Curatorial Work

Venice Workshop: Aquatic Futurism
2024 October 11-12


Contested Waters is a visual art project connecting aquatic aesthetics from Taipei, Venice, and Kaohsiung. Swimming into the ways in which waters are militarized, capitalized, and troubled in the age of hyper geopolitical frictions, in 2024 we launch the tri-year project by first gathering together in the up-coming workshop in Venice, October 11-12th, at S.a.L.E. Docks. The 2024 workshop focuses on the theme of Aquatic Futurism, bringing together Italian and Taiwanese scholars, artists, and activists to explore and re-imagine an aquatic urban design in our time of planetary polycrisis.

In the 2-day workshop, participants will take lagoon walking, boating, wetland journeying, sharing bodies of water in planting, listening, sounding, thinking and feeling with the contested politics of waterways. By staying with the trouble of waters with Taiwanese and Italian eco-feminist art groups, anti-big-cruse movement members, and prospectively with scholars from Forensic Oceanography, we hope to explore new horizons toward conceiving and reconceiving aquatic futures as critical material connections.

The workshop is a part of the Contested Waters exhibition project 2024-2025 (Taipei, Kaohsiung, & Venice), curated by Dr. I-Yi Hsieh (Multispecies Justice research cluster, the International Center for Cultural Studies, Taiwan N.Y.C.U.), in collaboration with S.a.L.E. Docks art collective & the Art for Critical Ecology network in Venice, along with the Environmental Humanities program at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.


Dates | 2024. 10. 11 – 12
Artists and Scholars | Szu Ni Wen, Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, Domenico Napolitano (Sec_)
Francesca Tarocco, Lorenzo Pezzani, and more.
Curator | I-Yi Hsieh
Venue | S.a.L.E. Docks
Image | Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, Kalvari Class
Font Design | Yajou Chang

The project thanks Taiwan Council of Culture and Arts, the Chew Foundation, the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Multispecies Justice research cluster at International Center for Cultural Studies in National Taiwan Yangming-Chiaotung University for their gracious support.