Noemi Quagliati
Noemi Quagliati is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, with the project "Bird's-Eye Views of the Venetian Lagoon. Planetary Visions and Birdscapes of an Aquatic Ecosystem," and a member of THE NEW INSTITUTE Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE). She received a PhD in art history from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society on the subject of landscape photography in WWI Germany. Before joining Ca' Foscari, Noemi lectured on German eco-aesthetics at the Junior Year in Munich program (LMU and Wayne State University) and offered courses on North American photography and art at LMU’s Amerika-Institut. Over the last years, she has also been a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Georgia, and the Research Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Deutsches Museum, where she has collaborated on modernizing the museum’s historical aviation section by investigating the topic of aerial photography.
Session
The Venetian Lagoon is known worldwide. Nevertheless, only “The Stones of Venice,” namely its architecture, to use John Ruskin’s book title, is familiar to most visitors. Instead, the lagoon’s more-than-human presence often remains out of focus. Located between land and sea, the Lagoon of Venice supports countless varieties of plant and wildlife species. Being the largest wetland in Italy, this lagoon is a protected habitat mentioned in the European Union’s Habitats Directive as a “priority for conservation” site (part of the Natura 2000 network of nature protection areas and LIFE program) and an “action site” of the EU Horizon 2020 Green Deal project WaterLANDS. Moreover, it is considered a wildlife sanctuary by the Ramsar Convention for wetlands because it is a crucial site for numerous species of coastal wintering, migrant, and breeding waterbird species.
My contribution to the 5th Spatial Humanities Conference studies the Venetian Lagoon ecosystem through a series of “bird’s-eye views”. These are not simply intended as aerial recordings and satellite images used to monitor the lagoon environment. In this presentation, “bird’s-eye views” are ecological exercises and creative approaches to investigate more-than-human geographies of the Venetian lagoon by focusing on its avifauna. The paper aims to challenge the human-centred historical narration of the aerial perspective by showing examples of citizen science, deep mapping, and art projects that reflect on the literal meaning of the expression “bird’s-eye view”. Finally, the role of animals, specifically birds, as sentinels for environmental health raises questions about non-human ways of mapping.