Matteo de Mayda: Una barena intera

Matteo de Mayda collaborates with environmental research institutions to explore the ongoing transformation of the Venice Lagoon, focusing in particular on the ‘barene’—table-shaped landforms typical of lagoon environments. These barene represent one of the most distinctive and, at the same time, fragile habitats of the Venetian ecosystem, playing a vital role in maintaining its balance.

Venice—long a favored destination of the Grand Tour and now a symbol of mass tourism—is one of the most frequently depicted subjects in the Alinari Archives. In his project “Una Barena Intera”, however, de Mayda moves away from the traditional tourist routes to document the fragility of an ecosystem where multiple bird species coexist, their survival increasingly threatened by human activity.

Combining a sort of mosaic-like visual scan of a barena with images of various bird species—inhabitants of these environments—photographed by F. Coburn around 1890, the dialogue between past and present inevitably compels us to reflect on the future of the lands we inhabit.

For the realization of this project, de Mayda relied on the scientific expertise of ornithologist Alessandro Sartori and the NGO We are here Venice, as part of the Vital initiatives. In the iconographic research, he was supported by archivists from the Alinari Foundation for Photography. The project was curated by CAMERA – Italian Centre for Photography.