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 flood displaced some 20,000 people), while rising sea levels are expected to “reclaim” the former swamps. Constantly flipping between historical drawings and recent satellite imagery, Bagnato argued that Danese’s work should be read as part of the never-ending human efforts to separate water and land. “How do we make space for water,” he asked in conclusion. A question that inevitably makes me wonder when we will finally accept fluidity.