2024-09-25 –, MG2 01.10
The Venetian Lagoon is renowned worldwide, yet most visitors are primarily familiar with its architecture—“The Stones of Venice,” as John Ruskin famously described. In contrast, the lagoon’s rich more-than-human presence often remains overlooked. Positioned between land and sea, the Venetian Lagoon sustains an extraordinary diversity of plant and wildlife species. As Italy’s largest wetland, it is a protected habitat recognized as a “priority for conservation” under the EU Habitats Directive, part of the Natura 2000 network and the LIFE program. Additionally, the lagoon is an “action site” in the EU Horizon 2020 Green Deal project WaterLANDS and is designated a wildlife sanctuary under the Ramsar Convention due to its significance for coastal wintering, migratory, and breeding waterbirds.
My contribution to the 5th Spatial Humanities Conference explores the Venetian Lagoon ecosystem through “bird’s-eye views.” These are not limited to aerial recordings or satellite images used for environmental monitoring. Instead, they encompass ecological and creative approaches to understanding the lagoon’s more-than-human geographies, with a focus on its avifauna. This paper challenges the anthropocentric history of the aerial perspective by showcasing examples from citizen science, deep mapping, and art projects that reinterpret the literal meaning of “bird’s-eye view.” Finally, it highlights the role of birds as environmental sentinels, raising broader questions about non-human ways of perceiving and mapping the world.
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.