‘NEVER LET ME GÒ, TUNAIGHT’

Barena Bianca
in collaboration with
Ilaria Genovesio

21.06 - 05.07 2022

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The project aims to draw a parallel between the cities of Istanbul and Venice, by identifying one or more extinct and alien marine species that the Sea of Marmara and the marine area of the northern Adriatic Sea and Venetian Lagoon share. By translating their research and analysis of these elements into an artistic and visual language, Barena Bianca would like to spark debates between Istanbul and Venice around urgent and common issues such as pollution, globalization, climate change, overfishing, and food, tourism, and biodiversity. 

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The project is now taking shape through a series of preliminary researches that the collective is doing in Venice with the aim of identifying the above-mentioned marine species in collaboration with local museums, researchers, fishermen, and fishmongers. Then, in the second half of June, for a couple of weeks, the project will continue in Istanbul, where Barena Bianca will be hosted as resident artists by Pasaj; with its support, they will have the chance to get in touch with some local bodies and institutions that are related to their research topics and, eventually, they'll present the project in PASAJ@BARIN HAN

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During the period in PASAJ, the collective will create mobile and flying sculptures depicting the identified marine species, which will become devices through which they will convey their investigation and the dialogue between the two cities; with these, they will move variously in the area of the Golden Horn and towards the Prince Islands, undertaking exploratory walks that will be documented with photographs and videos. The collective would like this first phase of work in Turkey to be followed by a second one in 2023, thinking of the project in the making.

 

Barena Bianca collective (Fabio Cavallari and Pietro Consolandi) was formed in the Summer of 2018 as a shirt-wearing activist group in the Venetian Lagoon, striving to bring to light many of its ecological and sociological issues, adopting the Barena (typical Venetian salt marsh, essential to the survival of the city) as its emblem. Barena Bianca is characterized by an anti-mimetic poetic approach, a willingly dysfunctional camouflage, refusing to disappear. It seeks to emerge in every situation, to be clearly visible, and increasingly impossible to ignore. Its work mostly happens in public spaces and formalizes in hybrid collaborative actions, installations and happenings communicated mainly through video.

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www.barenabianca.earth