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The traditional "Marriage with the Sea”, a Venice patriarchal ritual of domination on a feminized blue-scape, inspires the desire of a feminist and queer shake-up, becoming an alternative collective performance to inact with my island community.
In 1000 the Doge, Venice highest authority, married the sea. The union took place where lagoon and sea meet. He was clad in ermine and a gold ring was thrown into the waves. The formula says “I marry you, the sea. In sign of true and perpetual domination”. The doge was a male, the sea was feminized. The ceremony, still practiced today by the mayor, represents a human-male taming nature, the female-bride-sea, through a patriarchal and heteronormative marriage. The political and economic value of dominance over the seas is clear.
Here three inversions are proposed, giving form to a proposal of an alternative Venetian collective performance: from assigning a gender to the sea and enacting patriarchal domination to a fluid and non-binary relationship with it; from exploiting water resources to an ecological human-bluescape perfomance; from a hierarchical structure, male over female-nature, to an horizontal and queer inclusivity.
This project focuses on the value of the sea in the global sea level rising crisis, in the nexus of water-based artivism, and on how academic research can stimulate a live collective art performance to share and build with my own Venice community, and interconnecting it with other islands’ cultures and perfoming arts.