Occhio, 2025 

Laboratorio Laguna
Venetian Lagoon, Italy

Occhio (2025) is a site-specific sculpture installed in the Venetian Lagoon in collaboration with the Artistic PhD working group Laboratorio Laguna. The work consists of a 360° security mirror elevated on three carbon fiber tripod legs, stabilized with beach umbrella ground spikes and tensioned hemp ropes. Italian for eye, the artwork functions as a suspended, observing body—an optical instrument that simultaneously surveils and distorts. By relocating photographic production outside the camera and into the landscape itself, the work engages ongoing PhD research into material image-making, ecological agency, and the instability of vision within dynamic environments.

Fabricated as a maquette and installed on a barena—a tidal salt marsh shaped by shifting sediment and water flows—the sculpture operates as both apparatus and image-making device. The convex mirror produces continuously shifting, spherical reflections of the surrounding lagoon, compressing horizon, sky, water, and bodies into a single, unstable visual field.

These “photographs” are not captured but generated in real time, contingent on tidal rhythms, wind, light, and the movement of human and nonhuman actors. The work resists fixed composition or authorship; instead, it foregrounds an expanded photographic condition in which the image is co-produced by environmental forces.