Agenda

WATERSCAPES | Imagining Beyond the Human: Politics and Poetics of an Amphibious Ecology

Francesco Danesi della Sala
PhD in Cultural and Social Anthropology

10 February 2026
Ca' Bottacin, Room A Venice and
Online on Zoom https://unive.zoom.us/s/89356521339

Abstract

In the lagoon landscape of the Sacca di Goro (Po Delta), an area recently unsettled by an uncertain and disquieting environmental shift, the question of imagination becomes a way to interrogate local socio-environmental relations. These relations are currently organized around an extractive aquaculture system and a technoscientific regime of governance invested in ideals of controllability and capitalization. Goro’s industrial clam farming, and the crisis that has recently shaken it, makes visible a form of “technical surrealism”: a messianic faith in monitoring devices, management plans, containment measures, scientific reductionism, and emergency rhetoric. Rather than offering clarity, this apparatus sets the limits of what can be thought and seen, obscuring the lagoon’s multispecies dynamism—and, with it, the possibility of futures that would be more than nominal alternatives.

At the same time, the monoculture of the Manila clam, the proliferation of allochthonous species, and broader transformations of the lagoon reveal a plural and indeterminate agency. Through ecological improvisations—made of anticipations, correspondences, and opportunistic alignments—this agency has cracked open the infrastructural rigidity of the lagoon-as-factory-laboratory.

This talk approaches these dynamics ethnographically and speculatively, proposing a reversal of the anthropocentric assumption that imagination is an exclusively human faculty. It sketches the hypothesis of a more-than-human imaginative dimension, in which “the possible” is continually recomposed as a relational and multispecies achievement. In the Sacca di Goro, the arrival and spread of the blue crab (Callinectes sapidus), macroalgal blooms, the “tropicalization” of the waters, and shifting trophic relations are not simply environmental changes or habitat movements. They operate as imaginative processes of world-making: they generate other conditions of life (and death), open and close niches, and reconfigure forms of coexistence and conflict.

From this perspective, the lagoon’s amphibious ecology becomes a fully political, ethical, and epistemological provocation—one that locates, in the non-human’s poetic plurality, a fertile possibility for eco-cultural regeneration.