Paper Short Abstract:

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.

Paper Abstract:

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.