Sonia Levy: We Marry You, O Sea, as a Sign of  True and Perpetual Dominion | Exp. documentary | 4k | colour | 0:19:28 | France, Italy | 2025

Synopsis

“We Marry You, O Sea” engages with Venice and its lagoon “from below,” with the aim of focusing attention on the city’s submerged, life-giving, and altered bio-geomorphological processes rather than on its often-recounted political and military histories. Underwater filmmaking opens new ways of knowing the materialities of the Venice Lagoon and exposes a fractured and troubled environment that complicates mainstream historical narratives that start above the water’s surface. By attuning to the ebb and flood of the lagoon, we start sensing the interplay between land and water, life and decay, and the intimate processes shaping this environment. Noticing the kinds of life made possible in this damaged watery space compels us to delve into the ways it has been profoundly transformed.

In the lagoon, a space requiring continuous modifications for human settlement, wetlands and infrastructures have long been intertwined. Venice’s consolidation as a trading hub and epicenter of naval advancement during the Middle Ages prompted major hydrological engineering to maintain the lagoon’s shallow depths for defense purposes. However, in the twentieth century, harrowing modernization transformed parts of the wetland into petroleum refineries and one of Italy’s largest container terminals as part of an effort to turn the lagoon into an industrial frontier. Urban anthropologist Clara Zanardi has described how these transformations spatialized class divisions in a new way, while also causing irreversible ecological degradation that has profoundly altered the lagoon’s lifeways.

The film presents these histories of modernization by interweaving rare historical photographs from Venice’s Giacomelli Photographic Archive with submerged perspectives of the present conditions of the lagoon. The historical significance of these photographs is emphasized by the negative black-and-white reversal of the submerged perspectives, connecting past and present and unfolding futures within the lagoon’s contaminated waters. An original score, created by a chorus of human voices and underwater sound recordings, further emphasizes the links between submerged spaces and human domains. The composition captures the lagoon’s pulses and the impact of industries—from aquatic sounds drowned out by boat noises to the rhythmic poundings of industrial activity amid surging tides—as it gestures toward the profound interplay between human activities and the lagoon’s shallows.

Biography

Sonia Levy is a French artist filmmaker. Her work, marked by site-specific and interdisciplinary inquiries, delves into the implications of Western expansionist and extractive logics, exploring how these forces manifest in the transformation and governance of hydrosocial worlds. 

Her practice aims to probe the thresholds that have shaped and influenced the conditions necessary for life to flourish. She was the 2023-24 European Marine Board artist-in-residence, contributing to the UN Ocean Decade, and the 2022 S+T+ARTS4Water resident with TBA21–Academy in Venice. Levy’s work has been screened and exhibited internationally, including Tate Modern; Radius CCA; Arnolfini; Macalline Center of Art; Somerset House; Ocean Space; Museo Thyssen, Museo CA2M, ICA London, ZKM Karlsruhe, MarinMOCA, Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris; BALTIC, Gateshead;  The Showroom, London; ZKM Karlsruhe, Art Laboratory Berlin; HDKV, Heidelberg; Futura/Karlin Studios; Verksmiðjan á Hjalteyri, Iceland; and The Húsavík Whale Museum, Iceland. 

Her work has been published by MIT Press, Thames & Hudson, Antennae Journal, The Learned Pig, Billebaude, Verdure Engraved, and has appeared in NatureCulture and Parallax journals. She presented her research at Goldsmiths, University of London; the University of Exeter, TU Delft; NYU Gallatin; The University of California, Santa Cruz; Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge MA; The Iceland Academy of the Arts; The Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, and AURA: Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene. 

She is an Associate Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, School of Architecture and the co-convenor of the collective Howlikeareef. Additionally, she is a member of the Steering Committee at the UN Ocean Decade Coordination Office on Connecting People and the Ocean. Furthermore, she is an external member of the Centre for Critical Global Change at Goldsmiths, University of London. Currently, she is a guest researcher at THE NEW INSTITUTE Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE), Ca’ Foscari University.