Venice is a testament to humanity’s ability to bend the environment to our will. As an archipelago in a lagoon off the Adriatic Sea, swollen from the currents of the Mediterranean Sea, developed architecturally entirely of stone and brick, cabled underwater with plumbing and electricity – and with small and narrow streets that have never hosted a combustion engine automobile, it’s an urban impossibility.

Such man-made environments have long pressed upon nature and forced an uneven relationship, leading to the acute environmental threat we are currently facing around the world. But in Venice, a city that has been sinking for well over a hundred years, a discussion around the climate crisis feels urgent—if not a little too late. Studies report that Venice sank around five inches between 1950 to 1970; today, it’s about 2mm a year. Then there are the rising sea levels: by 2100, the sea is projected to be 2.5ft higher than it is now. The city of Venice has invested billions of euros in water pumps and an innovative sea-wall system (called MOSE, to evoke Moses parting the sea); it has banned cruise ships from the Giudecca canals—they contributed to building-foundation erosion from water displacement and pollution. However, ships continue to enter the lagoon with no alternative port to dock at and the city continues to suffer from flooding. Venice lives in the tension between hope and despair, solution and challenge, sinking and saving.

2024 marks the 60^th edition of the Venice Biennale, which remains not only the oldest biennial but the most prestigious. Thousands of art world professionals descend upon the city to trawl through the curatorial enterprise. With about 30 million tourists visiting the UNESCO Heritage Site of Venice each year, 20 million of whom come for just one day, the city is currently trying out (until July 14, 2024) a city tax of €5 imposed on day trippers, and already has collected nearly €1 million. It’s a sustainability effort to impede further impacts of climate change, but its effectiveness remains in question.

The Biennale has made efforts to be entirely carbon neutral. In 2022, all editions of the Biennale (across the different disciplines) achieved that designation. The Venice Art Biennale 2024 aims to take on the same status; this year the organisation has provided carbon-reduction guidelines for visitors (i.e. taking a train to Venice instead of a plane) as part of their on-going efforts to reduce the event’s footprint. However, the Biennale administration declined to comment further on the details of its carbon-neutral policies and practices. 

During the Biennale’s vernissage, the preview week for art insiders, references to the topic of climate change and the stress of the seas were abundant, from official pavilions, collateral exhibitions and off-site conferences. Portugal’s pavilion in the charming—and creaky—Palazzo Franchetti is an accessible entry point to the climate discussion as it relates to the 2024 edition. Titled Greenhouse, artist-curators Mónica de Miranda, Sónia Vaz Borges and Vânia Gala came together to create a “Creole garden”, which the artists interpreted quite literally, delineating a path with blocks of living tropical plants such as banana trees, areca palms and brake ferns. Conceptually, the garden is designed to be a discursive space; thus the pavilion is rooted in four actions: the garden, a live archive, a school and assemblies. Visiting curators (particularly from Portugal’s former colonies, like Brazil and Angola) prompted discussions about liberation and action. The garden is not only a space to tend and cultivate but also a physical marker of the fragility of the earth and the care needed to maintain life.

Venice is also home to the unique project Ocean Space, a centre for “exhibitions, research and public programs catalysing critical ocean literacy, collaborative research and environmental advocacy through the arts,” according to its website. It is led by the Madrid-based TBA21-Academy, which was founded in 2011 as the research arm of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Collection, explicitly to marry arts to the ocean. Its open-sea explorations with scientists and artists have garnered international attention, but in a strategic and experimental move, the organisation deploys the exhibition format—particularly ones that use objects, just as much as research-informed presentations—to help get its message across. The co-director of TBA21 Markus Reymann says that by opening in Venice and being an “outsider”, it was easier to bring people together and to “start talking very concretely about subjects that they would otherwise not talk to you about,” referring to climate change and the environment, especially vis-à-vis the arts. “[This] gives us the possibility to really work with communities that would otherwise not necessarily immediately jump into collaborating with a Western organisation,” Reymann adds.

Indigeneity is central to TBA21-Academy’s work: climate change and the ocean, after all, are disproportionately affecting native and indigenous populations of low-emitting nations. Thus, for the Biennale season, TBA21-Academy commissioned Tongan Punake artist Latai Taumoepeau for a piece titled THIS IS NOT A DRILL, which brings together Venetian high school sports teams in a choreographed performance where the athletes run on treadmills in unison while acting out paddling with oars. While the performance seems a bit silly at first, over its roughly 20-minute duration, the shared gesture of rowing connects the dangers of the water both in the South Pacific and the Mediterranean, where the artist and the teenagers hail from, respectively. The work, which was only on view during the vernissage but will find other iterations in other communities, Reymann notes, also struck at a crucial aspect of the climate crisis—and its solution—energy. The athletes could have stood on the floor; instead, they were asked to walk on moving treadmills, which requires using up energy.

Art 2030, a non-profit that is pushing the arts industry to adopt the 17 Global Goals of the United Nations (UN) Council 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, leads the World Hope Forum, which was launched at the Venice Biennale 2022. This year’s summit brought together the world’s top leaders, featuring opening remarks from the UN Secretary-General António Guterres (in a pre-recorded video), who said, “I am convinced that artists all over the globe can nurture that hope and be a driving force in achieving the change our world desperately needs.” Hope, it turns out, is to be found in renewables. 

I am convinced that artists all over the globe can nurture that hope and be a driving force in achieving the change our world desperately needs. – Antonio Guterres, UN secretary-general

Or at least that’s the overarching takeaway from the World Hope Forum’s messaging, where heads of sustainability departments at LVMH, Hauser & Wirth, the Guggenheim and Christie’s all extolled their internal inquiries to their climate impact, which mostly unearthed that energy usage through art shipping, building infrastructure and personal travel were the main culprits in energy expenditure, thus carbon footprint. Galleries are now looking into sea shipping, museums are turning off the lights and luxury companies are aiming to be circular in their material production. This forum was urging for the industry “to turn hope into action”, its founder, Danish curator Luise Faurschou declared, towards adopting the UN guidelines and neutralising the climate impact of the arts by 2030. While, of course, mobilising an $80 billion industry that requires large physical spaces and the movement of objects and people to onboard such practices is a daunting challenge in itself, perhaps a more pernicious reality lies ahead as well. 

Volume and scale—of business operations and industry growth—seemingly remain unaddressed. Are galleries going to reduce their participation in global art fairs? Would galleries minimise their real estate footprint? Are collectors going to refrain from attending fairs and biennials, like Venice? Are art professionals going to take a 14-hour (multi-change) train ride, as was encouraged in the Biennale’s aforementioned guidelines, from, say, Paris to Venice? Will an auction house like Christie’s abstain from touring masterworks in their marquee sales in key global markets? Could a digital art fair or biennial be less energy intensive, when digital technologies themselves provide 8-10 per cent of global energy usage and 2-4 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions? The uncomfortable truth is that the reduction of impact lies in these business channels.

But that’s not to say we should all feel hopeless or that we should cease all art operations. In fact, the context and contradictions of Venice, as a city and site for the Biennale, offer a tableau of inspiration. Yes, it has taken ingenuity, engineering and capital to keep Venice afloat, but the city continues and serves as a site of resilience and imagination. Those last two ideals are just what is needed in climate action and where the arts can pitch in. “One beauty of operating within the arts is that we can truly experiment in terms of innovation,” says TBA21’s Reymann. “Artists are innovators. If we could actually use this freedom and build an ecosystem around people who understand how to develop artists’ ideas into something else, that could catch on and turn it into something else.”

The mandate of the 60th Venice Biennale, which aims to highlight under-represented artists and art histories, aligns with the STIR philosophy of challenging the status quo and presenting powerful perspectives. Explore our series on the Biennale, STIRring 'Everywhere' in Venice, which brings you a curated selection of the burgeoning creative activity in the historic city of Venice, in a range of textual and audiovisual formats.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.)