Photo @ Ginevra Formentini

Making Waves – Designing Regenerative Coastal Futures: Final Conference of the Bauhaus of the Seas Sails Project at Ocean Space, Venice

The final conference of the Bauhaus of the Seas Sails project, “Making Waves – Designing Regenerative Coastal Futures,” took place on Saturday, 15 November 2025 at Ocean Space in Venice and gathered around 120 participants in person with dozens following the event online. The historic deconsecrated Church of San Lorenzo, now home to the Ocean Space art, research, and cultural center run by TBA21–Academy, offered the perfect venue for artists, researchers, and practitioners to gather and reflect on three years of work dedicated to regenerative, inclusive, and sustainable coastal design.

The day opened with welcoming remarks from project coordinator Nuno Nunes (Instituto Superior Técnico), Eduardo Castillo (Director of TBA21–Academy), and Rosa Ferré (Co-Director of TBA21), setting the tone for participants attending in person and those following online. The programme was moderated by project co-founders Frederico Duarte and Mariana Pestana (Instituto Superior Técnico).

Over the course of the project, 18 academic, cultural, and territorial partners collaborated across seven pilot locations—Venice, Lisbon, Oeiras, Hamburg, Malmö, Genoa, and the Delta region in the Netherlands. Each pilot developed and tested regenerative approaches for coastal environments through close cooperation with local communities, scientists, artists, and public institutions.

The pilot presentations were arranged around long tables set at the center of the room, imagined as “Cabinet of Curiosities.” These stations offered snapshot presentations of local experiments and methodologies from the seven sites, accompanied by physical objects that allowed visitors to engage directly with the tools, materials, and approaches developed throughout the project. Representation varied across the pilots and included project partners, artists-in-residence in Lisbon, Ocean Ambassadors in Oeiras and Genoa, and Sea Forum members in Malmö. The topics reflected the different drops explored in each location, ranging from regenerative menus and ocean literacy to future tidal architectures, blue makerspaces and digital storytelling.

A series of Conversations provided structured moments for deeper reflection and were interwoven with the pilot sessions. The discussion on multispecies assemblies introduced the Zoöp co-governance model through a dialogue between Michael Palmgren (Marine Education Center) and Klaas Kuitenbouwer (Nieuwe Instituut). Another conversation focused on the spin-offs of the Bauhaus of the Seas Sails project, explored pathways for replication and impact with contributions from Maëlle Salzinger (TU Delft) and Stefano Micelli and Michele Tagliavini (Ca’ Foscari University). The consortium also reviewed lessons learned and discussed potential future directions in a session led by the coordination team from Instituto Superior Técnico.

In addition to the partner presentations, the programme included contributions from TBA21 collaborating artists and researchers, who offered artistic perspectives connected to the project’s themes. The Experiential Storytelling session featured a discussion between Andrea Molina Cuadro and Eduardo Castillo (TBA21-Academy), and explored how narrative approaches can strengthen public engagement in coastal regeneration.

The programme concluded with a keynote by researcher and writer Laura Tripaldi, who works at the intersection of materials science and culture, discussing material agency and embodied technological intelligence, followed by final remarks from the organisers.

Throughout the day, a dedicated research room hosted visual presentations from the pilots, introducing a constellation of contributors and local stakeholders involved in the project and in the storytelling processes for the drops. A separate room in the venue presented Andrea Molina Cuadro’s visual storytelling installation on the seven pilots, which visitors were invited to explore.

The full-day event was streamed on Youtube and the recording is available here.

The photo album is available on Flickr.