Let It Flood

Straightening the unpredictable flow of water, enforcing the binary paradigm of water/land, and erasing the “otherness” of swamps are strategies that have always been employed to transform territories into devices of power, according to researcher and writer Andrea Bagnato. In the study room of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, the Italian scholar, one of the CCA’s 2023 research fellows, presented his research on Luca Danese. A professionally fluid figure (as was customary in the pre-modern era), Danese had a background in literature and law and was an architect, engineer, and political figure. Active in seventeenth-century Italy, he oversaw the construction of canals, embankments, and bridges in the Po River delta. His interventions, often devised after destructive floods, were theatrical, with a muscular affect that telegraphed their aim of taming the “feminine” fluidity of water. Today, the marshy landscape of the delta is gone, the result of agricultural sprawl and overexploitation of natural resources, causing disastrous floods (this spring, a fl…