supervision.: Prof.Giulia Mazzorin, Prof.Andrea Curtoni with Lorenzo Iannantuoni, Andrea De Lorenzo

students:

Charlotte Vetter, Chuming Yu, Gaia Tovaglia, Katharina Steinbüchler, Leonardo Cattaneo, Livia Schmitsberger, Lotta Bauer, Moritz Böttjer, Rosanna Schmid, Sophie Morelli, Tanya Shtykalo, Xiling Huang, Neha Chandel 

description:

VENICE TRAVEL AGENCY – THE VIBE IS INFINITE

Welcome aboard, the VENICE TRAVEL AGENCY invites you to cross thresholds — between land and sea, fiction and reality, dream and disillusion. We offer no standard itineraries. Instead, we present eleven counters, each a departure point for subversive journeys, immersive encounters, and speculative rituals rooted in the shifting landscapes of the Venetian Lagoon. You’re not just invited to observe — you’re asked to submerge and tune in to a frequency where emotions ripple, stories tangle, and new tides of belonging emerge.

THE VIBE IS INFINITE. Are you ready to travel?

program details:

Banco 1

(P)LACE – Moritz Böttjer 

(P)Lacemaking through Lacemaking connects the traditional lacework of Burano with a contemporary approach of placemaking. Starting from the shared practice of women crafting and chatting in public, the project reimagines lace as a collective and social act. Through collaborative making, a growing textile becomes a mobile, participatory object: activating public spaces, archiving stories, and creating connections between people and different places.

Banco 2

Invagency Cruises – Lotta Bauer

In a future where non-native species like the comb jelly Mnemiopsis leidyi have become a part of everyday life, where large parts of the world are uninhabitable and speculative bio art has become reality — the shipping agency Invagency Cruises has made a name for itself as a pioneer of a new kind of cruise.

In this installation, visitors are invited to leave their passive role behind and actively participate in an experience. Through immersive storytelling they are taken on a journey with Invagency Cruises to explore the parallels and possible symbiotic relationship between two highly diverse species — human and comb jelly.

Banco 3

INFINITE POOL – Charlotte Vetter & Katharina Steinbüchler

INFINITE POOL starts as an attempt on translating a Lagoon’s lamentation into a song that we can understand, or not understand but feel. Overcoming a feeling of disconnect, a lure for belonging. 

INFINITE POOL is a method of connection. A collective, connective vocal practice, indulging in each other’s worlds. 

Use your emotions, shed your skins, sharpen your teeth, build your shield with all your unwanted labels, spread your wings and start to sing your song. 

Lure all of those that call you the Unknown.

Join us underwater in the 

>>>>INFINITY POOL<<<<

>>for the ultimate 5D Venice X-perience<<

>>Submerge in the Water<<

>>Dip your head in<<

>>Cool off<<

>>And listen to a Venice you’ve never heard before<<

Banco 4 

colmare – Gaia Tovaglia
colmare (italian) verb to fill up/in, to fill a gap/lacuna: to accomplish something but also together with the sea – col mare: con il mare
The tide regulates and is cyclic, through its movement the sea covers and unveils pieces of land that are home to different species but also to local activities. “colmare” tries to give space to intertidal zones that are also places for fishing, eating and gathering with friends. How are these pieces of land used? What happens once the water hides them? How can we move through and with them? How can we inhabit these in-between spaces? How can we acknowledge these spaces/places?

Banco 5
PLAY AGAINST THE MACHINE. a guide to playful resistance – Rosanna Schmid & Leonardo Cattaneo

Venice may look like a dream: gondolas, golden reflections, quiet alleys. But everyday life tells a different story. Overtourism, surveillance, and public spaces turned into tourist transit zones have deeply affected the city. This project uses public play to reclaim those spaces and shift the focus back to daily life. Playful actions make hidden restrictions visible, invite cultural and social exchange, and offer new ways of experiencing the city. By mapping these play spaces across various neighborhoods and islands, the project creates moments of connection, reflection, and imagination. Public play becomes a form of resistance, challenging control and helping to rediscover Venice as a place to live, not just to visit.

OPEN PLAY SPACE EVERYDAY AT 2PM in the courtyard at Hauptplatz 6

Banco 6
Ritual Landscape (working title) – Sophie Morelli

Ritual Landscape is an exploration of Venice through archives, conversations, photographs, materials, and questions. It navigates the complex layers of the city and its lagoon, where  multiple temporalities meet, melt, clash, and merge in opposing rhythms. Various gestures intertwine, between past and present, memories, symbols, rituals, and traditions, within an ever-changing landscape. This continuous transformation shapes the habits of its inhabitants, and they shape the surrounding. The city itself is a living archive, like the life experiences of its people, influenced by water, resilience, and transformation. The research aims to become a tool to activate, care for, and map its complexity and fading aspects.

The moon influences the movement of tides, our bodies, and our connection to the landscape.

What kinds of relationships exist between land, water, and the moon? And what rituals and crafts were, or are still, practiced today?

Banco 7

Soilculture in a glut of culture – Livia Schmitsberger 

Venice’s soil is sinking, raising, excavated, stabilized, and eroded, constantly moved by the tide and humans. Soil is presented in different states. On the island of Sant´ Erasmo, one can observe on a small scale how humans are interfering with the soil/landscape to cultivate the land. Starting there, I would like to ask the question: Whose business is the regeneration of soil and its functionality?

The landlords? The government? The farmer’s? Not mine?

Should we stop talking about business, when it gets to food? Who is included in the debate about soil and nutrition? Further I want to discuss the absence of the matter “soil” in everyday life. Therefore I provide a variety of dirt from the Venetian lagoon, for smearing under fingernails.

Banco 8

The Disillusion Shop – Xiling Huang

Tourists come to Venice for the dream — the gondolas, the sunsets, the perfect postcards. But real Venice is more complex: beautiful, yes, but also worn, repetitive, and messy.

This project explores Venice as part of the “Illusion Industry” — a place not just visited, but performed, packaged, and sold.

The Disillusion Shop is a fictional souvenir store offering anti-souvenirs — objects that reveal the honest, imperfect, and sometimes absurd side of Venice. It is part physical space, part online platform, and part critique of visual tourism.

Banco 9 

Spatial Strategies for De-Militarisation – Neha Chandel 

Venice bears the imprints of a history shaped by defence and resilience. While the enchanted visitor drifts through its waterways, the city continues to navigate complex borders – between land and sea, emerging and submerging, memory and forgetting, the vanishing locals and populating outsiders. 

The etched Tiefdruck picture drawings of the openings reflect on the memories of military presence at Fort Sant’Andrea. In contrast, the border wall device experiments on the collective act of opening a window in the border and sharing tea, cultivating new forms of presence across a symbolic divide. Speculating future ruins and future thresholds, it asks : how might we meet one another differently, in spaces of separation?

Banco 10

Happy Birthday to You – Chuming Yu

“Happy Birthday to You” is a project that invites people to take a walk in the cemetery, and sing a birthday song if they come across someone who has a birthday.

The work was inspired by the main cemetery of Venice, San Michele Cemetery. The whole cemetery is an island itself. All the gravestones are surrounded by palm trees; the palm trees are surrounded by brick walls; brick walls are surrounded by water.

The project grows out of the story experienced in Venice, where reflections on death gradually deepened; the cemetery came to be seen as a lovable space — one that could be used, perceived, or imagined in different ways. Similarly, death and loss in our lives can also be approached in different ways.

Banco 11

Clay Dinner – Tanya Shtykalo

Cooking without facilities is where culinary art meets natural craft. Catch a big fish but have no kitchen or spices? Find fragrant herbs and fresh sticky clay nearby. Wrap the fish in leaves, cover with clay, and cook in the fire’s heat. In this way, a unique flavour is created using minimal tools and skills. 

The process unites people by needing teamwork and care. In harmony with nature and each other, not just food is born but living creativity preserved through centuries.