This episode of Magical Fresh & Salty Conversations features the artist and STARTS resident Sonia Levy in conversation with Erika Balsom, a London-based scholar and critic working on cinema, art, and their intersection. During their STARTS residency, Sonia Levy and her collaborators, environmental anthropologist Heather Swanson, ecologist Meredith Root Bernstein, and landscape architect Alexandra Arènes, looked at the Venetian Lagoon through the lens of nature-based solutions to mitigate flood risks. What issues arise from Venice’s long history of taming its waterscape? With a shared commitment to noticing more-than-human worlds, the group strived to forge their own understanding of the controversies arising from the lagoon’s water management.

In Sonia’s eyes, lagoons are fascinating places to think about the meeting of different bodies of water - fresh and saltwater. Filming underwater became a way to get to know the ephemeral world of the lagoon and its processes of transformation in the hope that this submerged perspective might also bring about speculative approaches to policy change.

Magical Fresh & Salty Conversations is produced by TBA21–Academy with the support of STARTS, an initiative by the European Commission.

Special thanks to our guests: Erika Balsom and Sonia Levy.

Editor at large: María Montero Sierra Sound edited by: Elena ZieserIntroduction and credits voice-over: Nathan JohnsonMusic by horizonsndUnderwater sound recordings of the Venetian Lagoon by Sonia Levy and Jez Riley French

Produced by: Miriam Calabrese, María Montero Sierra, Katarina Rakušček, and the artists.

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