'What lived in Venice was still afloat'. Speculative Texts as Spatial Events in the Venetian Lagoon

Science fiction and speculative literature, due to their future-oriented nature, have been increasingly employed by artists and designers as speculative narrative tools, unlocking new functions for these genres. These practices can offer new insights on the literary-geographical dimension that emerges from analyzing and interpreting the represented spaces, both real and imagined, in a context that is not merely literary. However, what do these practices reveal of a space that is both real and deeply embedded in the Western literary imagination such as Venice? This short text focuses on two artistic experiments in situated reading and writing: How does the World End (for Others)? (2019-ongoing) by German artists Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann, and La parabola della montagna (2023-2024) by Venetian artist Matteo Stocco. These projects demonstrate that collective, collaborative, and conversational experiences of reading and writing science fiction and speculative narratives can reveal the unconscious existential anxieties we associate with the spaces we inhabit daily.