Artistic practices and community innovation

Art productions, manual skills passed hand to hand, and Al Fresco Art Cinema, in dialogue with Chioggia’s fishing community.

Bogiaisso [bo-jah-EES-so]: in Ciosoto, the dialect of Chioggia, a whirlpool, the spot where the water boils up.

Since 2022, during the fermo pesca, the annual fishing moratorium when the boats stay in port, Bogiaisso has run Al Fresco Art Cinema: a time to look in the mirror and find yourself reflected in sensibilities, lands and waters near and far, through international video works chosen for how deeply they speak to life here.

Bogiaisso is also a year-long journey of collective imagination, where fishers, artists and curators meet in bars and trattorias to question art and use it to reimagine the present with a critical eye.

Since 2023, Bogiaisso has produced performances, sound installations and artworks with fishers, artisans and international artists in residence in Chioggia. We invite people who have never had much use for art to pick up its tools and voice unresolved tensions, hopes and collective desires. In their hands, alternate versions of the present and future take shape and point towards new directions.

Since 2026, Bogiaisso has been running hands-on sessions with Chioggia’s craftspeople, who pass on their skills at a teaching workshop for women and people with disabilities. Only by teaching people who have never had the chance to “think with their hands” can we give new life to the practical wisdom that has sustained Chioggia until now, and that many other communities will need in the years ahead.

None of this would happen without an advisory committee of more than 20 curators and art experts, who strengthen the ties between contemporary art and the lagoon year after year.

bogiaisso@gmail.com
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Versione Italiana

Hands-on Workshops

From
November
2026

From 4 PM

Monastero
di Santa Caterina

Chioggia (VE)

Free
for members

Pay what you can for everyone else

Access from Riva San Domenico, between
La Forcola restaurant and Hotel Clodia.

Partners

Supported, promoted
e co-funded by:

in collaboration with:

Supported by:

How to get to Chioggia

From Padua:
Autobus Busitalia E005

Tickets available on BusItalia Veneto App or in tobacco shops

From Venezia:
Autobus 80 da Piazzale Roma
Autobus 85 da Areoporto Marco Polo

Tickets available on Arriva MyPay App or in tobacco shops

ACTV Linea 11 from Lido & Pellestrina | Timetable or CheBateo App | Tickets available at ACTV Offices

From Treviso:
Autobus from Aeroporto to Venezia Piazzale Roma
Autobus 80 from Piazzale Roma

From Milan, Rome, Neaples etc:
we reccomend taking the train up to Padova

Parking:
Street parking where you see parking spots marked by blu stripes in two possible areas:
- Isola dell’Unione Translagunare for 8 euro/day
- Park Saloni for 6 euro/day.

Use the app Mooneygo to pay for parking and select 8+ hours of continuous parking to unlock the discounted daily rate.

Where
to eat
& shop

Thanks to the kind support of

Associazione Musica Chioggia

Associazione “Il Merletto di Chioggia”

Point Break

Vito Sub

M.P. Jolly

M.P. Silvano Bococi

M.P. Albino Tanfa

M.P. Carlo Alberto

M.P. Superbo

Macelleria Marcello

Ferr-Casa Ferramenta

Altrove Bacaro

Officina dello Sport

Pastificio Garbin

Furio Ganz for the superb video documentation

Elisa Dini for the masterful artistic support

and Gianmarco Rescigno for the phenomenal pictures.

Last Updated 24.10.31

Works

2025

2024

2023

2022

Productions 2025

"TOMBOLO ORCHESTRA"

Association "Il Merletto di Chioggia"
in collaboration with the
Stan VanDerBeek Archive.

Directed by Gabriele Vianelli.
(2025)

In a world premiere, sixteen tombolo lace masters made their bobbins 'sing' in a collective improvisation session bridging movement, sound and images, directed by Gabriele Vianelli, president of the Chioggia Music Association and director of the Chioggia Academy of Advanced Violin Studies.

The result is a community sonorization of the masterpiece "Poemfield 7 — Peace" by Stan VanDerBeek (1927—1984). One of Chioggia's identity traditions thus enters into sensory dialogue with a video art masterpiece, itself influenced by the embroidery Stan VanDerBeek was exposed to during his upbringing. The collaboration with the Stan VanDerBeek archive highlighted this overlooked connection, bringing his work 'home.'

COMMUNITY VIDEO ART

ABBAS ZAHEDI & SONAI
Na Barca Che Sogne
(2025)

Collaborative art piece created with the help and life experiences of over 30 women and men from Chioggia.

For over 3 years, the SONAI collective has collected verbal fragments, lived experiences, sayings, mottos, stories from Chioggia's fishing community to weave them into an audiovisual narrative directed by artist Abbas Zahedi, currently exhibited at the Tate Modern in London. The work is completed by the sound interpretation of Hugo Mir-Valette, a Marseille-based sound artist regularly present in Chioggia.

The result is a collaborative video work that gives space to the feelings of those who live the sea and cannot help but confront its constant unpredictability. Produced with support from the British Council.

SONAI is a collective platform that includes artists and dozens of Chioggia fishermen and operators in the fishing industry.

COMMUNITY SOUNDSCAPE

HUGO MIR-VALETTE & SONAI
Barca Infinitæ
(2025)

An experimental performance. All guests were invited to use their mobile phones to play one of eight tracks created by Hugo Mir-Valette by sampling and weaving together the sounds of fishing.

“In this work, each participant becomes a sound vessel carrying their own fragment of the journey through the waters.

Each visitor actively participates in the soundscape, disturbing the timeline and generating infinite possible synergies.

The phone, which often acts as an unauthorized listening device that captures private information, becomes an active participant in the sound story, to create a ceremony adapted to local narratives.” — Hugo Mir-Valette

STREET LOTTERY

5 FISHING BOATS AND FISHING INDUSTRY COMPANIES
20 CHIOGGIA COMMERCIAL ACTIVITIES
(2025)

A poetic reinterpretation of one of the most beloved elements of all lagoon festivals. An "excuse" to create moments of closeness between the fishermen's perspective and anyone unfamiliar with it.

Three of the most coveted prizes were workshops led by fishermen, which allowed winners to acquire perspectives, insights and skills through direct relationships with fishermen and boat owners.

Most of the other prizes were offered in quantities sufficient for an entire crew or were chosen because they are desirable for those who live life at sea, thus offering an opportunity to experience life from an angle close to that of fishermen or to organize a direct exchange with them.

Discover the lottery winning tickets

Video 2025

CHRISTIAN JANKOWSKI
Die Jagd
(1992/1997)

Shopping like you're hunting. Armed with a bow and arrows, Christian Jankowski spends a week "hunting" in supermarkets instead of the wild. His prey: frozen chickens, butter, toilet paper, and other "essentials." He dodges security cameras like a wild animal avoiding predators, shooting down industrial products that are already dead and mass-processed.
The performance highlights the absurd distance between food and buyer: the cashier couldn't care less about his "hunting trophies," scanning items with arrows still sticking out of them. He still has to pay like everyone else.

In the fishing industry, this gap between hunter and prey, between those who catch food and those who consume it, hits differently. Jankowski's performance exposes how ridiculous our world has become—where "hunting" means pushing a cart through air-conditioned aisles, and the only skill you need is knowing how to swipe a credit card.

Selected by Lele Buonerba and Gabriel Hensche

TINJA RUUSUVUORI
Untitled (burned rubber on asphalt, 2018)
(2019)

A fishing village along the Norwegian coast grapples with mysterious skid marks that suddenly appear on the town's streets.

Are they beautiful? Are they ugly? Who's behind these unexplained acts?

Tinja Ruusuvuori's documentary is being shown for the first time in Italy, after winning the Uusi Aalto Award and earning praise from audiences and critics at the Tromsø International Film Festival in Norway and the Brussels Short Film Festival in Belgium.

BASIM MAGDY
13 essential rules to understanding the world
(2011)

A vase of tulips dishes out life advice from such a fatalistic, disillusioned perspective that it becomes absurd—creating the kind of jarring irony that fishermen use when they talk about life, tragedy, and the other people on shore.

Egyptian artist Basim Magdy has always explored how societies and systems fail, mixing nostalgia, futurism, and social critique.
Magdy uses a unique visual technique: "fermenting" film in Coca-Cola or vinegar, turning household materials into artistic tools and, in this case, transforming tulips into poetic witnesses to a loss of hope so deep it's somehow liberating.

Selected by Camilla Zennaro

SIMONA DENICOLAI & IVO PROVOOST
A dream called Macba, Moca, Moma, etc.
(2010)

“The sea is tragic and comic at the same time.”

That's how Italian-Belgian duo Denicolai & Provoost — who represented Belgium at the 2024 Venice Biennale — sees trawling, observing it through cartoon sounds that shatter documentary conventions and create space to think freely about how humans can adapt to anything, the double life the sea offers, and the brotherhood that develops on boats.

Starting with "bags" of unsellable fish—which in Chioggia also mark bonds of affection and vital exchange networks—Denicolai and Provoost deliver a sharp, ironic take not just on the fishing industry, but on the art world itself: locked in its pretentious and distant jargon, its museums with impossible names, and the waves of artists who work on fishing boats every winter to sustain their art practice.

Selected by Camilla Zennaro

BIARRITZZZ + GLOR1A
The death of tomorrow
(2021)

Fishermen have a weird relationship with phones and digital networks, which makes total sense when you think about it. They spend most of their lives at sea, plugged into something completely different from what we call society—no constant communication, nothing that isn't right there in front of them, real and immediate.

Many people dismiss this bond to the physical world as outdated, even laughing at it. But that way of being is disappearing fast on land, and it shows us what we're losing.

Brazilian artist Biarritz—back at Bogiaisso for the second time—worked with Glor1a to capture what it's like being stuck between the physical and digital worlds, between working with your hands and endless social media scrolling.

They've made a dystopia that feels inevitable, a lullaby for people sleepwalking through digital quicksand.

Selected by Alice Jasmine Crippa and Cairo Clarke

SARAH AL-SARRAJ
Isthmus ancient river
(2025)

Following a river that flows backward through time, Sarah Al-Sarraj guides us across millennia from the perspective of a future ancestor.
The Ancestor Simulation moves through centuries of adaptation, encounters temples built from radioactive waste, witnesses occupation and resistance, until reaching our present: a dam in the river—the moment the flow stopped.

The work turns viewers into ancestors, forced to see through the eyes of those who will live with the consequences of our choices.
Every act of environmental violence today becomes a toxic inheritance for those who come after.

Selected by Cairo Clarke

GABRIEL HENSCHE
Gold Coast
(2025)

Gabriel Hensche's video couldn't have better timing for Chioggia. The city's become a tourist hotspot where sightseeing boats cruise the canals all day, passengers gawking straight into people's homes. Locals watch this daily intrusion from their windows, each dealing with it their own way.

"Gold Coast" flips the script—we see through the eyes of the lookers and the wanters—but Hensche doesn't hide how creepy this voyeuristic gaze really is, turning public waterways into private peep shows.

The German-Syrian artist, who's known for creating “collective games” that mess with social rules, slowly pans past luxury villas on Zurich's Gold Coast, making us all complicit tourists spying over fences and perfect lawns.

BIARRITZZZ
Wolf mouth
(2022)

biarritzzz — returning to Bogiaisso for the second year—explores a linguistic coincidence in Portuguese where the words for "us" and "knots" are the same. As if tying ropes and tying people together were the exact same gesture.

"Wolf mouth" is also the name of a nautical knot that gets stronger the more you pull it.

The work plays with this double meaning: knots as bonds of affection between people separated by time, knots as survival techniques at sea.

biarritzzz wonders if the further our ancestors drift away in time, the stronger the connection that binds us to them becomes. Like ropes in fishing nets: the wider the distance between anchor points, the more solid the whole structure. A reflection on the invisible ties that hold communities together, especially where one wrong knot can cost you everything.

Selected by Alice Jasmine Crippa and Cairo Clarke

DEBORAH STRATMAN
Laika
(2011)

We only know some forms by their shadows.

Deborah Stratman's tribute honors the spirits of space dogs and all the beings sacrificed for progress.

Laika is named after the little dog the Soviet Union shot into space in 1957, knowing she'd never come back. It's a tribute to the animals used as test subjects for what humans would do later.

The work looks at how some beings become shadows of others, how certain lives get burned up to light the way for everyone else. Like worthless fish—sunfish, sea turtles—tossed back dead, invisible casualties that are always there.

Selezionato da Alice Jasmine Crippa

MAGALI DOUGOUD
Le Soulèvement des Cariatides
(2021)

The caryatids on Parisian fountains are staging a revolt. The stone women who've held up buildings for centuries without moving suddenly start dancing, making water spill over until it floods the whole city.

Magali Dougoud turns ornamental statues into revolutionaries.

The artist explores “becoming-oceanic” — the idea that water can be a weapon of rebellion. In Paris's Wallace fountains, voices build into a watery chaos where every drop tells a story, every spray is a protest. Like water that's been trapped in the same shapes for centuries, finally breaking free.

Water laws imposed from above depend on fishermen following orders. But unlike the caryatids in the video, fishermen have developed a kind of quiet rebellion: local slang, changing names, workarounds for technology, unofficial schedules, movements, code words—habits that protect the agency of people who deal with the sea face-to-face every day.

Selected by Filmexplorer.ch, Fabienne Liptay e Giuseppe Di Salvatore

WANG YUYAN
The devil in the detail
(2018)

Hands clench, tremble, grasp, tear. On repeat, infinitely.

Wang Yuyan—returning to Bogiaisso for the second time—pulls the most universal gesture from horror films and transforms it into pure obsession. No monsters, no blood, no plot. Just hands repeating elementary movements, detached from their original context.

The obsessive repetition, guided by Steve Reich's "Clapping Music," transforms the images into a visceral experience. By endlessly repeating the same movements—clench, release, grasp—the hands become hypnotic tools that reveal how thin the line is between control and the loss of it.

The hands of the fishermen and their aides are also an archive of absorbed techniques, of time spent "not losing touch." When you know how to create or fix a net, you speak the universal language of fishermen. When you abandon the practice and forget the technique, it's like losing the use of your voice. And that's quite frightening.

Selected by Alice Jasmine Crippa

MAYBELLE PETERS
In the round
(2019)

Cylinders float and sway, letting water pass through them. Each one moves with the waves but also on its own, resonating with the others.

Maybelle Peters has created an animation that captures the process of automatic adaptation to movement—the very thing that happens when you're on a boat in the middle of the sea and you have to work.

Three levels of movement overlap: the waves, the cylinders, and the points moving on the cylinders. Like the sea, the boat, and the fishermen. Or the boat, the fishermen, and the fish. The artist leaves the interpretations open, using CGI that is deliberately neither too realistic nor too abstract.

The work focuses on the moments when you realize multiple times and spaces can coexist.
Out on the open sea, you are in a non-space where time and place no longer align—an integral part of the exhaustion that wears down fishermen who are out for 24, 36, or 48 hours straight.

Peters explores how bodies automatically adapt to movements that are, in fact, learned. The sea becomes a school of instability.

ELYLA
in collaboration with Otniel Tasman
Mirroring Lengger Gallo-gallina
(2024)

Two roosters meet in the ring. They were bred to kill each other, to make money for their owners. But instead of fighting, they recognize each other and fall in love.

Elyla, in collaboration with Otniel Tasman, transforms the cockfight into a story of love and resistance.

In Nicaragua, cockfights are brutal. Roosters with razor-sharp spurs attached to their legs fight to the death. When they lose their rooster, the owners embrace and weep as if it were a sacrifice. For years, Elyla has been taking dying roosters and accompanying them toward death in a ritual of spiritual cleansing—a way to acknowledge and move through death.

She recalls the experience of her first descent into the stern of a fishing boat—the noise, the smell, the death of a sole that becomes the beginning of its second life. Perhaps you never truly get used to it. And every day, some fisherman secretly throws a polpo or a smooth-hound shark back into the sea—as an offering, or simply to rebalance fate.

Selected by Ilaria Conti

TUÃN ANDREW NGUYẼN
City of ghosts
(2022)

Thành Phố Ma, the "city of ghosts," is real. It's a city built entirely for the dead that sprawls for miles like an open-air underground metropolis. Tuan Andrew Nguyen takes us through this massive cemetery that grew organically in the late '90s, creeping between the houses of a fishing village.

Thành Phố Ma was built mostly by Vietnamese boat people who poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into tombs back home, turning memory into concrete and stone.

Two ghosts drift through these monuments, their empty spaces becoming doorways into the cemetery's labyrinth.

A graveyard on an island where every tomb tells a story of leaving and returning. Even the dead need somewhere to belong. Death becomes the last place you can claim as yours.

Selected by Cairo Clarke and Giulia Menegale

JOSEPH JUNE BOND
Imbolc
(2022)

“eaters, eaten, eating, ate”

February 1 is Imbolc, the old Celtic festival that marks the start of spring when everything still looks dead. Joseph June Bond creates a love letter to all the organic matter that starts thawing out and waking up on February 1st.

“Take us in your belly, you who see at night” —the video whispers words about fluid bodies, bodily fluids as living records of mixed-up rituals. Bond explores being sensually drawn to nature through cycles of rebirth that start underground, out of sight.

“A grave, a seed” — every death already holds the next life, every bit of rot becomes food for what comes next. Like the Celts who lit cleansing fires to call spring back, the work celebrates the faith you need when you can't see anything, when you just have to trust that invisible things are happening.

Like fishers casting nets into dark winter waters, not knowing what's down there, trusting something will come up. Winter demands this kind of faith: believing life is brewing in the darkness.

Selected by Cairo Clarke

MARIA SOL
Vandets stemmer / Voices of water
(2024)

In winter, people often dive into icy water, figures emerging from the cold to swim where others wouldn't even step. Maria Sol collects the stories of these women who have a special, intimate bond with the sea. Her work, "Voices of Water," explores their choice to swim in winter and the sensations they seek.

From these connections to the water, a contradiction emerges: the deeper your dialogue with the sea, the more you feel the tragedy of it dying under the weight of human activity.

This feeling is shared by fishermen, who are helpless in the face of the sea's destruction and the lack of communication between their on-the-ground knowledge and official policy. It's a stark contrast to the days of the Venetian Republic, which, together with the fishermen, protected the Lagoon as a commons.

Selected by Zöe De Luca Legge

GABRIELLA HIRST
Ambergris - Swallowing
(2023)

There are over 170 myths of male heroes swallowed by whales or giant fish. Usually, they emerge redeemed and renewed, while the whale doesn't fare so well. Inside the whale's body, they find parallel universes or habitable spaces. Gabriella Hirst—an Australian-German artist—flips this ancient narrative, starting from her own personal experience.

During the pandemic, stranded in Byron Bay, she began observing the whale migration. To see them through binoculars, you have to hold your breath because their appearances are so brief—you hold your breath to watch them for as long as they hold theirs underwater. This unique connection became the heart of her work.

"Swallowing" explores the myths of men being swallowed by whales in a liberating way, using a tight loop of images and sounds from the Wellcome Collection archives. But Hirst reverses the script completely: after showing the heroes emerging from the whales' bellies, she ends up swallowing the video and the camera herself. It's an endless cycle of who eats what and what eats whom, where the woman has the final say.

Selected by Cairo Clarke

CECILIA BENGOLEA
Lightning dance
(2018)

On a stormy night with pounding rain, young Jamaicans dance next to a shack along the road. Their soaked bodies vibrate with low-frequency dancehall music while their movements echo the rhythm of windshield wipers on passing cars.

Cecilia Bengolea is fascinated by humidity and its ability to dissolve bodies into their movements. "Lightning Dance" explores the relationship between individual and collective bodies with nature. Water acts as a vehicle to dissolve the boundaries between body and world.

Fishermen's bodies as archives of movement. When describing engine types or breakdowns, mechanics use fluid or broken, smooth or labored gestures. There seems to be a body movement for every active part of the engine. The mechanic on board syncs with the machine in motion, as if they were two bodies of water in dialogue.

Selected by Niccolò Moronato

ANNE DUK HEE JORDAN
Ziggy and the starfish
(2016-2022)

Il cambiamento climatico sta ridisegnando l'ambiente marino, compreso il modo in cui le specie fanno sesso.

Anne Duk Hee Jordan esplora la sessualità della vita marina intrappolata nel caos ambientale più assoluto, dove inquinamento, sversamenti di petrolio e temperature in aumento sovvertono l'ordine costituito. I biologi osservano cambiamenti drastici da anni, mentre i pescatori da sempre danno nomi sessuali agli animali dalle forme più insolite.

Anche la prelibatezza o il prezzo di certe specie dipende dal sesso del pescato, come per canoce, cozze, polipesse, etc. Cosa succederebbe se il sesso del mare decidesse di prendere una strada completamente nuova?

Climate change is reshaping the marine environment, including how ocean animals have sex. In “Ziggy and the Starfish”, Anne Duk Hee Jordan dives into an alien universe of strangeness, adaptation, and survival. The film explores sexuality from the perspective of marine life caught in total environmental chaos, where pollution, oil spills, and rising temperatures mess with everything. And as we watch life reproducing itself, we know deep down that we might be headed for another mass extinction.

Biologists have been observing drastic changes for years, while the "situated" knowledge of local fishers has been giving sexual names to sponges and oddly-shaped animals for a very long time. The taste and price of certain kinds of fish are also determined by the gender of the catch (e.g., "canoce", mussels or octopuses, female)

So what might happen if the sex of the sea decides to take an entirely new path?

Selected by Zöe De Luca Legge

RICK SILVA
Liquid crystals
(2023)

Hands dig through dirt, brush away leaves and moss, scratch at sand. Underneath, instead of roots or rocks, a screen pulses with synthetic colors.

Rick Silva turns the world's oldest gesture—digging—into a technological revelation that's as disturbing as it is mesmerizing.
Seven thirty-second videos reveal seven natural surfaces hiding glowing displays. The Brazilian-American artist, grandson of a diamond prospector, inherits his grandfather's gesture but discovers different treasures: liquid crystal screens that utilize natural phenomena to function.

These gestures and technologies echo the sonar readings on fishing boats and the work of trawler crews—labor that's more like mining than the romantic image of fishing.

Selected by Alice Jasmine Crippa

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