Virginia Woolf, The Waves 

I am rooted, but I flow. 

 

Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours 

Water is for me something spiritual. 

 

The exhibition Liquid Archives explores water not only as a natural element, but also as sensible memory, female body, ecological force, fluid mythology and political matter. 

 

We are all bodies of water. To think through water is to remember we are never alone: as Astrida Neimanis affirms, thinking through water means recognising a radical connection. We are all bodies of water, and as such, part of a collectivity and its memory. 

 

Water is a living archive: it collects, nourishes, washes, dissolves, transmits. In its continuous movement, it carves, caresses, corrodes. It is origin and ruin, mother and tide. It holds and processes what the earth tends to forget. It is also a receptacle of what the Earth produces: in this liquid time, even water reveals itself as fragile. As it flows through the territories of memory, dream, identity and transformation, it is furrowed by deep ecological tensions. The liquid archive is not only a place of poetic or symbolic narration, but also of resistance: a memory of the living that asks to be heard, evoking what we risk losing. 

 

The exhibition seeks to reflect on the second element by exalting its mutability, while simultaneously rendering it a fixed presence and witness to time and its becoming. With the force and mystery of its flow and of its depths that retain, accompany and conceal everything. Surfaces, clouds, seabeds and infinite abysses. Water and the human come together generating myths, legends, sounds and forms that stimulate the imagination.  

 

An element of memory and preservation, in contrast with the earth that may forget or conceal, water preserves history: seas, rivers and lakes hold the memories of peoples. Water draws close to the unconscious and the feminine, which retain deep emotions and memories that the rational mind – the earth – has repressed. A kind of aquatic archaeology, close to the Foucauldian concept of archive: the description of this extraordinarily vast and complex mass of things that have been said in a culture. 

 

The anima mundi of the alchemist Robert Fludd describes this distinction: a feminine image that embodies the relationship between elements and symbolic principles. In the Western tradition, the right hand is associated with the masculine, the sun and domination; the left hand, marginalised,with the feminine, the moon and water. A dualism that reflects the historical hierarchisation between what is visible and affirmed and what is fluid and intuitive. 

 

In Venice, water is a system of orientation – Tiziano Scarpa teaches us in Venice is a Fish. And in a city like this, born on water and now in precarious balance because of it, Liquid Archives presents itself as an ephemeral archive of what risks being lost, but also of the power of what continues to transform itself.  

 

From this conceptual core the exhibition opens onto the practices of the invited artists, whose works traverse the liquid as matter, metaphor, emotional, vital, nourishing element and existential condition. The works dialogue like interconnected currents, generating an archive of the fluid in its various guises – one in which corporeality, memory and science are interwoven. 

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Angela Anzi (Lucern, Switzerland, 1981, lives and works in Basel, Switzerland) works at the intersection of sound, performance, video and sculpture, exploring the voice as a space of resistance and transformation. Through the mythological marine figure of the siren, the artist investigates the processes of silencing and domestication of the feminine in the collective memory of Western culture. In Lucid Voices, the sirens re-emerges as a sonic and aquatic body dialoguing with themselves and eachother: a fluid presence that connects submerged stories, desires and memories, restoring to the voice a collective and plural dimension, like water itself. With Murmurs in the Tides, the artist draws on the biological capacities of the tridacna, a bivalve mollusc with transformative powers: it is a hermaphroditic and sessile organism, capable of converting light into energy through a symbiotic relationship with algae. In tension with the dynamic imagery of marine creatures, the tridacna remains motionless, anchored to the seabed, serving as a crucial support and refuge for numerous organisms and fish species. Its shell configures itself as a liminal space, a threshold between interior and exterior. The surface – rough and sedimented on the outside, smooth within – evokes a resonant cavity disposed toward listening, from which a breath emerges, a vaporous and active presence in the form of mist. 

 

Katya Ev Anton (Moscow, URSS, 1983, lives and works in Brussel, Belgium) investigates the relationships between body, society and economy, revealing the potential for agency within structures of power. In Untitled (milk), human milk is wrested from its invisibility to become artistic matter, a living archive and surface of thought. A primary substance, almost always removed from sight, milk is transformed here into an instrument of measure and disturbance: it reveals what normally remains hidden, crystallising into tangible form a labour of the body that goes unrecognised and unremunerated. The work is inscribed within Ev’s broader inquiry into the idealisation and invisibilisation of breastfeeding – long confined to the iconography of the Virgo Lactans produced by male brushes – to reclaim it instead as a lived, shared and political experience. From a queer and non-binary perspective, the artist renders visible an intimate gesture charged with cultural meanings, transforming breastfeeding into an act of permanent appearance, care and resistance. Milk here is not a simple nutrient: it is an epistemology in action, a medium of knowledge that connects the domestic to the public, the icon to the everyday, the body to the law. 

 

Anna Grebner (Sinalunga, Italy, 1990 lives and works in Munich, Germany) works between painting and installation, focusing her research on the ecological fragility of water and the entanglement between the human body and the environment. In the series acid in the shell, water is at the centre of artistic reflection as a material that is at once living and fragile. Human skin, with a pH of 5.5, is placed in relation to seawater, whose pH oscillates between 7.5 and 8.4 – an equilibrium increasingly under threat. The progressive acidification of the oceans is an invisible yet profound transformation that endangers organic life. The mussel, whose byssus threads dissolve under the effect of increasing acidity, becomes a symbol of this change. The artist traces intertwined and interconnected drawings and bodies using the imprints of water, evoking the relationship between water and the human being. The observation of dissolving shells elevates them to precious emblems of an imminent climatic urgency, while the natural pigments and materials gathered from their decomposition anchor the works in a specific time and place, seeking to preserve all their beauty and mystery. Water acts as an agent of transformation, leaving traces that make visible the often-invisible impact of human actions on the non-human world. 

 

Marie-Luce Nadal (Perpignan, France, 1984, lives and works in Paris, France) with her scientific and artistic practice, Marie-Luce Nadal enters the imperceptible: the liquids of the sky. Through installations that interact with clouds, fog, steam and unstable atmospheric states, the artist captures transitory forms of existence, normally destined to dissolve. Her work inscribes itself in Liquid Archives as an archive of the ephemeral, in which water manifests as a relational force, capable of recording and transmitting fragile and mutable presences. In 9ème cercle, a cloud is collected and held within a closed space, appearing and dissolving in a continuous movement. Like an atmospheric aquarium, the work renders visible the instability of the sky, evoking a suspended and remote landscape. It thus configures itself as a silent underworld in which atmospheric matter becomes body and memory. With Couverture à mémoire de rêve, Nadal takes up the form of a quilted bedspread, a domestic echo that plunges into childhood. Within the lines of the matelassé, oneiric images emerge: traces that settle like condensations of dream. The imprint of a body evokes the desire to cultivate the sky, while a visionary landscape unites earth and atmosphere in a fluid continuum. The two works articulate a movement between observation and imagination, where the sky becomes sensitive matter and the dream a form of archive.

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Clara Rivault (Paris, France, 1991, lives and works in Paris, France) engages with a plurality of traditional techniques across bronze, blown glass and porcelain. Specialising in the art of stained glass, the artist devotes herself to a lengthy creative process initiated by photographic samplings, which she dislocates, recomposes and crystallises, proposing narratives in which mythology and the real world intermingle. The meticulous observation of organic materials and sculptural dimension. The notion of the body is the red thread running through her polymorphic work. Rivault presents works in which water becomes a space of invocation and emotion. X Voto presents a uterine anatomical image as an invocation of fertility: the uterus, as the home of amniotic fluid, is a vital and protective environment, a primal sea in which the body forms before separating from the fluid that held it. An ancestral archive of corporeal memory. Les Larmes du Ciel, through the creation of a lachrymatory, draws inspiration from archaeological objects used to collect tears during funerary rituals, transforming them into material traces of human feeling. In both works, water holds emotions, desires and vulnerabilities, sedimenting time and rendering visible what normally evaporates. 

 

Flaminia Veronesi (Milan, Italy, 1986, lives and works in Milan, Italy) works with the Enchantment. She explores the universe of mirabilia and naturalia through a reinterpretive and playful language, in which different forms and materials coexist without hierarchy. Her imaginary world is populated by amphibious and mutant creatures, suspended between human and animal, living forms in continuous metamorphosis. The siren asserts itself as the archetypal figure of the artist’s creative corpus: a hybrid creature, capable of living between different worlds, embodying a condition of openness to otherness and transformation. Sirena Iguana is a ceramic that bears the imprint of high-temperature firing: a skin with an archaic, almost Etruscan appearance, restoring to the object an ancestral presence. The hands, deliberately less refined – as in the preparatory drawings – retain an essential roughness that accentuates the amphibious and instinctive character of the figure. In Conchiglia morte a Venezia, the figure of the hermit crab and the shell are inscribed within a marine archive made of displacements, refuges and stratifications, becoming a mobile microcosm that holds traces. The work recalls the logic of the Wunderkammern, evoking a form of knowledge founded on wonder and astonishment. The reference to Death in Venice introduces a tension between enchantment and the ephemeral, in which beauty manifests as a fragile and transitory experience. 

 

Kiki Smith (Nuremberg, Germany, 1954, lives and works in New York, USA) explores the body as a porous and vulnerable territory. Her early sculptures rendered visible bodily fluids and repressed biological functions – menstruation, urine, excretions – challenging the idea of a pure, controllable and idealised female body. In a context marked by the AIDS crisis, this practice took on a strong political dimension, opposing the invisibilisation of illness and the denial of its fragility. Over time, Smith has also traversed mythological and archetypal figures as critical tools for interrogating feminine identity. In Liquid Archives, the bronze sculpture Mother activates a curatorial reading that interweaves the artist’s work with the mythology of the sea as an archive of collective legendary memories linked to water. A liminal and non-idealised figure, the siren emerges here in her subjectivity, suspended between human and animal, in continuous mutation. Smith’s siren overturns the traditional myth: not seductress or object of male desire, but a creature that explores depths, vulnerable and reflective. 

 

Historically, the passage of the siren from bird-woman to fish-woman is not merely iconographic: it is the way in which their abyssal song is displaced from Air to Water – a matter capable of holding and preserving it in its constant movement. Maurice Blanchot describes the song of the sirens as a song that, unlike that of the Muses, does not command but opens an abyss, inviting those who hear it to immerse themselves within it. In this perspective, the abyss is not only a geographical depth, but a condition of listening: a letting go. Liquid Archives thus configures itself as a choral and fluid archive: Water is the most favourable element for illustrating the themes of combinations of power. It assimilates so many substances! It draws to itself so many essences! It receives with equal ease contrary matters, sugar and salt. It is impregnated with all colours, all flavours, all odours. One understands, then, that the phenomenon of the dissolution of solids in water is one of the principal phenomena of that naïve chemistry which remains the chemistry of common sense and which, with a little dreaming, is the chemistry of poets. 

 

Gaston Bachelard, L’eau et les rêves 

 

Text by Maddalena Pelù 

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Exhibition

May 5–October 11, 2026

Campo Santo Stefano | 30129 Venice

Mo–Su 11am – 7pm

 

​by appointment only via WhatsApp at +39 331 2467714