Also economically, because it's so important, the tourism in Venice is so important. So we cannot stop, we cannot stop the tourism. We cannot stop the economic activity because it's so important. And so what was really interesting of filming in this film was this new ordinary and how the Venetian people, the inhabitants of the city can recreate this kind of new ordinary. And as you can see in the film, everything is, even the Venetian, they still drink the spritz. They still drink the cocktails. It's a catastrophe is going on. A catastrophe is going on, but everything else is going on. There's people that are delivering big, big, the big containers of beer. And it's raining so hard. So normally people stop and they start going on, going on. So it was really interesting this, I think. And we can see it living in Venice. We can see it all the time. There's a high tide. There's water everywhere. But we can find the solution. And finding solution is something typical of the Venetian because they know from the beginning of the city, they know they live in exception. Living in Venice is not living like in a normal city. You cannot live in a normal city. If you are used to living in a normal city where you have everything under control, you cannot stay in Venice because Venice is changing all the time and you have all the different climates, all different situations that can happen. So you have to be very, very open to find solutions, to find new solutions. And this was really very strong during the days. And I think we can see it in the film. Yeah, maybe if I can add something, it's actually the real phenomenon on those days and that's very nice. We meet tonight as it's almost the second anniversary of that specific high tide. The phenomenon have lasted, if I remember well, like one week or so, a long, long period, many days. And so the film was shot over these various days and there was the worst, the worst day was probably, I don't know, the 12th or something. I don't remember exactly. But so the film follows a little bit the evolution, this sort of escalation of a nightmare. And that's why the film is a little bit a tragic comedy, I would say, because initially the tourists mainly didn't understood at all the real complexity of what will happen. We were all living with unconsciously, obviously. But so in the film, there is a lot of comical scenes because initially these situations of Acualta were seen by the tourists as a sort of additional layer of the spectacularity of the show, as Ila said. So you see all these tourists going with their colorful boots around the city and walking around with these sort of physical difficulty, but they take selfies nevertheless. And they are, in a way, transforming the real catastrophic situation into a new, an additional layer of the show, as I said. But progressively, through the film, this really transforms itself into a really tragic situation and you progressively understand that from enjoying these situations, tourists are progressively trying to escape the city, which becomes almost, which have trapped them in. So there are terrible situations where you see all these tons of tourists rushing to the evaporators station in order to find the evaporator, but there are no evaporators anymore. And so you see that there is this sort of shift in the collective understanding of the situation. Yeah, there's also something very interesting that you can see in Venice all the time when you have water everywhere, the eye-tie, but you can see it very well in the film because we filmed a lot. It's also this kind of parallel economy that you develop when there's water in the city. So starting from the basic thing, that is this kind of colored shoes, the boots, this kind of plastic boots that you can buy everywhere. So there's a lot of people arriving with a lot of new gadgets, new products related to the water. They are coming to the tourists to sell new things. So this is also very interesting as I told you. It's a big economy of the show, it's a show. So it's a show and the show we have to sell things. So it's the products related to the new shows and the show has to change also. Because if you can see in the film there's all the tourists at the beginning, they were very, very happy to see this. So they took a lot of selfies in the water, the feet in the water. So it's a new event for the ordinary Venetian, the ordinary of Venice. And Venice lives with the events. So it's a big event. It's always a big event. You are in the film, when you are in Venice, you are the actor of the film. If you are a tourist or even a Venetian, everybody is an actor because you are all the time in the picture of other people. You know that if you live in Venice, you are in... I don't know how many photographers of you there's in Instagram because every time you pass behind someone else or any tourist, you are in the picture. So you are part of the show. We are part of the show. We now live in Venice and we know that we are part of the show. Even the gondoliers, they know that their role is much more important to be in a picture than making a guide in the gondola. So everything is an event in Venice. And when you have the eye tight or the water, it's also another event. And everything is going on like this. The restaurant, they don't close. You know, you can hit a pizza with 50 cm of water. And they are having your feet in the water. But this is happening all the time because the eye tight is not only during that day, those days. Even now, yesterday, we had also eye tights. So there's some restaurant where the level is very low in the city. They don't close. They just say to the tourists if you want, you can take this table, but you will have your feet in the water. But they both just before the plastic boots. So they say, wow, that's fantastic. Let's take a selfie. And this is something incredible for Venice. Venice knows this mechanism very well. Venetian knows very well this mechanism. And this is from the beginning. It's something that the people living here, they deal very well. We say that the best merchant in Italy are the Venetian. Because they know how to take advantage of every catastrophe. That is an incredibly interesting description of Venice. You touched upon a couple of points that I find very interesting. And we're also the points that made us choose Venice to tell a story of the story of global warming and cities. So we talked about, you talked about this idea of the exceptional becoming ordinary in Venice. We talked about Italo Calvino not mentioning Venice, but talking about Venice all the time. We talked about Venice being a show all the time. And the water and the environment becomes a sort of element that it's catastrophic, but people adapt to it as if it wasn't there, which is a really powerful metaphor of what is happening right now. So in a way Venice is a metaphor of our contemporary times and how we people live in this world. But it is also a cautionary tale because things are kind of moved faster in Venice. And we can magnify all these relationships between tourism, capitalism, the environment and everything. It's really a place where all of this is played out right in front of our eyes very clearly. And I really like the description of how Venetians adapt to all of these events, to the Aqual, as if it wasn't there, it becomes part of their life. I would also like, however, to swap the narrative now and see whether Venice adapts to the inhabitants, the city adopts. And while we discussed just the contemporary times now, I would like to go back in time a little bit and ask Sofia more about her study on the evolution of Venice. And reading your book, Venice Variations, you start from an intuition that you had about connections in Venice and how the city has evolved over time. And I would like you to tell us a bit more about this. Yes, thanks for the question. It's really interesting to look at the urban form of Venice because it really encapsulates a pattern of evolution. So using certain methods by computer analysis, I have analysed the network of Venice. And what emerges out of this analysis is a fascinating finding where all the squares are really interleaked into a network of pervasive centrality that permeates the entire city of Venice. And why this is really a trace of the evolutionary history and the social and political history of Venice is because we have to go back many, many, many centuries ago when Venice was starting emerging in the lagoon. It consisted of these islands, an archipelago in the lagoon, and its island had a semi-autonomous capacity. So with time, as the Venetians grew with trade and became more prosperous, they started reclaiming land and the islands joined together. So with the compact form of the city emerging, an analysis system had to be introduced in order to facilitate connections between the islands using the canal system and having another system superimposed onto the city, which was the alley system. So whenever there was a need for a connection, whenever there was a need for a bridge, these bridges were built in a way that they connected all the squares of Venice into this network of centrality. So the underlying properties that the squares are the nodes in the two networks. They connect the two networks together and it makes sense because when the alley network did not exist, the islands were serviced. The squares were serviced by boat. So when they were connected with the alley, they had another level of connection as well. Of course there are other connections throughout Venice, but these connections, the role of the squares as nodes in the network are very, very important. And they were community centers. The islands were semi-autonomous. They had patron saint. And even when the city became a compact city and continued involving and being transformed, the fundamental urban unit of Venice was the island. And the inhabitants of the islands had a very close attachment to their islands and their neighborhoods. And to the point that there was at some point a conflict between the communities themselves and the emergent state. So there was an interesting dialogue and conflict between the state and the republic and the semi-autonomous communities that was dramatized through the ways in which the rituals were played out in Venice. So that was a combination of morphological analysis that really told me one type of story and then historical research that was more or less showing how the networks of Venice were capturing exactly that conflict between the parochial identities in Venice and then the powerful state and the empire emerging at the end of the medieval times. So this was the main story of the analysis, how this relates to Calvin is another story as well which is interesting to discuss if the discussion comes to that point. But I'll stop here. So in a way, like both your work, the videos and an academic researcher are pointing out that Venice and Venetians, although the word Venetians is to be defined are a sort of unique entity. So this integration between the city and the people who live in the city makes a unique component that evolve over time. Do you think that your works like videos, art, literature can tell us something about Venice that hasn't been told yet? This is quite a tricky question. I think we are not the best ourselves to answer that. I think we could answer probably from someone else's work. Our intent in, as Ila said initially, this film was actually not very much planned ahead, but a more intuitive reaction to what was happening. So we felt the need of documenting and observing what was happening on those very days. And then it became, we edited it later on including it in the O Morbano series, but initially it was not like a scientificly planned. But I think what this film maybe brings is the observation of the normal day life in the city and this conflict or this paradoxical relation between normality and anormality or exceptional situation of this historical moment. But yes, it's more a minute kind of observation on how we move, behave, relate to each other in the city. So because probably when we look at films that were shot in Venice, they obviously are not talking about fictional films. There is a long history of fictional films, but mostly documentaries would take a very specific angle in dealing with a very specific issue on the contemporary life of the city. But on the country, this film was more looking for bringing this look upon our, as I said initially, real physical relationship with the space of the city and how Venetians and tourists are too sort of, as you said initially, the word Venetian is complex to define because actually I would say more inhabitants of Venice and the tourism which are like two realities overlapping every day or mixing and trying to avoid each other every day. And so the film observes both those human realities in their coexistence. And what was really touching living these days of exceptional high tide was to rediscover a sense of humanity, a generosity, a sense of solidarity, which in normal times had totally disappeared. I mean, you had like taxi drivers suddenly becoming incredibly generous and helping people in need because initially when we talk about these days, we mention mostly the tragic comedy and the way tourism or the economy of tourism grasps this event to take advantage of it. But there is also in the worst days, we have to say that it had been a real catastrophe, economic catastrophe for many families here and so we saw very interesting situation of local solidarities among various inhabitants and which is quite rare I would say. So in every, I think it's comparable to what happened also in New York in the 9-11 situation when suddenly the rules of these distances and anonymity in the city are broken by a sudden sense of catastrophe. And this is really important to feel that behind this sort of stage behavior suddenly humanity rises again. Yeah, I think that like both words Homo urbanus in particular the chapter on Venice because that's the one we are talking about but also Venice variations are different ways of portraying Venice which is very slippery. It's a very slippery term and we keep on mentioning calvino in a way or another and I would like to ask Sophia about this as well because I have the impression that from what we are saying is that like this idea of all these representations that we have of Venice, it's like humanity, the catastrophic event and inhabitants been totally untouched by it but also tourism all these paces are like the different cities that calvino might have written in invisible city and if we know that calvino hasn't lived in Venice Sophia, what was calvino for you? Yes, I think that a very strong theme in invisible cities is the ways in which cities evolve and their capacity to survive in a way so evolution is a very strong theme and obviously he had in mind Venice as a sinking city when he wrote invisible cities I think in 1972 I believe that the first alarms about the future of city must have already gone off and so the theme of evolution and what cities need to survive is really strong in calvino and if you read the cities one after the other you understand that there are cities that struggle to retain their existence and there are others that manage somehow to evolve and adjust and adapt and Venice has been a very adaptable city over the years we know that it was called La Serenissima because it was inviolable for 1000 years that meant that it wasn't really conquered by any foreign power until Napoleon put an end to La Serenissima but at that point there was a way in which the city revived itself and really produced a new image and a new myth because the most set in republic was a myth that the city had created about itself and in the 19th century when the writers of the industrial revolution and the grand tour arrived in Venice because of all these modernizations Venice recreates itself as this new myth above the decaying city the decrepitude the lost empire which gradually is transformed in the 20th century into the festival city the exhibition city the tourist city so from an equate collection of beliefs and legends in the medieval times it becomes the most set in republic in the 15th and 16th century through the work of the Venetian humanists then the decaying myth the myth of decay the lost empire and then the festival city the city of culture so what the next stage of Venice and how the city can reinvent itself into this next stage which is perhaps one of the most vulnerable stages and its history is a really interesting thing but it should learn from its past and to come with a new myth a new way to actually define itself in order to survive I think that's a very strong concept in Calvino and if you read the last dialogue with Kublaikan it matters on the question of utopia and Kublaikan says where are the concentric circles constantly leading us implying Dante's hell which is formed architectonically as an inverted pit based on circles and Calvino says that my utopia is made of fragments separated by intervals and the intervals are the dialogues that Polo and Kublaikan have with each other so his solution is try to find small ways to intervene rather than come with a grand utopia to the question of a citizen their survival and their future this sort of quick overview of how Venice has changed over time is really interesting like from splendor to decay to the city or like the show and again I will just mention the podcast you've heard the trailer of at the beginning we tried to explore all of this over time because like Venice is a city that is in constant changes constantly adapting to the circumstances that it finds itself in and we end up with the last episode which is called evolution which is about this idea of evolution there's always this idea that evolution is towards something better but like perhaps evolution is just adaptation rather than change actually the idea of preservation because this idea of preserving everything perhaps we should rethink preservation of preserving the idea of adaptation rather than stiffness I can already say some questions from the public but we'll go to that in a moment I would like to just get to an end of our conversation because I'm conscious of time we've mentioned this adaptation and you mentioned very rightly utopia and again we go back sometimes I think that literature has a sort of special power but I would like to ask you back in the one the pandemic and Venice everything stopped was there a moment where this utopia of this Venice empty from tourism was kind of thought as not possible but like glimpsed in the background and I have another question related to this where if you hadn't already filmed the Homer bonus in 2019 on that 13th of November would you have done it during the pandemic have you thought about doing anything on that period because again it was exceptional for the entire world really but I think it must have been pretty special for Venice as well yes we were here we spent the pandemic the lockdown here so it was an incredible city that I know very well because I was born not far from Venice and I studied and lived in Venice for 10 years and now we are back here so I know very well the city but I have never seen the city like that so no people around the city and it was incredible in a way sad but also for us exceptional because we could go to some other places we were totally alone and this is a kind of dream to see places like this but in a sense it was really really sad because even if Venice is now in this kind of evolution that you talk about it is the evolution of Venice since a long time now it's to be a living museum so it's a place for tourists the only economy in Venice is the tourism so what the city like this is obviously beautiful you take some pictures but after that you feel really relaxed and you say and we started to make this film to understand what is the relationship between the body and the urban environment but also the body and the other bodies of the people and when you don't have a body in a place you don't have a space you have just a dead city so making a film during the pandemic we said we thought that it is done in one day so you just take some picture and anything is moving there's no movement that's the problem of the pandemic is that we cancel the movement and the movement is the life so it's like for me I always see Venice as a brain and we have the connection between all the neurons if you cut the connection a brain without connection is just a dead brain so there's nothing to film during the pandemic so we really wanted to see back the tourism and we would love not to see only the tourism but the life of Venice today is the tourist and the tourists are the connection of this brain so it's much better watching human beings moving than empty city I wanted to stop here but you just mentioned a very interesting word which is brain which brings me back to Sofia in your book you talk about collective unconscious of Venice can you tell us more about that? yes a city is not a design product there are cities that are designed but the majority of the cities have evolved particularly in Europe that have a long long history have evolved by the collective actions of people so that's what I meant by the collective unconscious that they are products of creativity of people and as architects because I'm trained as an architect and I am an architect academic as architects we are accustomed to think of the things we design as the products of our creative activity but who creates a city is a very interesting question and how the creativity of the city as a whole relates to individual acts of creativity the incredible works by Palladio, Sansovino or any contemporary architect that has left a mark in Venice so I became interested in that and I think that this is what makes our city interesting that interface and collaboration and interaction between the collective creativity of the people and then individual instances of creativity that are all types of creativity become influenced from each other one inspires the other and vice versa so when Sansovino reconfigures the Piazza San Marco he's taken into consideration very important arteries of the city and very important monuments in the city and enhances them and enriches them rather than really destroy the logic of the city that the inhabitants of the city are able to do but what do you think about that Palladio? Well I would like to carry on with this conversation for another hour really but I think we have to stop here for now I would like to end the conversation with another two very short extract excerpt from a couple of questions already so let's watch out I think this too excerpt very interesting and they underlined very well part of the conversations that we had tonight there are a couple of questions from the audience and one question I think is open to everyone probably this one I'll start with because I'm one since you live in Venice there's a question where so people in Venice are ordering beers and taking selfies among the floods and is there anything that we could do to raise a sense of urgency and prevent people from accepting that the price is as normal do you think this is something that is necessary in Venice and can be done it's open to everyone and related to that sorry about this but there's another question that is what are some potential versions of a new myth of Venice that could make us hopeful like how can we how can Venice in a way that is forming us of potential catastrophe coming over but also being a sort of met a hopeful symbol of how we can react and adapt to the future do you think I think Venice in a way can do that right it's probably the adaptability it's not easy I think it's obviously because of the mediatic attention the importance of Venice in the world's conscious that say the images of that high tide went through all the the news all over the world it was unbelievable how those very striking images are all over the front head pages of all the newspapers breaking news over the world and so to the point that I heard it's quite funny that some Americans thought that Venice was flooded forever there was no more Venice existing on the map of Italy you know it's interesting how those striking images left such an impact in our collective and conscious that to the point that you cannot remove those images anymore in some ways no so I think more than a campaign to create consciousness of the tourists coming here I think these striking images going all over the world made that developed and contributed to that collective consciousness and they will not disappear so fast I think this is my personal intuition yes I agree I think that personally I'll add my opinion I think that in a way people adapting to the catastrophe is also a way of like showing that we can survive and so it's a it's a it's a double metaphor in a way is like we have to raise consciousness but in the other is also a symbol that still we cannot adopt so let's work on the two sides of things in a way one powerful example perhaps comes from the time where Venice stopped dominating the trading routes with the eastern Mediterranean simply because of the discoveries of the New World and the second navigation of Africa next day the banks in Rialto collapsed so that must have been an extreme shock for Venice and what did they do they actually took all their enterprises to the Veneto through agricultural and educational projects they really created new economies and new productive industries so there have been lessons from the past including how they cope with environmental problems like if you read literature environmental literature about Venice in the 16th century the lagoon is portrayed as dying as the future of Venice being under threat because the stilting processes of the canals and the rivers were really creating challenges in the lagoon and they engage with big hydrological projects at that time and this was something that was so central in the life of the city the city was in continuous dialogue with the environment and they were reconfiguring the entire landscape in the lagoon and the Veneto and this is what made Venice it's not just the compact city but it's the entire area so I think that there are lessons from history that they can take but one important aspect is governance who is in governance in the city and why certain things cannot be done so or can be done I don't know I'm not criticizing necessarily but that's a very very important thing and regarding a new myth I think that the city can really create a new direction for itself that has to do with education perhaps and with culture there is a great deal of productivity that the city has demonstrated already along that line Thanks for mentioning this Sofia in the podcast we've written an episode called Balance where we try to reconstruct the environmental history of Venice and we really go through what you just mentioned how the entire lagoon and the various island kind of adapted to what was happening and this connects me to the next question I can see here which is a question about Torcello Torcello is one of the islands in Venice and allegedly is the first island where like munitions quotation marks installed they lived there, they prospered there they were selling salt it was a huge, rich situation commerce and everyone was going there but at a certain point the balance between commerce, the economic hand and the environment the balance at a certain point started to move the wrong way and there was no balance anymore the river silted and various maladies started circulating in the island people left the island and they moved to what is currently Rialto and that is the secondary installment and then the new civilization of Venice started there and Venice is now facing another change so this idea of movement and adaptation is really interesting historically but also right now as we speak as we face what is happening the question I will read that although we partly answered it is am I wrong that Torcello was the first island populated in the lagoon and the answer is no it's correct this person is interested in the transition to current areas so Torcello was very populated and it is hardly lived on now but now it is a big show place with a showy church and a showy restaurant it's really a sort of boutique in a way what happened there was that due to physical wateriness yes I would say that is the reason but in a way Torcello represents what has happened to Venice from being a very rich and powerful island to now being a city visited by tourists with a show maybe Hila that lived for 10 years in Venice knows more I haven't understood the question but it makes me think about something that you can find in Torcello is the throne of Attila and this reminds me that Venice not really at the beginning but just some years after it was born in 451 I don't know if you are right but when Attila arrived in Italy not Italy but here all the citizens they lived in this area escaped to the lagoon just to find a solution they very know to be a very cruel man and so Venice started like an adaptation like this so they started to adapt themselves to live in the water because Attila had the army Attila's army was on the horses and the horses couldn't go on the water so all the people escaping from Attila tried to find a solution going in this archipelago of island in between the water so Venice started to exist like this it's a really big adaptation so they had to know how to live with the water they didn't know how to do it so starting from there you can find the symbol of that even I think it's fake it's not the real one but just to finish with this idea of adaptation that could be interesting for me it's not a symbol of what is happening in the world because Venice is an exception it's not a city like the others it's totally an exception even in a total catastrophe even when the world will be finishing Venice will be there because people want to go to Venice even with two meters of water they're taking selfies in Venice in Piazza San Marco under the water so I don't think we can take Venice as an example of adaptation to a catastrophe but we can take Venice as a symbol of the sea level rising yes, we can see it and if you come in Venice you see it it's amazing but I think maybe even you can see it in our film even with the high tide and a lot of water in the city everything is going well economically yeah, it's interesting this brought something else to my mind about Venice perhaps it's exceptional and it can't be taken as an example but I think it is really like a place where we can see how all these different emergencies that we are facing come together in a very, very visible way and sometimes we need facing something visibly because there's a lot of racism and economy and global warming and thinking sometimes about global warming and our cultural heritage what is the relationship between the two of them sometimes if we think about them just theoretically it can be difficult to grasp the relationship but in Venice it's just there in front of your face and when the water rises and you see that an institution where the water and the archives are damaged and all of that you realize that yes that is a physical event but it tells us about things and about relationships so it can't be taken theoretically to reflect on things so perhaps it's yeah now they know how to adapt themselves also for the archive because now they know that they don't have to put it on the floor you know yeah this is something that you learn very quickly that we have a sort of cave it's not a cave it's just a room on the floor on the storage and now we know that we don't have to leave things under a kind of one meter 60 or something so you what I wanted to say is that I agree totally with you it's very interesting Venice but it's a big exception so we can understand a lot about the global warming but at the end I don't think Venice will die today it's not a city because I say this because there's a lot of people saying it's a pity Venice will die it will not exist in 30 years, in 20 years, in 40 years I don't know I'm not so sure that we can use this model for this city maybe we need a Venetian model only for this city, an exception city I think that is also connected to how we talk about another interesting topic probably not for tonight but how we can talk about environmental emergencies like this idea of catastrophe as opposed to I don't know if positive is the right word but different narratives we probably need to find different narratives as well as collective solutions as well because this idea of the apocalypse that we're coming over is not working really I think that Ila's last words about Venice will never die a great conclusion to our night and keep Venice alive in our world but also in our spirits from you in London and you in Venice I would like to thank everyone for your great insight tonight for having offered us some excerpts from your film let me remind our audience are available through your website and the entire collection is available from Homo Urbanus and in particular the chapter on Venice Sofia's book The Venice Variations is also available as open access online and I would like to thank you again and hope to drink a spritz in Venice one day all together good idea see you soon bye bye good night