The Politics of the Flood ~ by Sara Alberani
Sara Alberani's "The Politics of the Flood" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on August 8, 2025 as one of 24 acts, (curated by Elisa Giuliani) at the occasion of the AEROPONIC ACTS 2025: CHOREIA (convened by Gabriëlle Schleijpen).
Here you will find an introduction by the presenter, video-documentation filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım and a written report by Grant Watson.The report includes a summary of the spoken, improvised comments by esteemed guest respondents Barby Asante, Sandi Hilal, and Zairong Xiang.
The Politics of the Flood
Sara's question: What flows beneath, unseen, undercurrents?
Sara's intro:
The Politics of the Flood offers a critically intimate and political look at today’s hydro-ecosystems, following decades of intensive capitalist development across the countryside and wetlands of Ravenna, Italy.
Framed through the lens of the recurrent floods of 2023 and 2024, this lecture performance moves between practices of extraction and states of submersion.
What flows beneath, unseen, or against the main current? Undercurrents is a flow of water beneath the surface, often moving in a direction opposite to the visible current. It signifies something not openly expressed, yet still active, influential, or disruptive; shedding light on a concealed infrastructure of rapacity, and capable of bridging ruptures. Like a flood: here understood as a political subject of transformation and resistance that moves in to repair the rifts, to connect the fragments, while simultaneously sinking the machinery of capital as an agent of rupture, insurgency and alternative current.
Grant's report:
The piece begins with images projected onto a raised screen at the back of the stage. To the sound of a song we see water, trees, huts on stilts, boats, fishing nets, fields of crops, a van arriving at a power plant, pine trees being bulldozed, a line of bulldozers. The artist stands at a lectern and reads in the format of a lecture performance. First wave. The lecture starts with an account of AGIP the hydrocarbon company established during the Fascist regime that operates to the present as Italy’s national energy company ENI. A diagram on the screen indicates the trade in gas from Italy across Africa and the Mediterranean. Peasant based labour is replaced by industrial labour, the landscape of cohabitation with the river becomes a landscape of machines, hydrological structures are used to cool fossil fuel plants. Second wave. We see the power plant under construction, workers welding, machines dredging the mud, cooling towers, boats with chimneys belching smoke, roads running in straight lines. To build this plant required willing subjects. The lecture takes an autobiographical turn. The artist’s father who comes from a peasant background was recruited to work for this company; the recruitment process included interviews to ensure workers were not politically active, police or priest being required to give references. The father found the factory work unbearable, because of the noise and the constant motion of machines, but nevertheless worked there for thirty years; exposed to the gases that gave many workers cancer. Third Wave. In 2023 and again in 2024, the artist’s home region experienced floods and landslides. Her family home became part of an archipelago of houses, the river flowing in a place which they called their home, destroying family memories in objects they could not protect. On the screen we see the image of flooded apartment blocks and hear how water becomes associated with death. What if water is understood as a political structure? The artists asks, at the conclusion of her text. How might join forces with the river? Break the dam and live like a river?
Barby Asante notes that it is difficult to present a practice that is embedded in research in twenty minutes. That this was a beautiful way to present what the artist is trying to explore. She speculates how this might be taken forward. Thinking about other practices, which are research heavy. Given the work slipped between didacticism and the personal, she would have been curious to hear the father’s voice in Italian. She wanted to hear poetry – such as the line about how the rivers returns to what it knows, but she doesn’t think the artist should abandon the lecture format. When the artist spoke about his father’s colleagues dying, it made her think about people who lived during the AIDS crisis. In a decolonising Europe project, it is also important to to attend to grief and shame.
Zairong Xiang is interested in how the work deals with historical images. One image is from Antonioni, who already came with a critical eye. He questions if the power plant was not also a place of wonder at the time. He asks if the factory being a technical wonder at that time gets lost. He was happy to see a work about class struggle which is something that we lack. But how to do it? The Brian Holmes quotation (which comes at the end of the film) is evocative but left him asking what does it mean to live like a river, can we do that? He concludes by inviting the artist to bring in more voices including the voices of workers.
Sandi Hilal says that she speaks as someone working in Italy. She notes that Italians are good at preserving history but that conservatism makes being critical towards history a challenge. So the first important act (of this work) is to revise history and interpret it differently. She appreciates how the piece moves backwards and forwards between history and personal emotions. She says that freeing the self is not about victimhood but acknowledging privilege and becoming free from there. She says that the place that needs to be decolonised the most is the west. How fascism is still very active in Italy today, that she appreciate projects from Italy that are pushing towards a critical history. Sandi would like to be provoke by asking what does it means to include other voices? Does that take the energy of the work elsewhere? She suggests that instead of the artist including more voices she might sharpen her own. That sometimes it is easier to include other voices rather than figure things out for yourself.
