Presentation short abstract

By examining the embodied experiences of everyday Venetian muddiness we suggest eco-restory-ation as a radical qualifier and generative pathway to meaningful wetland futures and socio-natural outcomes. This subverts both nostalgia and solastalgia resonate in metanarratives of the Death of Venice.

Presentation long abstract

Passing halfway through the UN decade of ecological restoration it is arguable that processes and practices of ecological remediation, remain ossified in techno-managerial failures of expansive finance driven formalisation. Even within the remit of re-wilding branded projects, such approaches, cleave embodied experience from landscape vitalisation. Building on a (2023) pragmatist agenda for eco-restoration, we suggest that socio-ecological recovery requires attention to the stories that are generated with and through both individual and collective practices of dwelling with, and caring for, ecology. We proffer the concept of “ecore-story-ation” acts as a critical, invitation to consider story as both bell weather of, and pathway to meaningful wetland futures. The relative richness of socio-natural storying is a situated practice entangled with, and reflective of, the ‘well-being’ and resilience of socio-ecological relations. To illustrate this the deep, reciprocal connections between the Venetian lagoon, its city and citizens are explored in stories of refuge, origins, identity – which generated through embodied engagement give shape to socio-ecological relations in the Venetian Mud. Yet we also demonstrate how these stories have become warped by nostalgia and solastalgia, and flattened by persistent metanarratives surrounding the Death of Venice. As such Venetian wetlands are drawn into resonance with broader (eco)systemic crises at multiple scales through the pertinent theoretical concerns of embodiment. We conclude that re-story-ation offers not only a lens to understand collective stasis in the face of ecological degradation, but a means restore a socio-ecological system by (re)connecting community and commons.