Venice, 5 September 2025
The TRACTS network’s final symposium marks the culmination of three years of collaborative inquiry within the Trace & Social Justice (WG2) and Climate Change (WG3) working groups. Co-hosted by the THE NEW INSTITUTE Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE) at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, and organised in collaboration with two networks of the European Association of Social Anthropologists—Anthropology of History and Heritage (NAoHH) and Anthropology of the Seas (ANTHSEAS)—this event offers an interdisciplinary platform for scholars, practitioners, and artists to explore the layered entanglements of trace, social justice, and the escalating climate crisis.
A highlight of the day will be Jaime Vindel’s keynote, The Dream of Water Produces Monsters: Enlightenment, Hydraulic Capitalism, and Imaginaries of Power in Contemporary Spain.
The day will continue with a series of thematic conversation sessions, delving into landscapes and waterscapes, materialities, contaminations and toxicities, water as a site of resistance and struggle, and the role of histories and archives in shaping ecological and social imaginaries. The discussion panels will be accompanied by artistic interventions, with performances by Graham Bell Tornado as well as Eliza Proszczuk and Mo Tomaszewska (River Sisters). The event includes a guided visit to Ocean Space and its exhibition otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua (other mountains, adrift beneath the waves), curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel and featuring new commissions by Nadia Huggins and Tessa Mars.