You are listening to submerged sounds gathered beneath the Ponte della Libertà, the long bridge connecting the island of Venice to the mainland. Originally constructed as a railway crossing under Austrian imperial rule in the nineteenth century, the bridge was expanded in the 1930s by Mussolini’s fascist regime to accommodate a roadway. The expansion was part of a sweeping territorial reorganization that linked the island city with dominant regimes of circulation and industrial modernity. Yet, as Deborah Cowen observes, infrastructures such as the Ponte della Libertà are “not only vehicles of domination—but also means of transformation” (2020, p. 15). A case in point, along the submerged piers of the bridge, Pacific oysters have settled within the engineered corridor. Introduced in the 1960s through experimental aquaculture and subsequent commercial cultivation in the northern Adriatic, the aquatic molluscs became a product of global trade and created extensive reef assemblages beneath the city’s foundations ever since. Down there, they accrete quietly, forming a living substratum within the very systems of circulation they both inhabit and transform.

Though Pacific oysters appear to flourish on the bridge’s Istrian stone foundations, emerging evidence suggests that their proliferating colonies are also reshaping the lagoon’s hydrodynamics. According to marine research, the oysters are impeding water circulation and altering oxygenation processes within a tidal system already under intensifying strain from port expansion, high-traffic maritime corridors, flood-defense infrastructures, and climatic pressures.

Within the underwater acoustics of this sound piece—pulses and crackles of marine life interlaced with the whir of boats, the Doppler wake of passing traffic overhead, and the rhythmic tremor of trains—multifarious stories such as the Pacific oyster’s proliferation become graspable. Through sound, the lagoon emerges not as a picturesque landscape, but as a dense medium, where engineered, economic and oceanic circulatory forces continually reorganize the conditions of life.

I suggest that submerged listening can prompt a curiosity attuned to the lagoon’s political ecologies, orienting perception amid complexity rather than abstraction. In this sense, listening unsettles Venice as spectacle or climate victim. Tuning into the lagoon’s multi-layered soundscapes allows one to anticipate a site shaped by long histories of intervention and contestation over water governance; a place that is entangled in the processes of its own erosion. What follows, traces several elements that have oriented my engagement.

I start with the ritual staging of sovereignty, a practice through which the Venetian maritime republic made its dominant relation to water legible. For centuries, the Serenissima performed the Sposalizio del Mare—the “Marriage to the Sea”—in which the Doge, patriarch of the state, cast a golden ring into the lagoon while proclaiming: “We marry you, O Sea, as a sign of true and perpetual dominion.” In this way, the ceremony performatively naturalized Venice’s claim to sovereignty over the sea (Omodeo & Krellig, 2022), framed water as an object of mastery, and reproduced patriarchal forms of authority. The Venetian language of claiming the sea reveals a hydropolitical imaginary structured by gendered metaphors—naturalizing the imperative to regulate what is deemed unruly or excessive, thereby legitimizing imperial interventions. Read through Wynter’s (2003) critique of “the overrepresentation of Man,” this hydropolitical imaginary appears as part of an androcentric epistemic order that normalizes domination and authorizes asymmetrical forms of rule.

From which vantage points might the genealogies of such arrangements be apprehended? Venice offers a revealing locus, where hydraulic science, naval engineering, mercantile expansion, and imperial endeavors converge along a formative trajectory of European modernity and capitalism. The lagoon was never merely a scenic setting for imperial history; it functioned as an epistemo-technical site in its own right—a zone of military knowledge production and a space of hydroengineering experimentation.

Geophysically, the lagoon should long since have silted into marshland where Alpine rivers meet the Adriatic. Yet Venetian power depended upon maintaining precisely this condition of arrested geomorphology: a shallow, unstable basin whose very precarity could be strategically mobilized. Beginning in the fifteenth century, hydraulic interventions redirected inflowing rivers to forestall sedimentation, instituting an early regime of water management inseparable from military rationality and statecraft. Thus, Venetian waters transported not only commodities across imperial routes but also a vast body of knowledge on hydroengineering.

Seen from this perspective, twentieth-century fascist modernization appears less as a rupture than as an irreversible intensification. Land reclamation projects, dredged shipping channels, and the construction of the industrial zone and port complex at Marghera, where petrochemical refining became a central activity, transformed the lagoon into an industrial frontier, further disciplining wetlands into zones of relentless productivity. These interventions, as Clara Zanardi (2020) notes, forcibly displaced working-class communities to the mainland, hollowing out Venice and laying out the groundwork for mass tourism.

What, then, is the lagoon now, and how do these layered histories come to matter within its contemporary waters? In what ways might the historical narratives traced above not simply belong to pasts, but continue to structure the material conditions through which presents unfold and futures are imagined? With certainty, today, the lagoon operates as a sole backdrop to Venice, its liveliness rendered imperceptible within urban spaces increasingly burdened by extractive tourism. As a result of this perceptual framing, the material conditions that sustain life are not only made invisible but also destroyed.

One response to the perceptual annulment may lie precisely in the reconsideration of what such framings obscure: the lagoon’s depth, its opaque waters, thick with suspended murk conditioned by forces inseparable from those same histories—urban effluents intensified by mass tourism, the resuspension of soft sediments set in motion by the churn of vessel wakes along high-traffic corridors, the modulation of tidal exchange through contemporary hydraulic and flood-defense infrastructures, and the erosion driven by altered currents in the proximity of engineered passages. The lagoon’s silted worlds materialize the afterlives of hydraulic intervention and extractive circulation.

The murkiness of silted worlds refers to a condition of governance too: a socio-ecological system in which overlapping authorities, economic pressures, bureaucratic decision-making, and unevenly valued, competing forms of knowledge turn the lagoon fragmented and contested, a condition that persists despite being among the most extensively studied coastal environments in the world. Governance remains fractured across contending jurisdictions and interests, producing a technocratic apparatus entrenched in obfuscation, slow interventions, and vulnerable to corruption.

In this sense, the lagoon’s ecology bears the imprint of engineered interventions and fragmented governance. Reconfigured oxygen flows and temperature dynamics, shifted salinity gradients, accelerated erosion, and altered sediment regimes create conditions in which some organisms thrive while others recede. Species capable of rapid physiological adjustment—such as the Pacific oyster along Venice’s engineered margins—inhabit this transformed milieu with ease. The lagoon’s evolving biota thus reflects not merely environmental change but historical and current processes through which water, infrastructure, and power have become inseparably entangled.

To conclude, we might return to listening from below: in this submerged medium, what is heard is a material trace of disturbance—registering a slow and uneven attrition that signals ecological strain along with forms of relational severance. As these transformations unfold, the lagoon no longer behaves as it once did; for traditional fishers, for instance, such shifts mark the erosion of formerly predictable patterns, disturbing intergenerational local ecological knowledges and making livelihoods increasingly precarious.

Submerged listening becomes an invitation to be situated within complexity rather than above it: a mode of engagement attuned to thickness and indeterminacy. Lagoon waters hold submerged histories that are neither stable nor linear but silted temporalities in which pasts, presents, and futures cohabit, perpetually churned by the infrastructural and oceanic forces that keep the lagoon in motion even as they wear it away. Within these silted temporalities, the manifold bodies of knowledge necessarily remain opaque and contradictory.

I turn to the words of Indigenous Lenape feminist scholar Joanne Barker (2019), whose work, grounded in ongoing struggles for Indigenous sovereignty in North America, offers a lens through which to question the Western normalization of extractive epistemologies—such as those that have influenced the governance of the Venetian lagoon and other waters. Her writing undoes these paradigms by advancing situated ways of knowing that apprehend water as relationally constitutive of life, responsibility, and world-making; such approaches must be engaged with consideration, in recognition of the coercive historical conditions that determine their emergence. As Barker writes, “water is about the movement and form of when and how and with whom we know, and not merely what we claim or make claims on” (2019, p. 6).

Attending to water in this way calls for perceptual practices that sustain relational understandings. These practices offer more than just alternative perspectives, as they counter dominant regimes of knowledge by refusing the terms through which water is rendered object, resource, or infrastructure. Here, I have sought to trace a possible contour of this refusal through submerged listening, as an attentive practice through which the lagoon’s political ecologies emerge into perception.

References

Barker, J. (2019). Confluence: Water as an analytic of Indigenous feminisms. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 43(3), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.17953/aicrj.43.3.barker 

Cowen, D. (2020). Following the infrastructures of empire: Notes on cities, settler colonialism, and method. Urban Geography, 41(4), 469–486,  https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2019.1677990 

Omodeo, P. D., & Krellig, H. (2022). Venice’s marriage to the sea: Ritual, representation, and environmental transformation. In C. Baldacci, S. Bassi, L. De Capitani, & P. D. Omodeo (Eds.), Venice and the Anthropocene: An ecocritical guide (pp. 37–40). Wetlands.

Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after Man, its overrepresentation—An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015 

Zanardi, C. (2020). La bonifica umana. Venezia dall’esodo al turismo. Unicopli.