Terræ Aquæ. Italy and the Intelligence of the Sea
Interview with the curator Guendalina Salimei
In this interview, recorded just outside the Italian Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, curator Guendalina Salimei explains how the exhibition addresses the relationship between land and sea, through a constellation of voices, projects, and visions that activate new forms of collective intelligence.
From May 10 to November 23, 2025, the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale reflects on the profound, structural, and poetic relationship that binds Italy to the sea. Curated by Guendalina Salimei and promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture, the exhibition project Terræ Aquæ. Italy and the Intelligence of the Sea offers a renewed vision of the Mediterranean and the Italian coasts, viewing them as a sensitive threshold between worlds and as a space to be reimagined through collective and systemic intelligence.
Water is seen here not only as a natural resource but as a spatial device, symbolic threshold, archive of submerged civilizations, and fertile ground for multidisciplinary design strategies. The Pavilion presents both built projects and speculative research, selected through an open call that brought together scholars, artists, researchers, young designers, and local communities, fostering an inclusive and intergenerational dialogue.
The sea, understood as limen, a transformative threshold rather than a fixed border, becomes a metaphor and a critical device to address pressing issues such as climate change, coastal erosion, urban regeneration, and the valorization of both visible and submerged heritage. Venice, the ultimate city of water, provides the symbolic setting for an exhibition that encourages us to look at Italy “from the sea” rather than “towards the sea,” reversing the conventional perspective.
In its dialogue between memory and vision, Terræ Aquæ invites us to design new relationships between humans and the coastal environment, recognizing the sea as an archive of the future and architectural practice as an essential tool to navigate it.
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